Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Brad,

Could I trouble you to update your blogroll link to our blog Needlenose? Our new URL is http://www.needlenose.com

Your fan and fellow blogger,
Green Boy

Well, they simply should have rounded up the explosives and taken them to the well-guarded Oil Ministry. After all, if you don't guard the paperwork, you'll never get any oil out of the country.

BTW, every time I see IAEA, my head translates it to IKEA, and I have to re-read the paragraph.

Either that or I need to treat my snazzy new plastic chair a lot more gingerly.

As John Kerry told RollingStone:

RS What's your take on Rumsfeld?

JFK: He should have been fired long ago.

RS: For?

JFK: Gross miscalculation in the judgements he made in taking a nation to war...

RS: Gross Incompetence?

JFK: Absolutely, unbelievably [slams table] unaccountable administration of things that have cost America untold millions of dollars. But, most important, life.

Yes, we all suspected as much.

What is most important - and likely won't get told - is that this information was blocked from view until (perhaps) it was close enough to the election to not be too damaging.

We shall see...we shall see...

BushCo has already lost. The problem: is there someone out there to beat him? Please?

D

Or maybe close enough to the election to be very damaging. The Kerry campaign should make sure the whole country hears about it. Though, come on now, is something like this a BIG surprise? The fact that almost all the major Iraqi weapons sites were completely unguarded for months and months after the war has been known for a long time.

But the story that the US hid the theft of these munitions from the IAEA is grotesque (what, they couldn't trust the pinko Eurocrats and foreigners with such sensitive information?). The story that the US then pressured the interim Iraqi government to cover it up is even worse.

Are these true stories? We shall see. But the admin's "Whose on second?" act regarding what happened *must* be a true story, since they are playing it live in front of the whole country, right now. Don't even need to stand in line and buy a ticket. And the show will go on for at least a few days just a week before the election. Kerry needs to make a big deal out of this, and if the press doesn't, then they are either totally corrupt or totally incompetent.

Plus an obvious inside job in the massacre of the Iraqi forces. That ghastly story should make an impression too. What will Bush say, that it's Kerry's fault since he dared criticise the US Maximum Leader in a Time of War?

Who could vote for these people? Hamilton's phrase "a spectacle both hilarious and disgusting" runs through my mind daily now.

I suspect Bush will lose, though. I interpret the Pat Robertson flap as his discreet way of jumping ship -and he is very politically clever and understands the mood of the Bush base.

And what if what must be a horde of disgruntled people with damaging info decide it is a good time to leak, with Bush wobbling between 47% and 49% in the polls? Might be an interesting week.

Delong: "There is no excuse for anyone to support George W. Bush. None. None at all."

There are four types of people who will support Bush.

1) The "I want to control your uterus" crowd.
2) The "sodomites are evil" crowd.
3) The Second Amendment crowd.

These people will simply be voting their interests, and their vote is, as a result, rational.
Note that there is a lot of overlap amongst these groups.

It's the fourth group that I can't understand.

4) I shit my pants on 9/11 and I'm still scared as hell.

That these people overwhelmingly support the chimp is astounding. They seem not to realize that 9/11 occurred on W's watch, and every single policy move his adminstration has made (or not made) since that fateful day is making Americans LESS secure.
Oh, I forgot, "but Kerry wants to give France a veto over using our military"!?!? wTF?!?

who's on second (is that right?)

Also note that the GOP seems to be preparing the country for real ugly (and maybe real publicly visible) voter intimidation tactics. That also may be another sign that they know that they are in trouble. Their spokespeople have been over the top in describing the evil Dem voter frauds, with no evidence presented, at least that I have seen in news stories. As opposed to real evidence of GOP plans -and criminal acts of their contractors.

I'm not one for dramatic gestures. But after reading the story, I will get out my US Flag and display it on the day after the election.

The only question is whether I disply it right side up or upside down.

But if I have to display it upside down, who will come to the rescue?

Actually, according to the NYTimes this morning, it was 377 tons...

oneangryslav wrote, "There are four types of people who will support Bush."

You left out

5) Wealthy people and people of high incomes who don't want to pay their share of taxes.

jml wrote, "Also note that the GOP seems to be preparing the country for real ugly (and maybe real publicly visible) voter intimidation tactics."

I read about how they signed up 1,000 people to challenge voter qualifications at the polls in one county in OH, IIRC.

The main point to bear in mind here is Krugman's claim that the Republicans represent a "revolutionary power" (from the introduction to his _The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century_).

Those $%*%*# traitors!!

http://www.markfiore.com/animation/treason01.html

They say that people aren't for Kerry so much as they are against Bush. Well, of course: I've never been so certain of anything in my career as a voter as the fact that Bush has been a lousy president. My hopes for a Kerry administration are inevitably going to run second.

jml, Who's on first. Whats on second. You are right though, Bush and Cheney are Costello and Costello.

I recently got my first glimpses of why someone would support Bush, aside from the reasons given above. Two reasons were given: 1)"Kerry called my (Vietnam veteran) husband a warmonger!", and 2)the thread on Drezner's blog, just before he finally came down for Kerry, which related to security. I might sum those up as either "Kerry doesn't 'get it'" (whatever that means) or "we need a trigger-happy maniac up there to scare the bad guys." Some of the Dreznerites almost made me see how one might hold this view. Almost. Others seemed to me like excuses, but I admit that's long-range mind (?) reading.

The media have done a terrible job of conveying the magnitude of the destructive power that was stolen. It should go something like this:

380 tons of RDX and HMX has the explosive charge of 0.6 kilotons of TNT. That's the equivalent of 65 MOABs, the Mother of all Bombs that are America's largest non-nuclear warheads.

(That's about 5% of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, for those keeping track)

We didn't need to defend weapons dumps. The Iraqis were going to welcome us with flowers, remember?

People who think they are libertarians, and are stupid enought to believe that Bush will shrink government and/or limit its powers -- despite four years of clear evidence to the contrary.

I'm confused!
I though the whole pretext to invade Iraq was to do what the weapons inspectors could not accomplish. To contain and confiscate the weapons of mass destructions; or mass explosions= terrorism.
So, then what was the war about, then?
If I was in that war theater, or my son or daughter, I would be beyond pissed.
I guess when you lose a war, and "no-man's" land is 85% of the country (ground we lost)...these types of things can happen.
Like Bremer said recently, we did not have enough troops on ground to accomplish one damm thing, exceot the Oil Ministry.
The Ministry of Truth was guarded well, though, until now!
Get out and vote!

Hundreds of thousands of tons, perhaps as much as million tons of Iraqi munitions have been left lying around the country. 350 metric tonnes of RDX is small compared with the overall story. If it were in place and accounted for we would be in almost exactly the same situation.

This does not mean that the Bush Administration is anything other than a bunch of idiots, or that neglect of Iraqi conventional munitions was anything other than a very serious mistake. It does illustrate the unpleasant fact that when it comes down to real understanding of war and of weaponry, almost everyone in the country is totally clueless. That is one reason why the Administration was so easily able to gull many people into believing that Itaq was some kind of military threat.
Which it was not. A lot of ammunition does not an army make.

Apparently the October surprise is ours--not theirs. This story about the 370 tons of unattended explosives is mind boggling--and Kerry addressed it (according to an AP story) in New Hampshire this morning. What I didn't see in the story is any mention of the "T" word--and Kerry needs to start using it. Here's a case where a link between terrorism and the war in Iraq is actually appropriate--and Kerry needs to be saying this--loud and clear.

Something like:
“Letting 370 tons of RDX and HMX, highly concentrated explosive material, be stolen by unknown sources potentially puts this stuff in the hands of terrorists all over the world. Less than one pound was used in the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Terrorists could wreak death and destruction by simply putting, say, 2 pounds of this stuff in their briefcase. And this is the president who claims he’s protecting us from terrorism!"

Do you have any idea how we can get this notion to dems-in-charge?

Liberal,

You actually need to tweak your definition of that fifth group that you describe here:

"5) Wealthy people and people of high incomes who don't want to pay their share of taxes."

I think it should read "Wealthy people and people with high incomes who are currently offshoring their assets, because they understand that reductions in marginal rates without corresponding spending cuts are not really tax reductions, but tax deferrals. So in 10-15 years, when the Treasury is bankrupt, and demands on it are great, taxes will have to be raised dramatically".

"no excuse for anyone to support George W. Bush. None. None at all."

I dunno, maybe if you give a prize I might think of one.

The Brad deLong "excuse to support George W. Bush" contest. Send stamped self-addressed envelope with your reason in twenty-five words or less to...

Examples:

"I like the way he says ''internets''"

"That thingy on his back is creepy - but fun"

"He's more exciting than Red Sox baseball"

All of us pointy-headed intellectuals offer fierce exposes of the clown-show fronted by the frat boy who could never get more than C-plus in Social Science 1A. To what effect? Even Zogby has him making serious gains in the last three days. It looks as if tens of millions of Americans have minds that are sealed-shut and frozen against all kinds of evidence showing the total and dangerous folly of their president. Foreigners are completely bewildered by the mania for Bush.

But the defense (the spin actually) is simple and (so) effective:
"there was no threat of nuclear proliferation and (the administration) preferred to concentrate on weapons destroyed, not those lost." (McClellan, http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/041025/w102578.html).

So it's all about the right priorities folks.
The Bushists are the really responsible guys: they concentrate on destroying weapons instead of attacking the administration on some minor mistakes that are unevitable in such a major battle in the fight against evil.
The warnings came from the IAEA, -that was that UN-organization with a leader with an arab name, wasn't it?-, and from Europeans: suspicious.
The fact that they are stolen should not make us forget that Saddam DID possess these terrible explosives: yet another argument why it was right to go after him.

That's rather cynical you could say (while I am strongly against cynicism) but I don't stop here: I ask all sensible people (in countries with free elections; democracies?) to acknowledge the fact that direct elections are more and more part of the problem. We need indirect elections instead.

Not merely do Bushling and clownco. have the wrong approach to the war on terror--unilateralism and arrogance preventing moderate Muslims from joining our side--but their shortsighted incompetence gives aid and comfort to the enemy. How many new recruits do you think Al Qaeda gained from this hilarious news?

Anybody who votes for Bush is aiding the terrorists!

Just read on a CNN crawler that Cheney says Iraq is a "remarkable success story". Phew, for a while I was worried.

Just read on a CNN crawler that Cheney says Iraq is a "remarkable success story". Phew, for a while I was worried.

mortgage leads

Hook. Line. Sinker.

The usual suspects bite again. This is a phony story. Planted for the benefit of Kerry and his gullible supporters. What a bunch of suckers.

Btw, John O'Neill, this morning, is touting the finding of a transcript of radio traffic from one of the Swift Boats on the Bai Hap river March 13, 1969. Reporting that one of them had been hit by a mine.

When asked if the base should send fighters to strafe VC, the response was: "No. There are no VC, no fire aimed at us."

A year ago I wrote a long post about how the war on terror plays to the strenghts of Democrats and their foreign policy approach. A Democrat administration will on average do a better job than a Republican administration in a War on Terror. The root of this advantage is two fold. First, Democrats are more capable at implementing the multilateral aspect of a successfully dismantalling of terror networks. Second, Republican policy makers and administrators currently have a rearview mirror approach to national security. They believe that the cold war can provide a universal victory template for the future. It is a dangerous illusion that is threatening the security of the United States.

The news today confirms my point.
Patrick's refocus on Vietnam is very instructive, it underlines how trapped in the past the GOP is when facing currrent national security problems.

A very good summary on what is at stake can be found here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17518

Sullivan says Kerry is a coward in Vietnam. Just because he served does not make him a medal-winner.
Bush is OK, fly-boy, grounded for not taking physical in states, like Cheney- would do anything, whore his mother, to get out of doing his duty in Vietnam. Hey, wait, Bush is not taking his physical again, ground him'.
Also, Cheney said yesterday that if Kerry was in charge of cold war, the Soviet's would have won the cold war, meaning we would be a communist country,like Kerry would have lost the civil war and WW11, if not a football game also if he was head coach.
But wait, Bush lost war in Iraq 11 this summer. 85% if country is a no-go zone, just like Hell's Kitchen in NYC at night in 1960's was a no-go zone. Rumsfield lost the war for us...We lost the war, the quarterback lost the playbook and gave it the opposition: time to change the quarterback before the games over.

Have any of you noticed the news (as reported on NBC last night) - that 350 tons of explosives were already gone before coalition forces arrived.

So, this stuff disappeared some time between (approx) the time that Bush first went to the UN and the start of the war (wasn't that ~12-14 months?). I wonder what else disappeared during that time-frame...

From Fortune magazine, 11/1/04, p. 42, in which David Stires dissects the behavior of the corporate tax over the period from 1950 to the present and discovers that the effective federal tax rate for big corporations has fallen from 26.5% in 1988 to 17.2% in 2003, and that an amazing 61% of U.S. corporations paid no taxes from 1996 to 2000:

"So who in the world IS paying? Berkshire Hathaway's $3.3 billion taax bill last year represeented about 3% of the total income tax bill paid by all corporations. And next year, Warren Buffett says, he hopes to pay even more. He, for one, sees higher taxes as the byproduct of a worthy goal: higher profits."

When are Republicans going to wake up to what BUsh is doing to them? What's astonishing to me, is that the very people who fit into category 5 of the list stated by oneangryslav and liberal are the ones who get to look at their brokerage account statements and see their portfolios going straight into the toilet.

Brad smear streaks again. http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200410261723.asp

Afghanistan elections. FANTASTIC election. 3 years after 9/11. Fantastic success.

Unemployment. 5.4. Better than Clinton in 1996. (oh wait, wahh, we want to CHANGE measurements now. It's uh, no, wait, um, FEWER JOBS. That's it, that's the new statistic.) 3/4 Great job on Domestic: low unemployment, low inflation, low long term rates; 4% of GDP deficit (while fighting a war AND a Clinton caused dot.com bubble pop).

Of course, the rich (job creators) DID get a tax cut (to create more jobs) -- which Kerry will take back and consume on government boondogles; but Brad promises to increase jobs that way (don't you?).

Iraq, on track to be a democracy in less than 2 years after invasion, at a cost in lives of less than half the 2500 lost in the towers.

Cowardly Leftists have NOT specified what a "good job" in Iraq would look like. How many American lives is booting Saddam worth? If you can't, or won't, answer that question with numbers, you should be ashamed to call Bush incompetent.

Oh, I forgot. Leftists don't care about honor; don't have shame. Just plan to apologize if they really get caught (stains on a dress caught; White House tapes caught).

(I DO wish there was a stronger revenue based corporation tax -- but Kerry's too cowardly to lead on such)

Well thank God employment's coming back after Bush stalled it with lousy fiscal policy for three years!

On Iraq, perhaps we should more accurately cost the lives: include over 27,000 GI's maimed, amputated, brain damaged; 30,000 to 50,000 (?) Iraqis dead (but none of them apparently involved in 9-11); and no figures at all on Iraqi maimed, amputated, brain damaged. More to come.

As to the question: how many American lives is booting Saddam worth? If the intelligence is faked to make him seem more of a threat, if the invasion takes place without wide multilateral assistance because our regular allies knew there was no uncontainable threat, and if our occupation makes moderate Muslims choose sides with the "insurgents" because our leaders perform arrogantly and incompetently, the answer is: Zero. If the question is, how many American lives will booting Saddam COST?--that is another number. And I'm not even a Leftist.

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When love is in excess it brings a man nor honor nor any worthiness.

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Thanks for that insightful comment! It makes interesting reading, especially when I need a payday advance .

Thanks for that insightful comment! It makes interesting reading, especially when I need a payday advance .