Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

This really is a full service blog.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Second rate reporter says what?

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

T R E 4 5 O N

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

I was promised a recession.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Everybody saw this coming.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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Dirty fucking economic predictions

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Paul Rosenberg highlights Dean Baker’s 2002 piece about the housing bubble:

This paper shows that there is no obvious explanation for a sudden increase in the relative demand for housing which could explain the price rise. There is also no obvious explanation for the increase in home purchase prices relative to rental prices. In the absence of any other credible theory, the only plausible explanation for the sudden surge in home prices is the existence of a housing bubble. This means that a major factor driving housing sales is the expectation that housing prices will be higher in the future.

Matt Yglesias explains why there is no professional benefit to being prescient in the economic world:

And in the reputational economy of analysts the consequences are even worse. If you go along with the herd and then predict a problem a month before it arises, then you strike everyone as prescient. But if you start warning about something and then it doesn’t happen, and then you keep nagging people, and then you keep complaining about how nobody’s listening to you, you start getting dismissed as a crank. And when you’re proven right, you’re still that crank nobody wants to listen to. You don’t get hailed as a hero. But Ben Bernanke who made very mainstream mistakes and then pivoted adroitly once the bill came due does.

Of course, it’s the same with everything. The people who opposed the Iraq war are are still those cranks that nobody wants to listen to, while George Packer and Fareed Zakaria are hailed as brilliant foreign policy minds. Zakaria and Bernkanke are bright and competent, which is why they’re good examples here: it’s not just that our discourse holds up idiots as experts, it’s also that, within the world of intelligent commentators, those who are wrong are rewarded while those who are right are ignored.

Again, I don’t see how any of this ends well for the United States.

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Don’t worry about the government

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None of you seem to mind my obsession with Ambergate, so I’m going to give it one more whack. Ambinder wrote:

And yet — we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.

Spencer Ackerman replies:

Talk to anyone who’s handled raw intelligence and s/he will tell you something on the order of this: “I thought it would be like a secret newspaper, but instead what’s already available in open-source materials is often more useful.” Rarely is there ever a clear policy option “implied” by intelligence — that’s a category error. Policymakers read intelligence, use it or discount it in whole or in part, and then make decisions. Intelligence is a text to be interpreted, not a compass pointing to true north. What’s more, those who acquire and analyze intelligence on a discrete subject use the same body of open-source information to shape their judgments as the rest of us do.

Which implies choices for journalists. We can choose to treat intelligence as more definitive than it is and enable the presumption of deference to those who say, Well, if only you saw the intelligence I saw… Or we can choose to treat intelligence-based claims as valuable but not definitive, and contextualize such claims within larger bodies of evidence.

In other words, “we weren’t privy to the intelligence” is the new “no one could have predicted”.

This shit never changes. Governments like to bamboozle people. One way they can do this is by claiming there is top secret intelligence proving whatever it is that they people to believe. In Ambinder’s world, even if this stop secret intelligence turns out not to mean what the government said it meant, we were still wrong to question it.

How is that not contrary to the first principles of journalism?

Update. Speaking of Marc Ambinder, this analysis of Fran Townsend’s remarks in an interview with Ambinder is spot on (from Michael Scherer, of all people):

In an interview with Marc Ambinder, Fran Townsend, a former Homeland Security adviser to Bush, says that the White House provided the language to Ridge only because he previewed his speech internally. “So I called him said, here’s what I think should go in it,” Townsend tells Ambinder. “It wasn’t an order. I didn’t regularly see his speeches in advance. He made speeches all the time without running it by us.” This is less of a denial than a startling admission: Townsend, whose job profile had nothing to do with politics, is admitting that she wanted political language praising the President inserted into an election-year statement about new measures to protect against terrorist attack.

Scherer’s whole piece, based on an advance copy of the book, is worth reading.

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Kruggers on Ambers

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Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that Marc Ambinder’s “the hippies were wrong to be right” post is such a classic that it merits further discussion. Here’s Paul Krugman:

But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.

Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.

Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.

The rules of modern day punditry are almost as complex as those of modern day wingnuts (minus the boycotts, I guess). Whether or not something is rational is of no relevance. Arcane mixtures of “balance”, deference to power, and “seriousness” have completely replaced common sense.

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Douthat’s Maiden Voyage

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I don’t think anyone will argue that it is better than anything regurgitated by Bill Kristol, and he makes some interesting points and a compelling argument that a decisive defeat of Cheney Republicanism would have been better for the country, but this portion made me think he will fit right in with our nation’s elites:

But the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus.

Got it? Prosecuting those who torture is “taking leave” of your senses.

I used to write stuff like that a couple years ago. I used to agree with Chris Matthews that Bush was someone you wanted to have a beer with and that Gore sighed too much in the debates. Also, at the time, I was writing about all the WMD Iraq had and how they were an existential threat, how of course the Bush administration has a plan for Iraq after the war and how shock and awe was just the bee’s knees, that of course we could stabilize Iraq with 150k troops, and I made fun of the anti-war protesters and that really, you shouldn’t blame the federal for their crappy response to Hurricane Katrina- natural disasters just happen!

The difference between me and Ross, though, is that I apparently paid attention the last eight years.

Having said all that, a marked improvement over Bill Kristol. I actually thought a couple times while reading it, instead of retching.

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They Still Think This Is About Politics

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Rep. Peter Hoekstra writes in Pravda the WSJ op-ed pages:

Congress Knew About the Interrogations

It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

At some point they are going to figure out that for most of us, we don’t care if the person has a ( R ) or (D) behind their name when they were instituting a policy of torture. That is what is so depressing (to me, at least) about the Ari Fleischer’s and the Thiessen’s of the world. They honestly seem to think this is nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt, the same old Washington gotcha poltics. It isn’t. When you torture people, you have crossed a really clear line. Innocent people are dead. Lives have been ruined. Our international reputation has been destroyed. Yes, the Bush administration will get most of the blame, but that is because they were in charge and they did this, not because of what party they happen to belong to. If Jane Harman and Nancy Pelosi knew about this and ok’d it, they are just as culpable.

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There, but for the grace of God, torture I?

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Roger Cohen has become a mostly thoughtful voice on foreign policy at the Times, but this makes next-to-no sense:

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

[….]

That, of course, is Obama’s favorite word: responsibility. I think it demands some acknowledgment that, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

I understand being ambivalent about prosecutions. I am ambivalent myself, without knowing in advance what an investigation might unearth. But this “we all failed” stuff is just bullshit. There are plenty of dirty fucking hippies who opposed the craziness every step of the way. Words didn’t fail them.

And while I can sympathize with CIA interrogators who in some cases may have been following orders, how many of us really look at Dick Cheney, who may have in effect ordered most of this, and think “There but the grace of God, go I?”

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Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Krugman R’lyeh wagn’nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!!

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It’s worth revisiting the point in January 2002 when Paul Krugman predicted that Enron and the system that allowed it would have a more lasting impact on America than 9/11.

Sept. 11 told us a lot about Wahhabism, but not much about Americanism.

The Enron scandal, on the other hand, clearly was about us. It told us things about ourselves that we probably should have known, but had managed not to see. I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

It still seems like a fair comparison. The lessons of both Enron and 9/11 went largely ignored in Washington, so we can think of them a matched pair. Let’s grant that Iraq, spying and torture have no more to do with 9/11 than (cue the tortured cries of Mike Godwin) a burning building caused WWII*. It seems fair to grant that even a guy like Krugman, who anticipated a lot, could not predict that only a tiny handful of the imponderably multitudinous possibility branches that filled a time-space light-cone centered on the 2001 attacks could out-stupid the next six years of Bush.

On the other hand, Krugman and a minority of others did not need a crystal ball to see a landscape crowded with firms like Enron. Fiscally speaking these firms lived on nothing. Many, especially but not exclusively derivatives traders, engineered complex schemes that had the ultimate effect of making a financial dirt sandwich look nutritious. These bogus schemes succeeded so well that by the early Bush years ginormous firms had already died, financially speaking, but still walked around because they didn’t know or wouldn’t admit it.

At one point a regulatory framework kept stinkier firms from chewing through too many brains legitimate enterprises, once, but twelve years of Reagan, eight years of Clinton (who, in a fair world, would be CATO’s favorite living president) and eight more years of fundamentalist Clif’s notes Reaganomics took care of that. By 2002 clued-in economists like Krugman and Nouriel Roubini must have looked at the national scene and seen late-period Romero.

Then there’s the twist that even Krugman may not have seen coming. Who would guess a large enough pack of zombies could go on feeding even after everyone from illiterate no-English farmhands all the way down to Michelle Bachmann realized what was happening? Read DougJ’s post below. Check out the graphs at Drum’s. It seems obvious as hell, now, while we watch Dr. Gramm’s undead experiments gnawing away at the federal government.

If I drag this analogy out a little further**, maybe now everyone knows they should have listened the crazy-sounding expert with the stories about the zombies, the alien brain worms, the volcano that we all thought went cold, the gremlin on the wing or whatever. Given time they might start listening to him.

They laughed at me in the academy.

Crazier things have happened.

(*) Strong chance that this minor point will consume the thread. Oh well.
(**) Only one thing will kill this metaphor.

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