• The article says Gray has 'long railed' against global warming, implying he's a crank.


• The article implies that the UN IPCC report, released the same day, represents scientific consensus (when everybody knows the IPCC is a political body).


• It describes his theory as "contrary to mainstream thinking".


• It closes with a quote from a scientist who disagrees with Gray.

Anybody who has followed press reporting on global warming, and particularly on its effects on hurricanes, has surely encountered various contrarian pronouncements by William Gray, of Colorado State University.

begins with a quote from Senator Inhofe calling global warming a hoax perpetrated on the American people, and ends with a quote by a representive of the Society of Petroleum Geologists stating that Crichton's State of Fear has "the absolute ring of truth."

None of the assertions are based on rigorous statistical associations, oceanographic observations or physically based simulations; it is all seat-of -the-pants stuff of a sort that was common in the early days of climate studies, but which is difficult to evaluate when viewed as a scientific hypothesis.

Read Joe Klein's "An Administration's Epic Collapse".

What you are trying to do, when you are trying to decide if somebody running for President is “electable,” is figure out the aggregate thought process of hundreds of millions of complete strangers....What are they looking for in a candidate?...You are trying to estimate - just based on your own instincts - how each of these highly subjective, personal categories will average out across vast multitudes of voters you know absolutely nothing about. It is exactly as impossible as consistently predicting the movement of the market, and for exactly the same reasons...You could listen to pollsters, and consultants, and analysts, but those people are wrong most of the time, too.

May I humbly suggest an easier way? The things that make a candidate “electable” are the exact same things that make them an appealling candidate to you, personally. Rather than try and divine the contents of a million scattered consciousnesses, why not refer back to the one brain you have instant, 24 hour access to, and see what it likes. Pick who you trust, who you believe in....The absolute best thing we as Democratic primary voters can do is pick who we judge to be the best candidate. Not the most electable. The one who we think will do the best job of being President.

We report; you decide.

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.

The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.

Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.

Oh, and since it's clear that the real intelligence didn't support going to war with Iraq, why exactly was it so important to fake some? Why did we really attack Iraq in the first place? Hmmm?

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes that "it's become fashionable to draw comparisons between George W. Bush's sins and those of Richard Nixon, and for good reason. Both presidents are likely to be remembered as polarizing figures who left the country more divided than they found it. Both wereaccused of wartime deceptions: both also lost their way in disastrous second terms. And both men's blunders...are the sort that could take decades to undo." I'm not sure I understand the last sentence there; it's certainly true of Bush, whose first act as president was to undo the economic gains bequeathed to him by the previous administration, and who has openly boasted that he intends to leave his misbegotten war for his successor to clean up. But the biggest and most ruinous mistakes Nixon made in office were related to his and his aides' criminal conduct, the most potentially damaging policies those related to his attempt to create an imperial presidency and destroy the system of checks and balances, all of which were immediately corrected by driving the asshole-in-chief out of office. If Nixon did anything that blighted the country for decades to come, it was establishing the Southern strategy of pandering to racist white voters which enabled Republican candidates very different in both political approach and ideological bent than himself to thrive and prosper.

Yet Douthat's point is that what Bush and Nixon really have in common is that, even in their moment of self-implosion, they can be credited with laying the groundwork for future Republican presidents who will carry forth their "legacy." I guess it all comes down to what you mean by a legacy. It's not as if Nixon and Ronald Reagan had anything much in common in terms of the direction in which they wanted to steer the country, but they did both have little "[R]"s next to their names on the voting ballots. Bush obviously has a lot more in common with the man who explained to David Frost that "if the president does it, then it's not illegal." But it's looking more and more as if this will not turn out to be a banner than anyone wants to pick up any more than it was in Nixon's day. What exactly is the Bush "legacy" that Douthat thinks other candidates will openly embrace. Well, writes Douthat, other candidates will follow Bush's lead in blathering about "fiscal restraint" without actually doing anything to keep the budget or the size of the government in check if that might cost them a vote somewhere. He probably has something there, though he's out of his mind if he thinks that this particular vein of hypocrisy was invented by Bush; Reagan ran with it like Charlie Brown trying to get a kite in the air. (The only Republican president of the past quarter-century to have actually made a public show of doing something politically risky in the name of budgetary sanity was Bush's father, and he's been pilloried for it ever since.)

Douthat also thinks that "although the Iraq War is likely to be an albatross for the Republican Party for years to come," it doesn't take anything away from "the rest of Bush's national security vision." Which is what? Refusing to negotiate with North Korea, with the result that they see no reason not to pursue their nuclear program? Making a token show of cleaning up Afghanistan on the way to the showdown with Iraq that the administration really wanted, so that years later, the army is stretched too thin to prevent the Taliban from regrouping? Never bringing Osama bin Laden to justiice? Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, torture? Using the Patriot Act to give the administration means to shore itself up politically? No, Bush's national security "vision" is the Iraq War. It was supposed to be the case for "preventive war" and the first step in boldly remaking the Middle East; it was supposed to be such a great thing, with such seismic, positive effects, that it would make little things like never capturing Bin Laden (never mind not preventing 9/11 in the first place, something that Bush and Ashcroft and company may get more of an automatic pass on than they deserve) forgivable. Take that away and all you have is the tough talk you expect from any adminstration, married to more evidence of Bush's wild-eyed power-grabbing. And you can't just not take Iraq into account; it's the huge mess that will define Bush's administration; it deserves to, because Bush did so much to insist on being defined by it back when everyone was calling it a shining success.

Like Castro, Bush really believes that "history will absolve" him--except that Castro at least used to get out of bed in the morning and do some work. In retirement, he'll sit in a big room at his ranch and surround himself with courtiers who will interview him again and again ("And then, while everybody else on Air Force One was cowering and whimpering, I swing decisively into action...") and tell him about the greatness of his legacy, just as Nixon did with professional boot-lickers such as Monica Crowley. But Bush's legacy is likely to remain that of a stupid rich layabout whose family worked to jigger him into the presidency as if it were an open slot on the board of directors of a savings and loan, a job that he wanted because it came with a really neat weekly gathering at the country club golf course. Stuck there with no mandate and a minimum of actual popular support, he was just supposed to quietly do his eight years and then retire to the speechmaking circuit, spending the rest of his life enjoying being addressed as "Mr. President." And then something happened that reminded everyone that the job actually comes with real responsibilities, and the poor fella went batshit. He was given the absolute trust of a frightened nation to do whatever it took to make people feel safe, and he--a man with no sense of other human beings in the world and no understanding of the traditions and ideals of his country or how its government was meant to work but a deep belief in his own innate greatness, the greateness of someone who doesn't have to do anything to prove it but who cannot be questioned, because it's tantamount to doubting God's wisdom in anointing him as His earthly representative--used that trust to claim unchecked power for himself, just because he should have it, and every kind of advantage for his political party, because his party is America. He knows that he can't single out every person who fails to understand all this and have them locked up, but the fact that he can't is part of what makes him look so pouty and aggrieved these days.

Who will replace him? Well, John McCain has no shot, let's get that out of the way right now. We live in a culture where attitude counts more than anything, and the fact that Bush managed to hang onto reserves of popularity for as long as he did can be credited to the fact that his stupid, belligerant arrogance looked to a lot of people like the manly impudence they associate with Hollywood Western action stars, the kind that you want to send out to scare the terrrorists, comptence be damned. McCain simply doesn't have the right attitude for a Republican presidential candidate--he doesn't do piety, and he has a sense of irony that the true believers see as snotty, too David Letterman. So the candidate who is actually closest to the culturally conservative true believers on such issues as war and abortion will never get their votes because they think that he isn't their sort. Besides, the religious right will never forgive McCain for his attacks on them, any more than the kind of people who admired him for those attacks will ever forgive him for trying to suck up to them now. The most amusing thing about Mitt Romny in this context is that, as he goes from forum to forum on his knees, whining that every potential voter tell him what they want to hear and, by God, he'll say it and believe it, he resembles nothing so much as Bush's dad, except without the resume and the money. I always assumed that without the resume and the money, Bush Senior never would have made it out the first gate; Romney has already done better than that, but, again unlike a Bush, the poor guy has actually had to get out there and work a little.

I remember that when Bush Junior was running in 2000, I heard from more than one Texas-based editor or reporter that, of course, they knew how to dismantle him in about ten seconds of air time, take apart the illusion that he had any business running for dogcatcher and leave his hopes flapping in the breeze, but nobody wanted to be the one who spoiled the state's chances for having their guy in the White House. It's one more measure of how weird New York is that, in the last few weeks, local magazines and newspapers have been lining up to publish articles expressing something like dismay at the prospect of a President Guiliani. The hot line on Guiliani lately is that his lively personal history and vulnerability on social issues where the religious right is concerned will have to hurt him. Yet he and Bush have a core resemblance to each other that might override all that in a field where the religious right has no real true believer like Bush to throw its weight behind. Guiliani made his name as a prosectuor of white collar criminals and Mafia figures, then became the mayor who liked to boast of his bare-knuckled triumph over the squeegee men and graffiti artists. The major link holding the pieces of his career together is a self-righteous satisfaction in having his boot on some miscreant's throat. In the documentary Guiliani Time, Guiliani can be seen mocking a man with Parkinson's disease who calls in to his radio show complaining that his benefits have been cut off. What's creepy and disturbing about it is the naked enjoyment Guiliani seems to take in having the power to rub the man'snose in it; he makes no attempt to ask the man about his situation and find out what's happening with him, he simply responds to anything that he perceives as a challenge with chortling contempt: I'm the big dog, so you must not matter. It calls up memories of the infamous moment when Bush told a man in a crowd, "Who cares what you think?"--and that was before 9/11 was sold as confirmation that Bush was no mere mortal man who walks humbly among us. As his history with Bernard Kerik and his firing of Police Chief William Bratton demonstrate, he also shares with Bush a preference for cronyism over competence, and even an outright opposition to competence when he feels that it's getting in his way. If Guiliani has a clear walk to the Republican nomination, it'll be at least in part because Republican voters still feel drawn to the ugly, thuggish qualities of George Bush--qualities that they mistook for personal strength--and decided that what they really want now is a smart George Bush, a loud-mouthed bully who won't overreach. I'm honestly not sure at this point whether a smart Bush--a Bush who might know how to control himself-- would be better or worse than the Bush we've had, a model programmed to autodestruct. I could be very happy never finding out for sure.

[cross-posted on The Phil Nugent Experience]

I usually skip the celebrity interview segments on The Daily Show, but when Dennis Miller oozed out onto the floor last week, I found that I was curious to see what the weary old fudd was like in these hard days for the Bush hardcore. Part of it was the way Jon Stewart quietly uttered his name in the show's opening moments, as if worried that, given the opportunity to react, the crowd might boo, the way they did when John Bolton took a few moments away from running the International Society of Evil to drop by and explain that he didn't mind working for the most unpopular president of modern times because, hey, back in the sixties he was a Goldwater supporter. (He was? And now he supports Bush? Does he think that Bush and Goldwater have anything in common? I wish I could use one of my three wishes to bring Goldwater back from the dead just long enough to let him have three minutes to share his thoughts on the current administration with the nearest microphone.) I guess Stewart feels some kind of professional brotherhood with Miller, who he called "a very funny comedian," even though "funny" is simply inaccurate and even "comedian" is pushing it. I've never liked Miller, just as I've never really liked Christopher Hitchens, though I do think that Hitchens wanted to be a journalist, whereas Miller is a guy who'd have been happy hosting a game show or being a weatherman, so long as it got him some money and attention. Instead, he made it onto Saturday Night Live and was the first performer there to be the official "Weekend Update" guy who didn't generally appear in other sketches, a distinction that is a tribute to his one-note quality as a personality. In some of his book reviews, Hitchens actually managed to achieve competence; Miller, whether on SNL or hosting a failed talk show or failing on Monday Night Football or "starring" in a movie spin-off from the played-out Tales from the Crypt TV show, is just a stiff, tight-assed dude with a geeky sophomore's knack for stringing cultural references together. Even his most distinctively irritating quality--the way he laughs at his own jokes even as he's spewing them, to tip the audience off that the sentences he's speaking are indeed supposed to be jokes--wasn't an original affectation; Eddie Murphy did it to let audiences at the Beverly Hills Cops movies know that the shootouts and explostions that had originally been written with Sylvester Stallone in mind were now supposed to be funny, just because Murphy was now the trigger-happy badass at the center of them. But at least Murphy knew that it would be better for his career, after he'd cooled off considerably, to stop tittering and actually tell some real jokes.

So as I say, I'm predisposed not to be crazy about the guy. My impression that he looked deflated should probably be taken with that in mind. Still, I thought that it was interesting that, with Stewart trying to help him out by presenting him as a real comedian instead of a Limbaugh-like partisan mouthpiece, Miller couldn't help himself: the first thing he did when he sat down in the guest's chair was to tell Stewart that he "appreciated" him for having given "equal time" that night by making some jokes about the Democrats. Miller seemed to think that it was an unusual thing and that maybe Stewart had done it out of respect for Miller being there to keep him honest. He didn't seem to grasp that Stewart, like most comedians, will pick on anybody if they seem to be asking for it. In the same era that Miller has been remaking himself as, in his words, "a Rat Pack of one" for George Bush, Jr., The Daily Show and South Park have established themselves as satirical institutions. The former is regularly identified as somewhat liberal and the latter has its own cult of self-styled "South Park conservatives," but if you actually look at the shows themselves, both have been all over the map in terms of their targets. You can't accuse them of consistently shilling for one side or the other; if they did, they'd be too predictable to be funny, in the way that Rush L:imbaugh, for all that you hear about his supposed wit, is finally too predictable to be really funny. (That's why, when Limbaugh makes a noise that's heard outside his church of the already converted, it's not because he's done something especially funny, it's because, as when he mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms, he's gone completely beyond the pale.)

Some of us grow up with a romantic attitude about both comics and reporters, because they're supposed to be the ones who know the score and tell the truth. In an age where people use stand-up stages as platforms for getting their own situation comedies and Washington journalists see themselves as validating their own high salaries and speaking fees according to how much cozy "access" they enjoy with the powerful, that might seem like a preposterous notion, but some dreams die hard. If both Hitchens, the self-styled hard-scrapping opinion writer, and Miller, the professional wiseass, have seemed even harder to take than usual in their Bush-era incarnations, it's because, by linking their wagons to Bush's star when he was riding high, they seem to have betrayed the roles they'd chosen for themselves. I'm not saying that it's inconceivable that someone could have honestly supported Bush around the time of the start of the Iraq War and remained smart and funny about it, but both these guys threw down the gauntlet and basically declared that they would stand by Junior through thick and thin, to the bitter end, no matter what. I don't doubt that opportunism had something to do with it, and abject quaking fear in the wake of 9/11, though I suspect that they both also recognized Bush as some kind of soul mate. (What they probably lacked the self-knowledge to see was the real basis for their seeing themselves in him. Like Bush, both Miller and Hitchens have thick, unexamined bullying streaks that have really blossomed in these times.) What I'll bet they didn't realize was just how thin things could get for a Bush loyalist as the bitter end arrived on schedule. Neither can just turn on Bush now; their declarations of eternal fealty are too well-documented, as are their most bilious denunciations of anyone who's ever had the temerity to doubt the greatness of our mighty war president. (Hitchens, who, like Dwight Shrute, Rocky Balboa, and that potted plant that's wilting on my fire escape, is much smarter than Miller, has been showing signs since Katrina that he'd like to tiptoe away from his circa-2004 estimations of Bush's infallibility, but he can't quite do it; in the end, he agrees with Bush that any criticism of Bush amounts to criticism of the war, and Hitchens will never tolerate any criticism of or even any doubts about the war.)

What makes it sad is that these are such rich times for crusading opinion journalists and professional wiseasses, and Miller and Hitchens have cut themselves off from getting a piece of the action. The president of the United States is a moron, he's heading for a constitutional crisis in order to hang onto an Attorney General who is, almost unimaginable as it is, an even bigger moron, the White House is sinking under the weight of its hypocrisy and venality, and poor Dennis Miller is stuck there sitting next to Jon Stewart with nothing he can say but, boy, that Harry Reid's a stiff, huh? And don't get me started on global warming--what a hoax, right? Miller was never going to be the next Lenny Bruce, but as savvy as he once seemed to be--given his level of talent and likability, it's a major feat that he even had a career--I don't think anyone ever expected him to turn out to be the next Westbrook Pegler. (There's a reference for you. If it means nothing to you, don't bother googling it, just take that as the point and move on.) I imagine Miller, around the time of the 2004 elections, catching sight of people telling the truth about Bush and the war on late night TV and smirking as he thought to himself, what losers! But aspiring wiseasses should take him as the cautionary example that he is. In the end, the truth tellers have the most fun.

[cross-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]