“Hang on in there, buddies”

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The excellent Melanie Phillips bolsters our morale in the wake of the deadly shooting down of one of our helicopters:

To repeat — this is a war that’s still being fought. The Americans’ mistake was to assume they had won it and to turn their attention to creating the civilian administration. They have to put themselves firmly back onto a war footing. They have to find Saddam. And they have to stop being strung along by Iran and start getting heavy with them and the rest of the axis of terror.

I think she’s right.

BTW, was anyone else besides me offended by the extreme (even for Reuters) anti-American bias of this article about the incident, that Drudge linked?

Witnesses said American soldiers had fired on a crowd after a hand grenade was thrown at them. U.S. helicopters circled as armored personnel carriers blocked roads.

One man said he had pulled his five-year-old daughter out of a car just before an American tank crushed it. “She just made it. Why are the Americans doing this?” asked Ali Saleh.

Iraq’s six neighbors plus Egypt held security talks in Damascus, mindful of U.S. assertions that Syria and Iran were not doing enough to prevent militants crossing into Iraq.

In a statement, they condemned “terrorist” attacks on “civilians, humanitarian and religious institutions, embassies and international organizations” and vowed to cooperate with Iraqi authorities to “prevent any violation of borders.”

Yeah, that’s it — American soldiers fired on a crowd, just like that. We know it happened, because the anti-American witnesses said it did. No need to ask the Army. And of course there are the famous Reuters quotation marks around the word “terrorist.” How dare we call them that. It’s merely those poor, misunderstood militants who are attacking civilians. I’m glad someone cleared that up.

Un-fucking-believable.

“Why do people write like this?”

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Virginia Postrel asks, in response to:

[. . .]

I think you might fail to consider that religious progressives might finally awaken from their decades long slumber to answer the call against idolatry. One can cherish the “feminine” without relying on post-capitalist constructions of the “feminine” to acknowledge the embodiedness of gender. One can be LGBT friendly without becoming a materialist or a vulgar libertarian.

[. . .]

She has a point, though I suspect that few people really do write like that except in academia or related fields. For those people who do write as in the sample above, perhaps the writing style functions mainly as an indicator of group solidarity. Whereas prospective street-gang members might have to commit crimes to prove that their allegiance to the gang tops their allegiance to the law and outsiders, so perhaps are members of some academic disciplines (“disciplines”?) expected to write incomprehensible jargon to prove their allegiance to the theories and/or values of their fellow savants.

But in terms of actually communicating ideas — assuming that’s really the goal — maybe these people would be better off writing clearly and substituting some more benign ritual (urinating on fire hydrants?) to show solidarity with the intellectual pack.

Economic Policy Contradictions

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Watching the markets this morning. Third-quarter GDP report comes out stronger than expected. Stock indices and the dollar take off, bonds dump. Good times seemingly ahead.

Then Treasury Secretary Snow opens his mouth, asserting disingenuously that the U.S. still has a strong-dollar policy, and carping about how China and Japan run monetary policies that actually benefit their domestic economies. The second Bloomberg article linked above puts it well:

Even as he called on China and Japan to adopt policies that might weaken the U.S. currency, Snow insisted “a strong dollar is in the U.S. national interest” because “no country can devalue its way to prosperity.”

The contradictions in Bush’s politically-driven monetary policy are difficult to avoid and are having negative consequences for the securities markets. A usually mild-mannered trader friend of mine, with whom I was having an IM exchange during the Treasury secretary’s testimony, said that the way in which Snow lies about our weak-dollar policy is disgusting. I don’t think that my friend is the only one who thinks this. Stocks and the dollar sold off during Snow’s remarks.

As of 1:00 PM EST stocks have recovered some of their losses. But the losses were unnecessary. Stock market recovery is being held back by bad policy. (Bonds stayed down during all of this. That tells you something. Either there’s going to be continued economic recovery and bonds are going to get killed, or there’s going to be a weaker recovery combined with inflation and a weak dollar and bonds are going to get killed.)

I hope that the Bush people get their act together. Snow reminds me of G. William Miller, about whom an ex-boss of mine once quipped that the T-Bill market moved 50 points whenever he opened his mouth. That was back in the days when markets were opaque enough for insiders to profit consistently from politically induced price swings. Nowadays things are much more open, bid/ask spreads are tight, and unexpected volatility of the Miller/Snow variety is at least as likely to lead to trading losses as to gains. It would be in everyone’s interest for the Bush Administration to shut up, get out of the way, and let the economy follow the path of least resistance.