Glenn Greenwald's Salon piece is a must-read. The 2001 anthrax attacks were hugely important in stoking up a War-of-the-Worlds panic. The envelopes of white powder inflamed the sense that They're Everywhere--Lake Worth, FL; Washington; a mailbox in Princeton. Without doubt, the anthrax panic muddled brains, promoted an atmosphere of Bush-knows-best, and was easily convertible to war fever--in Iraq or, goddammit, somewhere .

I'm not convinced by Greenwald's belief that ABC News was instrumental in spreading the specific association between anthrax and Iraq and thus a phantom dot-connection between bin Laden and Saddam. Still, insofar as ABC News promoted the possibility of an Iraq-anthrax link--evidently when the White House was officially not signing on, according ot Greenwald--it contributed to the crazy uproar of that panicky fall, and owes us a straightforward explanation and not the mealy-mouthed stuff it's delivered to date.

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This is a hell of a good season for audacity. If you haven't tuned in to Joe Klein's fight with the smarmy bullies of the Jewish Right, here's what you've been missing. Last month, Joe Klein posted in his Time blog as follows:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

Whereupon Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League promptly accused Klein of perpetrating an "outrageous assertion...reminiscent of age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."

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Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.

That's Dana Milbank in this morning's WP. Imagine! Obama holds meetings with enthusiastic supporters from his own party "pep rallies"! He gets motorcades! He plans a presidential transition! (Everyone knows it's far better to wait till November.)

The "presumptuous" meme is swooping virally through the media. Nexis picks up 23 mentions in major newspapers in less than three weeks--about one a day. Why do I think what they really mean is "uppity"?

Thanks to Matt Yglesias for ringing the bell on the vile, even crazy part of Milbank's stuff, his interpretation of Obama's talk to House Democrats. I can't put this any better than Matt:

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Today's NYT Business section has an excellent piece by Michael M. Grynbaum on the hyping of rumors, estimates, and other financial froth in public. Amid some interesting stats on the routine errors of "stock analysts" and other frequently quoted pseudo-experts, this paragraph arrives:

"These are volatile times. There's a lot of moving parts here, and nobody can quite figure out how they all mesh," said the investment strategist Edward Yardeni. "You're hearing a lot of catastrophic predictions."

You certainly are. And my mind rolled back to the late '90s, when a goodly share of catastrophic predictions emanated from the then chief economist and global investment strategist at Deutsche Bank Securities, a fellow named--you guessed it--Edward Yardeni.

From 1997 through the late fall of 1999, Yardeni was among the most-quoted alarmists warning that Y2K was going to bring the sky crashing down because computers would misread 2000 as 1900. A Nexis search will readily turn up hundreds of citations from Mr. Yardeni around the world, especially in the countdown year of 1999. "Many thought of him as chief alarmist," wrote Guy Dixon of Toronoto's Globe and Mail on Nov. 30, 1999:

As early as September, 1997, he warned that potential Y2K computer problems, if left unchecked, would be a "serious threat to the global economy."

By November, 1997, when most people had yet to figure out that "Y2K" stood for "year 2000," he was warning the U.S. Congress of "worst-case disruption scenarios," causing "a global recession, possibly one of the longest and deepest on record."

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