Do these conmen, professional liars and hysterics dominating America feel any shame? Do they ever get embarrassed? Why doesn’t polite society shun them? Why doesn’t the blob (America’s foreign policy establishment) cast them out? Why do universities honor them?
I love this 2006 book by John Mueller. He does a great job taking down the shysters who dominate our public life.
ChatGPT:
Short answer:
• Shame/embarrassment: rarely. The incentives reward alarmism, not sobriety; non-alarmist statements are “exceedingly rare,” while the market keeps producing fear.
• Why they aren’t shunned: media, bureaucratic, and political ecosystems pay for worst-case talk and barely notice when the danger ebbs.
• Why the foreign-policy “blog/establishment” doesn’t cast them out: overestimation is career-safe, underestimation is punished (“CYA”), and the industry keeps cultivating fear.
Why the system protects alarmists (from ‘Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them):
Media economics: “if it bleeds, it leads.” Terror alerts led the news 23 times; de-alerts almost never did. Context (e.g., terror kills only a few hundred worldwide in most years) is seldom reported.
Bureaucratic incentives: agencies amplify vague threats so no one can blame them later; the formal term is “CYA.”
Official messaging promotes omnipresent peril (“any place, any time, virtually any weapon”), which justifies spending everywhere and makes backtracking embarrassing.
Security theater sticks: duct-tape guidance, almanac “warnings,” and color-coded alerts train audiences to expect drama, not probabilities.
No scoreboard for failure: even after years without the predicted carnage, leaders retreat to “what we are not seeing” rather than admit error.
Fear is sticky: once embraced, it resists rational analysis; the “terrorism industry” keeps cultivating it.
What actually changes behavior (Mueller-Style):
• Force probabilities into every claim; stop letting possibilities masquerade as certainties.
• Publish the crossover math (e.g., when flying becomes as risky as driving) every time fear is invoked.
• Reward officials and outlets that reduce fear where risk is low; shame the ones who sell hysteria.
• Sunset “everywhere spending” unless programs show measured safety gains; stop treating omnipotent-terror talk as a blank check.
Bottom line: the shame deficit isn’t a moral mystery; it’s an incentives machine. Change the incentives; the embarrassment will follow.
Did the hysterics who pushed for the 2003 invasion pay any price? Did the people who warned against invading get any reward?
• The Iraq-war boosters mostly kept their platforms and careers; a few paid limited or unrelated costs.
• Skeptics often paid costs in real time (fired, shunned) and only later got partial vindication or modest rewards.
Who paid a price (somewhat):
• Judith Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after intense criticism of her WMD coverage.
• Paul Wolfowitz left the World Bank in 2007 over an ethics scandal (not a formal sanction for Iraq, but his reputation never recovered).
• Douglas Feith was rebuked by the Pentagon’s inspector general for feeding “dubious” intelligence that buttressed the case for war.
• I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted (2007) in the Plame affair; his sentence was commuted and he was later pardoned (2018).
Who largely didn’t:
• CIA chief George Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 despite the WMD debacle.
• High-profile pro-war pundits mostly kept or regained megaphones (e.g., Bill Kristol moved among major outlets even after the war).
• Core prewar claims were later discredited (e.g., no Saddam–al-Qaeda cooperation), but many original advocates faced little professional penalty.
Who was penalized in real time for dissent:
• Phil Donahue’s MSNBC show was canceled on the eve of the war; a leaked memo called him a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.”
• NYT reporter Chris Hedges was reprimanded after an anti-war commencement speech and later left the paper.
• Brent Scowcroft publicly warned “Don’t Attack Saddam” (Aug. 2002) and was sidelined by the GOP foreign-policy apparatus for years.
Who was eventually rewarded or vindicated:
• The Knight Ridder (later McClatchy) team—John Walcott, Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel—was celebrated after the fact for getting the WMD story right (Moyers’s 2007 special, Nieman honors, later retrospectives).
• Barack Obama’s early opposition to the war (“dumb war,” 2002) became a key asset in the 2008 primary and his rise.
• In the UK, the Chilcot Inquiry (2016) judged the case for war “deficient,” cementing reputational damage, particularly for Tony Blair—yet few legal consequences followed.
Bottom line:
• Prices for being wrong were modest and uneven; institutional incentives favored alarmists and punished dissent in the moment. The few “prices” (Miller, Wolfowitz, Libby) were either partial or for adjacent issues, while genuine skeptics were validated only later—and mostly by reputation, not power or pay.
Here’s your 50 pompous blowhards list straight from ‘Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. To be clear: John Mueller doesn’t always call them out by name, but he systematically rips apart their claims, categories, and hype. I’ve broken it down by who they are, what they said/did, and how Mueller exposes them.
Politicians (fear as political currency)
George W. Bush – made terror central to reelection; approval ratings soared with every alert. Exposed: riding fear like a surfboard.
Dick Cheney – “downplaying the ongoing threat” is dangerous; used constant doom language. Exposed: fueling paranoia.
Donald Rumsfeld – hyped WMD “known unknowns.” Exposed: linked phantom weapons to Iraq.
Richard Myers (Joint Chiefs) – said 10,000 deaths would “do away with our way of life.” Exposed: absurd underestimation of U.S. resilience.
Karl Rove – engineered terror as campaign centerpiece. Exposed: pure political exploitation.
Tom Ridge – presided over color-coded alerts, later admitted White House pressured him. Exposed: fear theater.
Administration speechwriters – Bush’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric. Exposed: invented existential menace.
Congressional hawks – demanded DHS overfunding for every cow pasture and theme park. Exposed: pork-barrel patriotism.
Rudy Giuliani – declared more 9/11-style attacks were inevitable. Exposed: wrong; the “second shoe” never dropped.
John Kerry (2004) – insisted terrorism required a “war footing.” Exposed: mimicked Bush’s hysteria to stay competitive.
Bureaucrats & Agencies (security theater)
Department of Homeland Security – “terrorists can strike any place, any time, with virtually any weapon.” Exposed: fatuous and misleading.
TSA – $4B/yr screening; made flying so miserable people drove instead (causing extra deaths). Exposed: net negative for safety.
FBI – warned Americans about people carrying almanacs. Exposed: paranoia disguised as intelligence.
Post Office – spent $5B on anthrax response (=$1B per fatality). Exposed: wildly disproportionate.
Air Marshal Service – billions to chase phantoms. Exposed: low-value deterrent.
Local officials – Weeki Wachee Springs mermaid park sought anti-terror grants. Exposed: pork grabs justified by fake threats.
DHS duct tape campaign – told families to seal houses with plastic sheets. Exposed: laughable and useless.
Visa/immigration bureaucracy – choked foreign students and scientists. Exposed: undercut U.S. economy and research.
Pentagon planners – exaggerated rogue state threats. Exposed: North Korea and Iran far weaker than portrayed.
State/local police – forced to divert resources to counterterror drills instead of real crime. Exposed: violent crime ticked up.
Media Amplifiers (fear merchants)
Bob Simon (60 Minutes) – rebuked Michael Moore’s factual claim about low terror risk. Exposed: hysteria trumps math.
Mark Bowden – wrote of “housewives in Iowa afraid al-Qaeda’s charging in the door.” Exposed: media-fed panic.
Charles Krauthammer – declared post-9/11 terror waves inevitable. Exposed: wrong prediction.
Time magazine (1985 cover) – hyped “phantom proliferators” of nukes. Exposed: never materialized.
CBS News poll framers – questions assumed terror inevitable. Exposed: surveys manufactured consent.
CNN – ran constant threat countdowns. Exposed: fear as ratings gold.
Talk radio shock jocks – equated terrorism with Armageddon. Exposed: turned bathtubs into a bigger killer.
Print editors – 125,000 stories on the Tylenol poisonings. Exposed: no copycat wave followed.
War journalists – treated Pearl Harbor/9-11 parallels as gospel. Exposed: sloppy analogies.
Terror “docudramas” – amplified WMD nightmare scenarios. Exposed: science fiction dressed as analysis.
Think-Tankers & Academics (professional alarmists)
Michael Ignatieff – WMD inevitability claim. Exposed: terrorists still haven’t pulled it off.
Graham Allison – “more likely than not” nuclear terror within 10 years. Exposed: deadline passed, no nuke.
Brian Jenkins – forecasted portable WMD proliferation. Exposed: decades later, none used.
C.P. Snow – 1960s alarmist predictions of nukes everywhere by 1970s. Exposed: wrong timeline, no “nuclear cascade.”
Warren Buffett (quoted by Allison) – “nuclear terror is inevitable.” Exposed: Buffett clarified he meant centuries, not a decade.
Analysts hyping “dirty bombs” – claimed cities would be uninhabitable. Exposed: at worst, minor contamination.
Experts predicting “bioterror pandemics” – claimed it was “as easy as brewing beer.” Exposed: Aum Shinrikyo failed miserably despite $1B and 300 scientists.
Ethnic conflict alarmists – forecast “global ethnic wars.” Exposed: fizzled out.
Rogue-state alarmists – hyped Castro, Qaddafi, Saddam as existential. Exposed: all faded into irrelevance.
Cold War strategists – overblew communism’s reach. Exposed: USSR collapsed under its own weight.
Contractors & Risk Entrepreneurs (profiteers of fear)
Defense contractors – pushed scanners, surveillance toys, and missile shields. Exposed: billion-dollar boondoggles.
Biodefense firms – pocketed billions for anthrax vaccines. Exposed: flu vaccine shortfalls killed more.
Airport security vendors – sold tech that solved no real risk. Exposed: cost lives by slowing air travel.
Local lobbyists – demanded anti-terror funding for irrelevant targets (dams, petting zoos, theme parks).
Security consultants – billed cities for “worst-case” tabletop drills. Exposed: fantasy scenarios, real invoices.
Private trainers – cashed in on fear with active-shooter “terror camps.” Exposed: taught paranoia, not resilience.
Politically connected contractors – funneled billions into border “terror tech.” Exposed: failures like “virtual fence.”
Surveillance profiteers – peddled warrantless spying as “safety.” Exposed: no terror cells ever caught.
Alarmist publishers – churning out “Doomsday” books. Exposed: Mueller shows odds are microscopic.
Military-industrial complex (as a whole) – fed by “simplicity and spook.” Exposed: bled trillions fighting phantoms.
The Punchline
John Mueller’s demolition job in Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them:
Terrorism kills fewer people than bathtubs, toilets, or bee stings.
Overreaction killed more Americans (car crashes, wars) than terrorists ever did.
$1–2 trillion blown could have saved lives elsewhere (health, crime, disasters).
Terrorists didn’t destroy America; our own “rescuers” did the damage by panicking us into paranoia and waste.
