As Ugly as It Gets

When I first read Tommy's latest, "As Ugly as It Gets," I thought, "What an apt title." After all, it's got it all: Saber-rattling against Iran based on discredited and exaggerated estimates of Iran's nuclear capabilities (more here); imperial arrogance where Tommy lectures Brazil and Turkey for negotiating with Ahmadinejad with nary a peep about how his own country coddles dictators and human rights abusers around the world and, of course, has a bit of a human rights problem of its own; and complete ignorance (he contrasts Iran with Colombia, which he calls "one of the great democratic success stories " -- more on this front here)." And then there was this:

I confess that when I first saw the May 17 picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms — after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think of was: Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?

No, that’s about as ugly as it gets.

I wouldn't be the first to point out (man, other people blog fast) that even if one accepts Tommy's extremely questionable version of events, there are many things that are uglier, like for instance, Tommy's infamous "Suck on This" Charlie Rose appearance. As Jonathan Weiler notes:

You need to watch the video to see the sneering, snarling bloodlust in Tom Friedman's withered soul to appreciate fully what ugliness really looks like, when a self-described democrat explains why it's OK to murder innocent civilians in a country that had nothing to do with the attack that Friedman says was the culminating justification for our invasion.

And speaking of ugly, there's the fact that Friedman seems completely unaware that he's doing it again -- taking neocon arguments and lies and putting a respectable, mustached "liberal" face on them, and in the process, pushing the argument for war a little further into the mainstream. Or that Green Tommy is being shunted aside for Beat-Your-Chest Tommy the same week that Friedman is taking a beating from conservatives for his "I wish I was China for a day" comments on Meet the Press.

But as I sat there sitting there thinking about everything about Tommy that is considerably uglier than the ugliest Tommy can imagine, my eye wandered across the editorial page and I was confronted by ugly in its purest, ugliest form: A whopper of an op-ed by John Yoo -- yes that John Yoo - on Elena Kagan.

Now John Yoo is either:

1. The legal architect behind the Bush torture program; or
2. One of the few low-level flunkies at the Bush DOJ who was willing to write memos giving legal cover for the torture that the Bush administration had already decided it was going to do; or
3. At best: A really bad lawyer with poor judgement, which is what a Justice Department review ultimately decided in "exonerating" Yoo and not recommending further sanctions.

None of these, obviously, should qualify Yoo to evaluate Kagan's views on executive privilege in the newspaper of record. But that's America for you. First, you're infamous. Then you're famous. Then somehow you're an expert -- call it the Ollie North career trajectory. And then you get to write a 1,330 word smug, condescending op-ed (theTimes suggested length for op-ed submissions is 750) on the very editoral page that called you out a few months ago where you excoriate a candidate for the Supreme Court because you're worried she might not be so keen on torturing Muslims. (God let's hope so, but I'm not as sure as Dungeon Master Yoo).

That might really be as ugly as it gets.

Tommy's Spare Tire

There's a part of me that wants to resist the temptation to go after Tommy's prose. For one, it's been done - and done really, really well. Also, I've been feeling a little uneasy since Meet the Press yesterday. There was something about his completely vacant look when they cut to him for reaction shots, not to mention his inability to communicate in non-Friedmanese, that made wonder if there wasn't something wrong with him besides being a racist, war-mongering, narcissist who doesn't have a fuckin' clue how toxic his ideas are. When does going after low-hanging fruit cross the line into making fun of someone's handicap? Minds much greater than mine have struggled to answer that question.

But more importantly, I don't want to imply that there is any sort of equivalency between the fact that Tom Friedman likes to pull metaphors out of his ass, contort them to the point where you no longer sure if that's still a turd in his hands, and build a column around said contorted turd (or a book around several) and the fact that Tom Friedman says things like this:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. That Charlie is what this war is about. We could of hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could of hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

But. If I'm going to have a Fire Tom Friedman blog and actually update it (and this is my fifth post in less than a week - look Mom, I have a blog!), I'm going to need some material. And Tommy's prose is the gift that keeps giving. So having gotten the obligatory disclaimer out of the way that I don't think murdering the English language is as bad as cheering on the murder of innocent Iraqis (boy, you're glad I cleared that up, aren't you?), onto Sunday's column!

The veteran global investor Mohamed El-Erian, who runs Pimco and has lived through many a financial crisis, recently issued a report describing the new, perilous state of today’s global economy. He described it like this: “The world is on a journey to an unstable destination, through unfamiliar territory, on an uneven road and, critically, having already used its spare tire.”

I like that image.

Of course you do, Tommy. You wish you had thought of it yourself. You wish you had thought of it so you could have built a column around it, and then a book chapter, and then you could have gone on Meet the Press and gazed into David Gregory's eyes when he asked you your thoughts on the economy and dazzled David and America with your world is a car without a spare metaphor.

We all admire the works of others. But what sets Tommy apart is that he's not going to let a little fact like the fact that someone else thought of it keep him from doing all of the above. (I can't shake the feeling that in the pre-Internet era Tommy would have pulled a Maureen Dowd on El-Erian ). And that when Tommy goes to a museum and sees a painting he likes, he pulls out a magic marker and starts drawing on it:

America used its spare tire to prevent a collapse of the banking system and to stimulate the economy after the subprime market crash. The European Union used its spare tire on its own economic stimulus and then to prevent a run on European banks triggered by the meltdown in Greece. This all better work, because we’re not only living in a world without any more spares but also in a world without distance.

Conspicuously absent: All those spare tires we dropped on Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars that Tommy wanted and we're still killing and dying and paying for - it's like they never happened.

Still, I have to admit, when Tommy said the world was without distance, I was relieved. Because if I'm driving without a spare, I don't want to go too far. So maybe since the World is Flat, it's OK not to have a spare since we don't even need to leave our house to outsource all our jobs and pollution to developing countries. Phew.

But wait. The very next sentence:

Nations are more tightly integrated than ever before. We’re driving bumper to bumper with every other major economy today, so misbehavior or mistakes anywhere can cause a global pileup.

This is the kind of shit that drives Friedmanologists crazy. That nonexistent distance apparently has nothing to do with the distance we're traveling in our car without a spare to an unstable destination; it's the distance between cars, all of which are lacking spares. So the world is no longer a car; it's a traffic pattern. And "We’re driving bumper to bumper with every other major economy today" - so the car no longer represents the global economy, but each nation is its own car. I think. And the danger is a pileup, not a pot hole, in which case an airbag, not a spare tire, would be the crucial accessory. You can't even see the original painting under Tommy's magic marker scribbling.

The point is that Tommy heard something that sounded like something he might say about metaphorical cars so he said to himself, "That's really brilliant." Then he said, "What else do cars do besides drive? They crash. And if they crashed, it would be . . . a . . . a global pileup! If I can work that in somehow, I'll have killed two paragraphs."

Which is essentially what Tommy admits next:

And that leads to the real point of this column: In this kind of world, leadership at every level of government and business matters more than ever.

"The real point"? That was just an exercise? You're not even faking it any more. It's all, "I'm Tom Friedman. I have three Pulitzers, I'm a best-selling author, my wife is really rich, and the New York Times has to print whatever I write because I don't have an editor (really), so read my filler, bitches!" Fuck you, Tommy. Just for that, I'm skipping to the last paragraph:

Winston Churchill famously observed that, “You can always trust the Americans. In the end, they will do the right thing, after they have eliminated all the other possibilities.” Is that still true for our generation? We’re going to find out. The time for bluffing ourselves is over. Are we going to do what it takes to fix our country, or are we going to be remembered as the generation that received more poker chips from their parents than any other and then had to turn around and toss a single chip to their kids and tell them to put it on “Lucky 21” — and hope for the best.

You see what he did there, right? Instead of saying "the time for fooling ourselves is over," he said bluffing. And that little sneaky word change sets us up for Tommy's Whirlwind Casino Metaphor! Never mind that one doesn't bluff oneself. Or that we're playing poker and then all of a sudden we seem to be playing some sort of roulette/blackjack hybrid called "Lucky 21." Or that he could have just said, "are we going to be remembered as the generation that received more from their parents than any other and squandered it?"

Which brings me to the real point of this blog post: The night after I read this, I had a dream that Tommy invited me over to his mansion to play poker. And while he riffed on how the world was hot, flat, crowded, and smelly, I won all his money and the house, too. Then I invited a bunch of Iraqi refugees to live with me in Tom Friedman's house. And we let Tommy stay there, too, because he knew where all the bathrooms and the closets were and the Iraqis found him funny. One of them called out, "Tommy, tell us again about the first rule of holes." And Tommy dutifully replied, "The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels." Then we all laughed and laughed while Tommy fixed us sandwiches.

The Tom Friedman Time Machine

Today’s Tommy column is ostensibly about the oil spill and Obama’s response, but really it’s yet another attempt by the Green Tommy to distance himself from the bloodthirsty, war-mongering Tommy. Friedman writes:

(T)he gulf oil spill is not Obama’s Katrina. It’s his 9/11 — and it is disappointing to see him making the same mistake George W. Bush made with his 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.

President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America. I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change. . . .

Had we done that on the morning of 9/12 — when gasoline averaged $1.66 a gallon — the majority of Americans would have signed on. They wanted to do something to strengthen the country they love. Instead, Bush told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping.

"Wow," I thought when I read that. "Have I been getting Tommy wrong all these years? I thought his response to 9/11 had been to advocate for killing Muslims -- any Muslims -- to send a message. Maybe I was confused. When he talked about invading Muslim countries and going door-to-door with a two-by-four and telling Muslims -- whether they had anything to do with 9/11 or not -- to 'suck on this', maybe that was Tommy-speak for raising the gas tax."

So I went back and checked. And lo and behold, Tommy did call for a a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” after 9/11 . . . on October 5, 2003. So what was Tommy writing about in the intervening 25-months during the time that horrible President Bush "told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping."

• On 9/13/01, Tommy's first column after the attacks, he did not propose a gas tax. He wrote a column called "World War Three".
• The next day, he wrote that the U.S. must "retaliate ferociously".
• Two weeks after the attacks, the man who now mocks Bush for telling Americans to shop, bravely taunted Osama Bin Laden from his Bethesda home with this ode to western consumerism:

I went to the ballgame Friday night, took in Dvorak's ''New World'' Symphony at the Kennedy Center Saturday, took my girls out to breakfast in Washington Sunday morning, and then flew to the University of Michigan. Heck, I even went out yesterday and bought some stock. What a great country.

I wonder what Osama bin Laden did in his cave in Afghanistan yesterday?

• On September 18, 2002 -- a full year before the gas tax he actually proposed (and a year after he now claims he proposed it) Tommy wrote that he was for invading Iraq to help spread democracy in the Middle East. And from there, of course, Tommy was off and running as he became one of the prime "liberal" cheerleaders for the invasion.

I'm sorry I've held such contempt for you all these years, Tommy. If only Bush had traveled forward in time to listen to what you were saying in October, 2003, instead of doing what you were advocating at the actual time he was making his decisions, the world would be a much better place.