When Tommy met Tommy

Tommy is justifiably catching a lot of shit for today's train wreck of a column, but it's one of my favorites. For years, a standard Tommy column gimmick has been to pen a letter from some world leader like President Bush or the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The point of these columns, like his recent calls for a third party made of Tom Friedmans, is that if the world leaders thought (shudder) and wrote (triple shudder!) exactly like Tommy does, all of our problems would disappear.

Today, Tommy ups the ante, envisioning a fantasy press conference in which the roles of Obama, Boehner, McConnoll, Reid and Pelosi are all played by Tom Friedman. Both Boehner and Obama give long-winded speeches where they promise to be more like Tom Friedman (including by never mentioning those icky wars that Tommy doesn't like to talk about any more.) At one point, Tommy Obama and Tommy Boehner even hug. And as a result of all this Tommy-on-Tommy love, the stock market surges like never before!

It's a bold column -- not in its ideas which are boring, conventional, and wrong -- but in Tommy's openness about the fact that he dreams (a la Buster Keaton in The Playhouse) about a world inhabited by no one but himself. Which is almost enough to make you feel a little better about the world we actually live in now.

Fire Tom Friedman

Wondering why we're fucked?

Ryan Lizza, in this week's New Yorker, describing how then-Senator Obama got himself up to speed on foreign policy:

Obama had always read widely, and now he was determined to get a deeper education. He read popular books on foreign affairs by Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman.

Almost makes you nostalgic for Bush reading My Pet Goat.

Fire Tom Friedman (and those who read him for a "deeper education").

David Brooks Call Out the Kettle

If you're like me and you've wondering, when is David Brooks going to review Qaddafi's book of teachings so that I can truly understand what's going on in Libya, wait no longer! Actually, the review is as vapid as one would expect. (If Qaddafi would review Brook's new book The Social Animal (Die, yuppie scum!) , that might be pretty entertaining). But it does include this gem:

Along the way he offers banal observations as if nobody had ever thought of them before.

Wait, isn't that Brooks' entire schtick? What's next, is he going to criticize Qadaffi for beginning every passage, "There are two schools of thought when it comes to . . . "?

I look forward to Friedman critiquing the Madman for using mixed and mangled metaphors and Dowd calling him out for reducing every issue, no matter how serious, as schoolyard gossip as well Qadaffi's annoying tendency to rely way too much on cloying nicknames.

Good Stuff

A friend of Jonathan Chait's edit this Friedman column down to nothing but mixed metaphors and cliches: http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/84059/tom-friedmans-volcano-wakeup-call.

And even better: My new hero Sarah Carr joins the Pantheon of all-time great Friedman takedowns (next to Taibbi and the pieing): http://inanities.org/2011/03/this-is-just-the-start-and-it-never-fucking-ends/. Makes yesterday's FTF on the same column look rather lame, I know, but it's always been about the movement.

Fire Tom Friedman.

These Are A Few Of Tom Friedman's Favorite Things

My inbox has been flooded with emails asking for my take on today’s Tommy column. (OK – I got one email but that’s a record), in which everyone’s favorite mustachioed, graying (new pic!) gas bag speculates on the “not so obvious” causes of the uprisings in the Middle East.

Before we get to the what, let’s start with the why. Why he would write a column that my emailer succinctly described as “so bad it's like he parodying himself. Or like Taibbi is ventriloquisting him.”

Egypt, Tunisia, et al should have been Tommy’s Charlie Sheen moment, shuttling from studio to studio so he could explain to us what was really going on. (Sorry – every blog post I’ve read this week has had an awkward Charlie Sheen reference and I’m pretty much a follower). After all, for years he’s been our Middle East expert, the one we turn to for Gladwellesque oversimplifications and fact-free meta-narratives so we can sound cocktail party literate and give our racist impulses a nice pseudo-intellectual veneer.

But it didn’t happen. First, Kristof beat Tommy to the punch. Badly. While Kristof was writing riveting accounts from Tunisia, Tommy was taking his annual 6-week X-mas vacation. Tommy didn’t reach Cairo until a full two-weeks after January 25, when everyone who was anyone was already there; hell, Anderson Cooper had already been beaten up by the time Tommy finally filed from Tahrir Square. (Tellingly, Kristof went on to Bahrain and Tripoli while Tommy retreated to Bethesda).

More damaging than being late was the fact that suddenly he had a lot of competition. Who needs Thomas L. Friedman when our pundit class, after locating Tunisia on a map (or not), was instantly transformed into experts on Arab history & culture, regional political parties, etc . . . ? Or when the Brookings Institute alone has 9,000 on-call Middle East experts to remind to stop being so enthralled with the exhilarating images because what really matters is how this will affect the U.S. and Israel. (Less cynically, the sheer volume of time spent on events, not to mention our access these days to all sorts of delicious media, meant that lots of us were having our eyes opened by lots of brilliant people we’d never heard of before.)

So if I had to guess about today’s column, it’s Tommy’s attempt to put his unique stamp on the events of 2011. And give credit where credit is due. It is, um, unique. Tommy’s list of not-so-obvious factors begins with:

THE OBAMA FACTOR Americans have never fully appreciated what a radical thing we did — in the eyes of the rest of the world — in electing an African-American with the middle name Hussein as president. I’m convinced that listening to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — not the words, but the man — were more than a few young Arabs who were saying to themselves: “Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.” I’d put that in my mix of forces fueling these revolts.

There’s something almost touching about the fact that Friedman thinks everyone thinks the way he does: Meaningless observation about two things sorta having something in common (“Obama has a penis . . . )” leads to light bulb moment! Never mind that Friedman’s fictional young Arab actually has nothing in common with President Obama besides the fact that Tommy named him Hussein. After all, Obama is not actually a Muslim and (h/t Fire Tom Friedman’s Sister) in Egypt, where the median age is 24, our 49-year-old President is almost certainly not considered young.

But this puzzling paragraph becomes clearer as Tommy lists the rest of his “factors”: Obama. Google Earth. Israel. The Beijing Olympics. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. It’s not Five Not So Obvious Factors. It’s Five Things Tommy Really Likes! (If Egypt have revolted 10 years earlier, it would have been golf, Taco Bell, Wikipedia, and the Amazing Race). Write about your passion – isn’t that what they say? Even if it doesn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with what you’re ostensibly writing about.

And besides, have you used Google Earth? You can find your own house on it! And no matter what you think of the Chinese, you gotta admit they throw one helluva an Olympics. Surely there was at least one Egyptian kid out there who said, “Holy shit! Look at those fireworks. Time to get rid of my U.S. backed torture regime!” As for Prime Minister Fayyad – Tommy’s already invested several columns in predicting that he would be the change agent in the Arab/Muslim world. It’s really important for the Friedman brand that he keep peddling that one, even though no matter how laughable people who actually know something about the region may find it. And while its true that Fire Tom Friedman's research team was unable to find a single instance of a young Egyptian citing Fayyad as inspiration, it's also true that we don't have access to the thoughts of the young Arabs Tommy invents for supporting evidence.

With all the breathtaking changes going on in the world right now, isn’t it comforting to know that some things, some people, stay absolutely the same?

Fire Tom Friedman

Flying the Friendly Skies with Green Tommy

Remember way back on Sunday when Tommy declared the oil spill was our fault because WE "sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price." And how inspired he was by his buddy Mark Mykleby's courageous decision to stop blaming BP and start haranguing his wife to drive a more fuel-efficient car? Well, what did Green Tommy do after urging all of us to look in the mirror?

He flew to Turkey!

Now, I'm no climatologist, but I have heard rumors that flying wasn't so good for the earth. So I went to one of those websites where you enter all sorts of data about yourself to determine your carbon footprint so that you'll feel terrible about yourself so that you'll fork over some money that goes God knows where so you can feel good about yourself again.

It turns out that for taking a round trip flight to Istanbul from Washington DC, we can assign 4,525 lbs of CO₂ emissions to Thomas L. Friedman. That sounds like a lot - good thing he doesn't fly very often. I mean, in the past six months he's only gone to:

• London -2,867 lbs of CO₂
• Athens - 4,463 lbs of CO₂
• Mexico City - 1,740 lbs of CO₂
• St. Louis - 1,074 lbs of CO₂
• Qatar and Yemen - 7,123 lbs of CO₂
• Hong Kong and Taiwan - 7,586 lbs of CO₂
• Davos -3,682 lbs of CO₂
• Copenhagen (for the summit on climate change) - 3,760 lbs of CO₂

For a six-month total of 36,215 lbs of CO2. Which means Tom Friedman is on pace for more than 72,000 lbs -- or 32.7 metric tons -- of plane-related CO₂ emissions this year! By comparison, the average gluttonous American emits 19 metric tons of CO2 a year from all of their activities.

So what do we get in return for Tommy's high-flying carbon belching? Let's look at today's column. There's not a single on-the-ground observation. No interviews with anyone in Istanbul. In fact, the only quote in the entire article that wasn't pulled from the Internet is a mysterious "Turkish foreign policy analyst" whose views so perfectly align with Friedman's that he or she is probably a) made up; b) Tommy's neighbor in Bethesda; or c) corporate strategy consultant Peter Schwartz. There is nothing in here that requires boarding a plane. Oh, he does has a cringe-inducing imaginary conversation with some Turks (Wait one minute, Friedman. That is a gross exaggeration, say Turkish officials), but that obviously doesn't require real airline travel, either.

There is simply no reason that Tom Friedman needs to go to Turkey to write a column. Or anywhere, for that matter. So if we really want, as a certain NYT columnist urges, to get"serious about fixing the problems that we can control," we could start by taking away Tom Friedman's passport. Maybe even place him under house arrest. Although we should probably find a more suitable house first.

Hot, Flat & Crowded Manor

Fire Tom Friedman.

Meet Corporate Strategy Consultant Peter Schwartz

Nearly lost in Sunday's Tommy column, in which the mustachioed one looked in the mirror at his Bethesda mansion and decided your oil consumption drove the good people of BP deeper and deeper into the Gulf, was a moment that's even strange by Tommy standards:

We need all the cushions we can get right now, because we are living in a world of cascading and intertwined threats that have the potential to turn our country upside down at any moment. We do not know when the next Times Square bomber might get lucky. We don’t know how long the U.S. and Israel will tolerate Iran’s nuclear program. We don’t know if Pakistan will hold together and what might happen to its nukes. We don’t know when North Korea will go nuts. We don’t know if the European Union can keep financing the debts of Greece, Hungary and Spain — and what financial contagion might be set off if it can’t.

“It is not your imagination,” says corporate strategy consultant Peter Schwartz — there is a lot more scary stuff hanging over the world today.

Tom Friedman has just listed Five Scary Possible Events, four of them being Security Threats From People With Skin Darker Than Tom Friedman. So who does Tommy turn to for validation that the dark and scary is closing in? Corporate strategy consultant Peter Schwartz. If you're going to use a completely useless, made-up identifier like "corporate strategy consultant," why not give Peter Schwartz a title that actually suggests expertise in what your talking about? Why not call him "global terrorism expert" Peter Schwartz or "security consultant" Peter Schwartz?

But even better is the fact that Tommy introduces Peter just to say: "It is not your imagination." Huh? Who the hell is Peter Schwartz and what is he doing in this column? Do Tommy columns now include product placement for his downsized friends? Did he lose a bet on the golf course and have to figure out a way to work Peter in? Is corporate strategy consultant Peter Schwartz the name of some douchebag-speaking 8-ball ("Your brand is your greatest asset;" "Opportunity is another word for risk") that Tommy reaches for when he needs a little filler to hit his word count?

Whatever the reason for Peter's bizarre appearance, I really hope to see more of him in future Tommy columns. Every superhero in the war on global terror needs a good sidekick.

Tommy By the Numbers

Since this blog was inspired by the late, great Fire Joe Morgan, I thought I'd post a quick follow- up yesterday's post on Tommy's freedom flotilla column with a little Friedman sabermetrics.

• Number of times Tommy mentioned the 9 dead activists in his freedom flotilla column: 0.
• Number of times Tommy referred to himself: 15.
• Number of times Tommy mentioned the suffering of the people of Gaza: 0.
• Number of times he mentioned his own suffering (this week's events have been hard for him to watch): 2.
  
• Number of times Tommy espoused centrism or balance as the key to solving the current crisis: 4.
  
• Number of specific acts of violence committed by Israel detailed by Tommy (in a column written in response to Israel's killing of nine civilians): 0.
• Number of specific acts of violence committed by Muslims detailed by Tommy (in a column written in response to Israel's killing of nine civilians): 5.

Fire Tom Friedman.

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.

"Live" Blogging Tommy Boy on Meet the Press

Note: Not surprisingly, I couldn't bring myself to sit down and watch MTP this morning. But I just watched. OK, not the whole thing so if you're interested in my take on what Robert Menendez and John Cronyn had to say about Rand Paul (and why wouldn't you be?), I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. But I watched the roundtable with Tommy Boy, Paul Gigot, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and host David Gregory. If you'd like to get the full live-blogging effect, you can watch here while reading my searing commentary below. 

9:35 AM:*

Tommy Boy gets the first question. It's about Rand Paul. Even though my cat knew there would be Rand Paul questions, Tommy seems unprepared. In fact, it's not clear he even knew who Rand Paul was before he heard Menedez, Cronyn and Gregory talk about him in the first segment. That doesn't stop Tommy from zinging Rand, though; says being against Civil Rights Act is not a "growth" position. Harsh. He might as well have called Rand's mom a whore.

Tommy quickly moves away from Rand and onto more comfortable ground: stuff he's written about in the past few weeks. "It's easy to be against government, but what specifically are you going to cut."

9:38:

Gigot points out to Tommy that Rand is actually one of the few people that does spell out what he's going to cut: Medicare, for example. (Did Tommy do anything to prepare except reread his own columns?) Cut to Tommy who is nodding enthusiastically and suddenly looks really intrigued. (Maybe it's just occurred to him that the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act applies to Muslims, too).

9:43:

Why I don't watch shows like this in a nutshell: Paul Gigot - "President Obama has governed so far to the left that I think he's driven Republicans to the right." When did pulling stuff out of your ass that you know isn't true, but you think will be effective for your side, become analysis? No one will challenge him on this crap, either.

9:45:

Gregory asks Tommy a question he's better prepared for because he's written about it recently: What's happened to the center? Tommy - I'm very worried about the center. It's falling apart for a number of reasons, including "digital lynch mobs on the Internet" (Was that Tommy giving Fire Tom Friedman a shoutout?) . That's why I'd like to be China for a day (Chapter 16 of Hot, Flat and Crowded.) "If we were China for a day, we could get some shit done." Tommy the provocateur is in the house! But not for long. "I don't want to be China for a second." Now I'm confused. Is a day longer than a second? I thought I knew, but now I'm not sure.

9:50:

Gregory asks Tommy about what the government should be doing to address the oil spill. Tommy does what he does with every question: tread water for thirty seconds than change the subject to a recent column. The treading is painful -- "We've got an oil spill, it's, it's about a mile below the surface, it's about 60 to 70 miles offshore, so it's hard to see, OK?" -- but he picks up steam when he starts reciting, practically verbatim, his column from last Tuesday.

9:55:

Bob Woodward just suggested that BP call in Google to clean up the oil spill. Seriously. Because when you're old and you don't understand new things, you tend to ascribe to them all sorts of magical powers. Tommy should give Woodward a big sloppy kiss right now for saying something decidedly stupider than the crap he's been peddling, but he's not that self-aware.

Recap:

Having never watched Tommy in this format, it was amazing how uncomfortable he was when he actually had to talk about a topic that someone else chose rather then just unleashing a steady stream of Friedman diarrhea. I really wish there was footage of Tommy in the green room before hand; I guarantee he was reading his own columns and books. He certainly didn't read anything else to prepare. How can you go on a national television news commentary show without knowing a thing about Rand Paul or the specifics of the oil spill?

*All times are made up, of course. It's 12 hours later as I write this.

Karzai the Carpet Salesman

A few weeks ago, Tommy was angry. According to a Times article,Hamid Karzai had "recently told lunch guests at the presidential palace that he believes the Americans are in Afghanistan because they want to dominate his country and the region." This assessment of American aims upset Friedman so much in the very next paragraph he repeated it essentially verbatim, "Karzai believes that America is trying to dominate the region". (I've subsequently learned from a conversation with someone in the NYT editorial office that Friedman doesn't have an editor).

Tommy, of course, didn't pause to consider what might make that paranoid Karzai think the U.S. was trying to dominate the region. Instead, he started in in on a typical Friedman theme: the ingratitude of those whose countries we invade and people we kill: "That is what we’re getting for risking thousands of U.S. soldiers and having spent $200 billion already."

Much of what followed was pretty forgettable. Apparently, the U.S. is violating THREE CARDINAL RULES OF MIDDLE EAST DIPLOMACY. I'll spare you, except for what he said about rule # 2:

Rule No. 2: “Never want it more than they do.” If we want good governance in Afghanistan more than Karzai, he will sell us that carpet over and over.

Karzai will sell us what?!? "Selling us that carpet" is simply not an an expression. And while Friedman is famous for making up his own tortured metaphors, you cannot just throw out racist caricatures about the President of Afghanistan on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Except apparently you can. Not only did Friedman write that and The New York Times printed it, but no one said a word about it. I spent a lot of time reading reaction to that op-ed (it might surprise you to learn I'm a little obsessed with Friedman), and there were lots of people who oohed and aahed over the THREE CARDINAL RULES. But except for a lone solitary tweet, no one said, "what the fuck did you mean by that carpet crack, Tommy? What caused you to choose those particular words? Were you were playing off of the racist stereotype of Arabs and Persians from the Middle East as slick carpet salesmen?"

The sad fact is no form of prejudice is more socially acceptable in so-called polite company than anti-Muslim sentiments. Can you imagine the uproar if someone had written in the New York Times, "If we want peace more than Netanyahu, he'll lend us money at exorbitant rates over and over"? But that's essentially what Friedman did.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, Tommy's racist writings are a drop in the bucket compared to the atrocities committed by the U.S. in our -- dare I say it -- attempt to dominate the region. But in a just world, Friedman would making his carpet salesman cracks on some obscure xenophobic website and not as Esteemed Thinker on the pages of The New York Times.

Fire Tom Friedman.

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.