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.

The Last Days of Disco in Libya?

The weapon of choice for our chickenhawks is the public letter. Nothing demonstrates your resolve to spend taxpayer money to send other people's kids to kill in other countries then putting your name on a letter written by someone else.

So it comes as no surprise to find that this letter from the Foreign Policy Initiative urging Obama to institute a "no-fly zone" and "explore the option of targeted strikes against regime assets" is signed by the usual suspects. Robert Kagan. Marty Peretz. Max Boot. William Taft!?!? Paul Bremer. Bill Kristol. And of course, the loathsome Michael O'Hanlon who long ago discovered the best way to get your name in the New York Times is to advocate for Muslim deaths from the "liberal-leaning" Brookings Institute.

But one signatory stands out among the usual cast of Cheneys and Podhoretzez: Whit Stillman. Remember Whit, the film director who burst on the scene with Metropolitan in 1990, followed it up with Barcelona in 1994, and finished his Manhattan trilogy in 1998 with The Last Days of Disco before vanishing from film-making without a trace? (Maybe there was a trace; I didn't really look.)

Apparently, Whit's "sly depictions of the "urban haute bourgeosie" (thanks, Wikipedia!) qualify him as a "foreign policy expert." Because I'm looking at the press release from the Foreign Policy Institute and its entitled "Foreign Policy Experts Urge President to Take Action to Halt Violence in Libya."

OK. I'm not being fair. I actually really like (or liked -- I wonder if they hold up) the trilogy. And, in reality, old Whit is almost certainly no less of an "expert" than the rest of the horrible signers. Not to mention, having celebrities like Tim Robbins or Elmo sign your public letters has always been a tactic that activists use to draw attention to their cause.

But that's kinda the point. Whit Stillman is not exactly a household name. Back when he made movies, how many people knew who Whit was outside of my clique of Chris Eigeman-quoting friends? The Last Days of Disco grossed less than $3 million in the US. At 1998 ticket prices, that's 500,000 people tops. And that was 13 years ago!

So if he's not an expert and he's not a celebrity, why is he listed on the letter? Two very uneducated guesses:

• The Chuck Norris wasn't available theory. I've always been pretty skeptical of the idea that Hollywood was a bastion of the left. After all, as David Sirota recently noted in Salon, Hollywood has a long history of working with the Pentagon to produce movies that are remarkably similar to chickenhawks wildest fantasies. But this Whit incident has me wondering if the top 3 million people in show business aren't actually all Pinkos. "We really need a celebrity on this letter. Bieber won't take our calls? Crap. Chuck said no? Darn. What about that guy who made a movie about prep school kids on vacation twenty years ago?"
• The Whit Stillman has a really bad PR team theory. Is it a coincidence that Whit signed the letter at the same time that his first movie in 13 years is coming out? How could it be? "Whit, 99.5% of the population has never heard of you and the other .5% find your movies about the insufferable navel gazing of the privileged to be incredibly cloying. I've got three words for how we solve both these problems: Paul "Fuckin" Bremer."

Other theories?

P.S. Fire Tom Friedman

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

Cruising With the Old White Men at the National Review

After four months of not writing a word, Fire Tom Friedman really needs a vacation. That's why I signed up for the National Review's Post-Election Cruise. It leaves today and I couldn't be more excited. Seven days and nights of Nordlinger!

When I told my friend, Screw David Brooks, that I was going, she was like, "Why would you want to be stuck on a ship for seven days with a bunch of gross, old, white dudes?" But SDB clearly doesn't understand that the faces of conservatism have changed. This is not your father's National Review - it's a big tent! Check out the speakers:

Speaker	White?	Male?	Age
Bernard Lewis	White	Male	94
Phyllis Schafly	White	Female!!!	86
Cal Thomas	White	Male	78
Michael Novak	White	Male	77
John O' Sullivan	White	Male	68
Bernie Goldberg	White	Male	65
Scott Rasmussen	White	Male	65
John Derbyshire	White	Male	65
Peter W. Schramm	White	Male	64
Tony Blankley	White	Male	62
Kate O' Beirne	White	Female!!!	61
Michael Walsh	White	Male	61
Karl Rove	White	Male	60
Vin Weber	White	Male	58
Victor Davis Hanson	White	Male	57
James Lileks	White	Male	52
Ralph Reed	White	Male	49
Jay Nordlinger	White	Male	47
Rich Lowry	White	Male	42
Andrew Breitbart	White	Male	41
Jonah Goldberg	White	Male	41
Daniel Hannan	White	Male	39
Roman Genn	White	Male	38
Ramesh Ponnuru	Indian!!!	Male	36
Kathryn Lopez	Hispanic!!!	Female!!!	34
Andrew McCarthy	White	Male	???
Jim Geraghty	White	Male	???
Roger Kimball	White	Male	???
Alan Reynolds	White	Male	???
Rob Long	White	Male	???
Robert Costa	White	Male	???
Ed Whelan	White	Male	???
Kevin Williamson	White	Male	???
Greg Gutfeld	White	Male	???

For those of you who are statistically inclined, the speakers are only 91% male, only 94% white, and the average age is a sprightly 58. Sounds like America to me!

Depending on the ship's Internet connection, I hope to live blog/tweet from what is sure to be a wild and wacky seven days. Gotta go. Just saw Rove -- in a Hawaiian shirt! Jealous?

The Jobless "Indulge" in Unemployment

Note: There have been no Tommy columns this week in the New York Times. So far, the only explanation for the NYT has been a note on Sunday's and Wednesday's editorial page that "Thomas L. Friedman is off today." Speculation is rampant (in my house, anyway) that Tommy has been shitcanned, but Fire Tom Friedman is not ready to pop the champagne just yet. We'll keep you posted on this rapidly developing story, but in the meantime:

Meet Douchebag Ryan Young

On Sunday, Paul Krugman argued in his NYT op-ed that Congress should extend unemployment benefits. Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute's long-necked wunderkind Ryan Young fired back:

To the Editor:
Paul Krugman is at a loss to explain why some people oppose extending unemployment benefits. One reason people hold such an opinion is that when government subsidizes something, there tends to be more of it.

The more government subsidizes unemployment, the more people will indulge in it for longer periods of time.

Ryan Young
Washington, July 6, 2010
The writer is a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ah yes. That's right. We are suffering from an epidemic of unemployment indulgence. I mean, you can't turn a corner with bumping into a job. But for so many Americans, the temptation to pamper themselves with $210 a week (Mississippi unemployment benefits) or $362 (Michigan) is just too great that they walk right past all those "We're hiring!" signs on the newly erected factories and march into the unemployment office for their weekly splurge.

Some people indulge themselves with a glass of wine before dinner. Others chocolate or a nice spa treatment. Douchebags like Ryan Young indulge themselves with the fantasy that unemployment is a lifestyle choice, and has nothing to do with the fact that employers aren't hiring.

Even Michael Jackson's Rabbi Hates Tom Friedman

Poor, poor Tommy. It seems like everyone wants a piece of him these days. (Call it the Fire Tom Friedman effect.) The left can't stand him. The right can't stop howling about his "I wish we could be China for a day" shtick. Anyone who is the least bit sympathetic to Muslims and Arabs (or at a minimum, doesn't like killing them indiscriminately) finds the mustachioed one quite repugnant. And now Tommy has pissed off Michael Jackson's rabbi!

Meet Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Maybe you already have. I'd never heard of him before he ripped into Tommy, but apparently he has or had a show on TLC and he's written like 40 books including one called Kosher Sex which he gives observant Jews his blessing to do all the crazy and kinky things they've always wanted to do (provided the lights are out, of course). And best of all, he's been "successfully counseling individuals and couples - most notably the late Michael Jackson and Jon Gosselin - for years"!

Now Shmuley Boteach may very well be the greatest name ever. And with a bio like that, it's very possible that someone is pulling a Nordlinger here. And this off-the-wall introduction to his Tommy piece doesn't do much to quell my suspicions about this Boteach character:

I don't often read Tom Friedman in The New York Times. True, he is one of the most lucid writers in America and his crystal-clear prose help in understanding some of the world's most intractable conflicts.

Tommy lucid? Crystal-clear prose? Sure sounds like Nordlinger. But we at Fire Tom Friedman take all things Tom Friedman very seriously and so we're going to treat Schmuley Boteach as if he's a legitimate celebrity whore/Rabbi. So what's eating Shmuley?

Friedman is, of course, entitled to his view. But he is not entitled to slander Israel. And this past Sunday he did so with relish.

In words that blur the line between commentary and defamation Friedman wrote of the "brutality of Israel's retaliations" against Hezbollah and Hamas, and how Israel "chose to go after them without being deterred by the prospect of civilian casualties." He then crossed a line of common decency when he irresponsibly accused Israel of using "Hama rules" in its war against the twin terror groups. "Hama Rules," he explained, "are named after the Syrian town of Hama, where, in 1982, then-President Hafez el-Assad of Syria put down a Muslim fundamentalist uprising by shelling and then bulldozing their neighborhoods, killing more than 10,000 of his own people."

This is a straightforward blood libel.

Oh no. It can't be. Thomas L. Friedman, Israel's faithful lapdog, has flunked an Israel purity test! And it's not just the good Rabbi who is foaming at the mouth. My "Tom Friedman" Google Alerts are coming fast and furious with everyone from Ruthfully Yours to Soccer Dad excoriating Tommy for the 'Hama rules" comparison.

This just isn't right. Tommy has been so good to the Israel-can-do-no-wrong crowd, putting a reasonable face on their unreasonable views. They can't take away Tommy's lifetime AIPAC membership just like that!

Now I'm no Schmuley Boteach, but maybe I can help mend some fences here. (Although one can't help notice that half of the Rabbi's celebratory clients are divorced and the other half is, among other things, dead.) I know Tommy better than anyone so let me try to clear up what I think is a big misunderstanding.

First, the "Hama Rules" thing. Now I understand why blind Israel backers the phrase and its implied comparison to Assad so offensive; after all, it's not like Israel has ever used a bulldozer in a civilian neighborhood or anything like that. But you need to understand that Tommy really loves rules and these "Hama Rules" are some of his favorites. In fact, he's not shy about letting you know that he coined the phrase "Hama rules," which means, according to Tommy means there are "no rules at all" in the Middle East. Sure he could have just said Israel used an "anything goes" approach which probably would have been less offensive to the Israel zealots. But when given a choice between a simple well-known expression and a trademarked Friedman phrase that requires explanation, Tommy will choose the latter (self-promotion and it kills a paragraph!) every time. No offense meant.

Which brings us to the whole "not deterred by the prospect of civilian casualties" business. It's true that a Friend of Israel is always supposed to insist that Israel does more than any other country in the world to avoid civilian casualties. But what you have to understand is that Tommy didn't, as Rabbi Boteach claimed, "accuse Israel of using "Hama Rules" in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah. Tommy was not accusing; he thinks using Hama Rules -- and showing disregard for civilian life -- is a good thing (provided the civilians are, you know).

Tommy may have been impolitic, but he really wasn't criticizing Israel. Hama Rules is how Tommy lives his life! Or at least how he advices others to deal with those crazy Muslims in the Middle East. Tommy has essentially counseled Hamas Rules in Iraq ("what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand? Suck. On. This."); Afghanistan "a new attitude toward the battle" that includes acting "just a little bit crazy" and using "whatever tactics will make the terrorists feel bad, not make us feel good;" and Gaza, where Tommy urged Israel to "educate" Hamas by "inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population."

So please, Israel fanatics, will you take Tommy back? At this point, he's basically got no one else. Besides, if you're going to insist on such purity that even Tom Friedman can be excommunicated, that means no one is safe. Not Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Not even Soccer Dad.

Fire Tom Friedman.