Six Rules for Criticizing Obama Over Social Security Cuts

These are confusing times for liberals.  They’ve just awoken from a seven-week bender to discover that their number one sacred cow – President Obama – wants to take a butcher’s knife to sacred cow # 2, Social Security.  Libs are feeling angry, betrayed, and sputtery.  They want to hold Obama’s feet to the fire but aren’t sure how to do so in a way that reassures Obama that they will always have his back. 

Thankfully, liberals themselves have developed – and relentlessly enforced – a number of rules about whether, when, and how it’s acceptable to criticize Obama.  Libs love rules almost as much as they love their rulers so hopefully this will help them get through these troubling times.

1. It is not OK to criticize Obama for something he said he would do before the election.

This rule was best articulated by uber-lib David Atkins, who took to the Daily Kos in 2009 to excoriate the timing of those who dare criticized Obama’s plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan in a piece titled, “Where Were All You People During the Campaign?”

I have watched with no small shortage of puzzlement as much of the progressive blogosphere has taken the Obama Administration to task for its plans to send additional troops to secure Afghanistan from the threat posed by the resurgence of the Taliban.  . . . (W)here was all this sturm und drang from the progressive blogosphere over the need to leave Afghanistan during the primary process, when all the major candidates had made their positions perfectly clear?  Where were the screaming cries of agony during the campaign?

You get that? As liberals will always tell you, the time to for frank criticism of their guy is during the campaign. And what was Obama saying about Social Security then? Well, in the first debate with Romney, he said, “I suspect that on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position.” And as Matt Stoller documented back in July, cutting entitlements was always a major part of Obama’s agenda for his second term.

Bottom line: Obama told you he was going to cut Social Security – it’s not his fault if you were too busy monitoring GOP Twitter accounts to notice.  You missed your window for sturming and dranging, so STFU.

2. Obama is smarter and knows more than you do.

"I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do." – Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

Why does Obama want to want to cut Social Security? We don’t know but the fact remains that we are not privy to everything that Obama knows – and we probably couldn’t understand it if we were.  Maybe Obama is banking on the fact by the Post Office will be closed by the time the cuts take effect so there won’t be anyone to deliver benefit checks. Maybe he realizes that shit will be so fucked up from climate collapse that no will live to see sixty-five in the coming years.

Bottom line:  Obama knows what he’s doing so STFU.

3. Always consider the alternatives.

For those complaining about Obama, ask yourself this:  Is there another politician you’d prefer to cut Social Security?  Because we don’t love in some utopia where grandma gets to pay for food and heating oil.  Your choices were Obama cutting Social Security or Romney  cutting Social Security. And personally, I’ll take Obama every time.  At least Obama will act humble and pained about fucking over seniors.  Are you honestly telling me you’d prefer Romney’s smirk?

Bottom line: Grow up and STFU.

4. Pause to smell Obama’s greatness.  And take gratuitous shots at Ralph Nader.

Last night, Chris Hayes took to Twitter to express his dismay that Obama was considering cuts. When friendly Tweeters responded that they were surprised that Hayes was surprised since Obama has clearly been gunning for entitlements for some time, Hayes quickly dropped his Social Security complaints and moved on to weightier matters:

Honest question for lefties who think Obama is horrible. Who do you see as better, more progressive American presidents?

To which Dan Savage replied, “Remember President Nader? He was so awesome.”

(For readers unfamiliar with American history, there was no President Nader! Savage is making a brilliant, biting joke designed to belittle anyone unhappy with President Obama.)

Bottom line: Grow up and STFU. And Fuck Ralph Nader.

5. Remember Obama’s heart is always in the right place. If you must criticize him, do so only on tactics.

As liberals will endlessly tell you, if Obama has one flaw, it’s that he sometimes thinks too much of people. He has, for instance, failed to recognize that the Republicans are the party of Satan.  He consistently tries to bargain with the GOP and sometimes, because of his desire to promote bipartisanship, Obama will sound and act exactly like the enemy.  This combination of GOP evil and Obama magnanimity occasionally leads to people getting screwed. Badly.  But we can all agree that that’s not what Obama really wants.

So while it would probably be best if you just STFU about Social Security, please remember the following if you feel, out of some nagging sense of principle or concern for humanity, that you must say something:

A. Anything bad Obama does is primarily the GOP’s fault.
B. You can criticize Obama for “caving.” You cannot criticize Obama for wanting to cut Social Security. (You might want to forget everything you read in rule # 1.)

Bottom Line: Fuckin’ Republicans.

6. Keep your eye on the big picture.

It is tempting to lash out at Obama and the Democrats for slashing  caving on Social Security. But remember, Social Security is an incredibly popular program and if voters start associating Democrats with benefit cuts, that’s not going to help come November, 2014.  Imagine Obama’s last two years in office if we win back the House and hold onto the Senate in the midterms. We could restore the Social Security cuts, ban guns, reverse climate change, and maybe even bring those Pakistani kids back to life.
 

But that’s not going to happen if you keep whining about grandma, is it?

Bottom line: We love you Obama.  And if we ever doubted you, that’s our failing, not yours. 

The Courage of the Progs

With all the horrific images and stories coming out of Gaza, it’s easy to overlook the true victims in this tragic story: progressive bloggers. Thankfully, Digby’s right-hand man, the courageous David Atkins, is here to shed some much needed light on the bombs of hateful comments being tossed their way.

Atkins’ piece is a response to criticisms that progressive bloggers have largely ignored the assault on Gaza. (While the assault was escalating this weekend, Atrios took to his blog to announce, “I Got Nothing To Say.") For Atkins, there are three reasons why progressive bloggers don’t want to get their hands dirty on this one. These reasons are neither accurate or legitimate, but they are unintentionally illuminating enough to rouse Fire Tom Friedman out of a pathetically long hibernation. So without further ado, here’s Atkin on why the progs are right to keep quiet:

1. Incoherent, hateful backlash. The fact is that it's impossible to say anything substantive about the Israel-Palestine conflict without being called a hateful anti-Semite, or a hateful bloodthirsty imperialist. Most hilarious is the notion that silence on the issue is caused by defense of the Administration, as if most of the progressive blogosphere had been somehow aggressive against the Bush Administration for failure to be concerned about the Palestinian people. If one examines the archives, one will see that most of the big sites from Atrios to DailyKos to TPM to Hullabaloo and the rest have largely refrained from commenting too much on the issue for years, long before Obama took office. That's in large part because nothing can be said about it without eliciting a horrifying deluge of asinine commentary that no other issue seems to generate. Especially for unpaid bloggers more concerned with climate change, the predations of the financial sector, the ongoing assault against the middle class and women's rights, etc., it's often not worth the headache of being called a vicious anti-semitic terrorist enabler and/or imperialist apartheid murderer--often for the exact same post. 

Really, Palestine – shut up about your dead kids. As Atkins so forcefully reminds us, the brave men and women who take to the internet several times a day to generate page views for their personal blogs and those of their employers have feelings, too. Do the people of Gaza know what it’s like to endure a “horrifying deluge of asinine commentary?” Have they ever been called “a vicious anti-semitic terrorist enabler and/or imperialist apartheid murderer--often for the exact same post?”

And as Atkins points out, it really is only “the Israel-Palestine conflict” that brings out this vulgarity on the internet. If only the commenters would be as restrained as they are when they discuss the recent election or immigration or marriage equality or anything having to do with non-Palestinian Muslims, I’m sure Atkins and co. would be happy to weigh in.

Easy mockery aside, Atkins does have one point. The idea that the prog blogs are keeping quiet because of who is in the Oval Office is demonstrably false. Those who are cowards today when it comes to calling out Israel for war crimes, apartheid, and occupation were cowards during the Bush years as well. But that's because it's party orthodoxy, not the presidency, that matters. Progressive bloggers didn't oppose Bush’s Israel/Palestine policies because the Democrats didn't.

Prog blogs have plenty to say on issues – and only on those issues -- where there are real (e.g. marriage equality) or perceived (e.g. climate change*) differences between the parties. But on Israel, the parties don’t even pretend to disagree (witness the Senate’s unanimous passage of a resolution written by AIPAC this morning) so there is simply no role for progressive bloggers to play. Maybe this is all just a long-winded way of saying progressive bloggers are Democratic mouthpieces. Not exactly news, I know. But it strikes me that by daring to talk about why progressive bloggers don’t dare to talk about Israel and Palestine, Atkins may have unintentionally exposed why the progressive blogosphere is so fucking harmful.

Atkins being Atkins, he lists two more reasons the progs don’t do Israel that range from horribly offensive to asinine. His next reason, “2) There are no good guys here,” got my hopes up, but it turns out he’s talking about Israel and Palestine, not the progressive blogosphere. There’s enough nauseating equivalence  between the occupiers and the occupied in this section to make you want to call Atkins “an imperialist apartheid murderer.” Do yourself a favor and skip it.

Atkins may save the best for last, though, when he writes, “3) There's nothing we can do about it. It makes sense to blog about things that we can theoretically do something about.” It may be news to you and me that cutting off subsidies for Israel’s war machine is something the United States can’t even do in theory, but we don’t get invited to the same DNC cocktail parties as Atkins. So maybe he’s right and progressive bloggers should focus on manageable, easily solvable problems, like climate change. They should have that one solved by next spring – just in time to sit out Israel’s next assault on Gaza.


*My favorite election season quote came from Matt Stoller, who wrote, "Partisans may enjoy Mitt Romney’s corrupt denial of man-made global warming, but nature doesn’t distinguish between Obama’s cynical lack of action and Romney’s cynical denial of reality. We simply do not have time for this nonsense anymore."

Meet Arthur S. Brisbane, Truth Vigilante!

Arthur S. Brisbane, the most timid in a long line of timid New York Times public editors, is having an existential crisis. Brisbane is supposed to be The Times’ “readers' representative . . . who responds to complaints and comments from the public and monitors the paper's journalistic practices.” Brisbane has sailed through his first 18 months on the job, but now one of those pesky readers he’s supposed to be representing has asked him a real stumper.

Shouldn’t the Times, a reader emails, point out when the subject of a story is lying rather than just dutifully passing along those lies? The idea that a reporter should challenge the falsehoods of the powerful is so foreign and radical to Brisbane, whose been working in the newspaper business since 1976, that he doesn’t even have a word in his vocabulary (“fact-checking!” “reporting!” “journalism!”) to describe it. So he settles on the most straight-forward, rolling-off-the-tongue phrase he can think of: “truth vigilantism.”

In a provocative piece entitled, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” Brisbane asks what reporters should do if, say, Mitt Romney excoriates President Obama for “apologizing for America” when, in fact, the President has done no such thing? (Turns out the Prez is just fine with America being the world’s most destructive force.) Should the Times point that Romney’s pants are on fire or just what Mitt said? There are, Brisbane notes, “some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight.” Of course, it’s not just the distortions and evasions in public life that readers are fed up with; it’s also the distortions and evasions in The Times. And framing it as a question of "setting the record straight" ignores the fact that The Times isn't just reporting what the liars say; it's amplifying those lies.

Regardless, it’s a pretty remarkable piece that deserves to be read in its entirety, though preferably not while drinking a hot coffee or anything else that might damage your nasal passages. And Brisbane’s musings have already made quite a difference. For one, through sheer stupidity, Brisbane may have accidentally done more to draw attention to the fact that many of The Times “reporters” are mere stenographers than his three predecessors combined. And it’s propelled Brisbane from the guy no one knew existed to an Internet joke in just a few hours.

But alas, despite the fact that the 265 comments on Brisbane’s article all advocate for actual reporting, I predict that the only lasting result at The Times will be that Brisbane won’t be Public Editor much longer. Don’t cry for Arthur, though. I’m sure he’ll land a nice cushy job at teaching in the Truth Vigilante department at some prestigious university . . .

Some of My Best Friends Are Deroy Murdock

Move over Rosa Parks and James Meredith! There's a new civil rights trailblazer in town. Meet Deroy Murdock, the first black* speaker on the prestigious National Review Cruise! (OK, it's possible he's not the first, but there wasn't one last year which was the only other year I've tracked it.)

And while all the credit in the world goes to Murdock and the Cruise organizers, I can't help but think that last year's Fire Tom Friedman exposé played a small part. In that post, I pointed out that the speakers were 91% male, 94% white and their average age was 58.

I'm happy to say that progress goes well beyond Deroy Murdock. This year, males only make up 85% of the speakers and whites only 90%. And Ramesh Ponnuru won't be so lonely when the Asian Caucus holds its meetings at this year's cruise, not with John Yoo on board!
And who says all the young kids are busy Occupying Wall Street? The
average age of a 2011 National Review speaker is a frisky 55 -- 3 years younger than last year! It's amazing what happens when you replace octogenarian Phyllis Schafley with America's Sassiest Randian, S.E. Cupp.

Below is a complete speaker list so you can see what progress looks like.

Speaker	White?	Male?	Age
Bernard Lewis	White	Male	95
James Q. Wilson	White	Male	80
Cal Thomas	White	Male	79
John Sunununu	White	Male	72
Fred Thompson	White	Male	69
John Derbyshire	White	Male	66
Tony Blankley	White	Male	63
Elliot Abrams	White	Male	63
John Bolton	White	Male	63
Michael Walsh	White	Male	62
Victor Davis Hanson	White	Male	58
Andrew Klaven	White	Male	57
Mona Cheran	White	Female!!!	54
Charles Kesler	White	Male	54
John Fund	White	Male	54
James Lileks	White	Male	53
Mark Steyn	White	Male	52
Ralph Reed	White	Male	50
Tim Pawlenty	White	Male	50
Kevin Hassett	White	Male	49
Jay Nordlinger	White	Male	48
Charmaine Yoest	White	Female!!!	48
Greg Gutfeld	White	Male	47
Deroy Murdock	Black!!!!!!!!!!!!	Male	47
John Yoo	Asian!!!	Male	44
Rich Lowry	White	Male	43
Jonah Goldberg	White	Male	42
John J. Miller	White	Male	41
Roman Genn	White	Male	39
Ramesh Ponnuru	Asian!!!	Male	36
Kathryn Lopez	Hispanic!!!	Female!!!	35
S.E. Cupp	White	Female!!!	32
Tracie Sharp	White	Female!!!	????
Sally Pipes	White	Female!!!	????
Andrew McCarthy	White	Male	???
Jim Geraghty	White	Male	???
Rob Long	White	Male	???
Robert Costa	White	Male	???
Kevin Williamson	White	Male	???

* The original post referred to Deroy Murdock as the "first African-American speaker." On October 5, 2012, Mr. Murdock emailed a correction request (a FTF first!), asking that "African-American" be changed to "black."  The post has been updated to reflect Mr. Murdock's wishes.**

** The original correction contained two embarrassing mistakes: Mr. Murdock's first name was wrongly listed as "Delroy" and the last sentence read, "The post has been be updated to reflect Mr. Murdock's wishes" (emphasis added).  Those mistakes have now been corrected thanks, once again, to the diligence of Mr. Murdock.  I apologize to Mr. Murdock, who has been nothing but delightfully gracious  throughout this whole correction ordeal.  So much so that I'm tempted to make another mistake in hopes of hearing from him again . . . 

The Imperial Messenger: Part 2 of FTF’s Interview with Belén Fernández

Belén Fernández is the author of the brand-new The Imperial Messenger: Tom Friedman at Work. Below is part 2 of my interview with her. If you missed part 1 (how dare you!), it’s here. To learn more about the book, please visit http://www.versobooks.com/books/1024-the-imperial-messenger. This excerpt at Al Jazeera is also highly recommended. ”

Did you come away with a lower opinion of Friedman or of the people and institutions that continually give him platforms to spew his idiotic, loathsome views? I find it so telling that, when Friedman did his “suck on this” performance on Charlie Rose, Rose just nods and leans in for the next question instead of calling Friedman out for saying one of the most offensive things ever said on television. Or to put it another way: Do you think the New York Times would allow one of their columnists to consistently dehumanize entire groups of people – to the point of openly calling for civilian deaths in Gaza, Afghanistan and Iraq – if those people weren’t Arab/Muslim?

Unfortunately, Orientalist dehumanization is institutionalized in US media discourse, the result being that there is no overwhelming public concern when over a million Iraq lives are lost thanks to America’s bellicose projects or when 1400 Palestinians perish in a matter of 22 days at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces.

It is utterly appalling that neither Charlie Rose nor anyone else in the US establishment media took issue with Friedman’s obscene proclamation, and that he was never required by his employer to apologize for it in the interest of maintaining a pretense of objectivity. One can imagine the uproar that would have ensued—and over which Friedman himself would have presided—had, for example, Yasser Arafat instructed Israelis to suck on things, or had Osama bin Laden justified 9/11 with similar terminology. Friedman, on the other hand, is permitted to continue blissfully peddling his contemptuous analyses of the Arab/Muslim world, such as his 2007 assessment—with regard to the US military—that Iraqis “don’t deserve such good people… if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”

Of course, it is safe to assume that most Iraqis exhibit normal human affection for their offspring, including for those millions of offspring that have been killed, maimed, displaced or otherwise made to suffer as a result of a US military-inflicted sucking, and that the half a million Iraqi children previously killed by US-championed sanctions were probably also loved by their parents.

Even if Charlie Rose et al. fail to comprehend that sucking orders do not qualify as proper journalistic etiquette, they should at least be able to comprehend that Friedman’s argument for why the sucking should occur is in complete defiance of logic. According to Friedman, Iraqis must be made to suck so that the US can effectively combat the “terrorism bubble” that has developed in “that part of the world” and that poses a “fundamental threat to our open society,” something Americans discovered on 9/11. However, this very same Friedman also explains that the real threat to “open, Western, liberal societies today” consists not of “the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables – the boys who did 9/11.” The resulting argument—made by someone who himself criticizes the Bush administration for implying a link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein—is that war against deterrables whose weapons are not the problem will solve the problem of undeterrables who are the weapons and who by definition cannot be deterred anyway.

Regarding your question of whether I have a lower opinion of Friedman or of those who encourage and promote him, they are all part of the same system that rewards the willful subversion of human empathy on behalf of empire and capital. The system would naturally exist without Friedman; he just does his part to sustain it.

As for whether Friedman will ever be made to atone for his crimes, I’ve personally found that one effective means of stress relief is to ponder reincarnation options for him, an activity that he himself actually used to engage in on occasion in order to highlight what he deemed to be unethical behavior by certain sectors of the US citizenry. In a 2004 column entitled “In My Next Life,” for example, Friedman sarcastically described his desire for reincarnation as a college or professional athlete:

For a mere dunk of the basketball or first-down run, I want to be able to dance a jig, as if I’d just broken every record by Michael Jordan or Johnny Unitas. For the smallest, most routine bit of success in my sport, I want to be able to get in your face – I want to know who’s your daddy, I want to be able to high-five, low-five, thump my chest and dance on your grave. You talkin’ to me?

Why athletic grave-dancing is more offensive than telling entire populations to “suck. On. This” is unclear.

I would meanwhile suggest Friedman contemplate reincarnation as an Afghan civilian, an aspiration that might merit the following description (as well as sudden re-reincarnation):

“Yes, in my next life I want to be an Afghan civilian. I want to meet my demise by American B-52, and, when I do, I want the foreign affairs columnist of the US newspaper of record to place the ‘civilian’ portion of my identity inside quotation marks. I want him to take time out of his busy schedule of complaining about his own horrific experiences and the tendency of other diners to interrupt his restaurant meals with their cell phone conversations, and I want him to debunk the blasphemous idea espoused by the European and Arab media, according to which I had not actually been ‘praying for another dose of B-52’s to liberate [me] from the Taliban.

Did you find that Friedman tries to rewrite his own role in history, even though it’s quite easy to fact-check these days? For instance, I’ve noticed he often claims that he called for a $1/gallon “Patriot Tax” on gas on 9/12/01 when, in fact, he didn’t call for one until more than two years later – after both wars he had cheerled for were well under way.

Yeah, it’s not clear whether Friedman intentionally rewrites his own history or whether the rewriting is just a byproduct of the fact that he is employed in a position that does not require him to understand or keep track of what he himself thinks about things.

To give a very simple example of self-contradiction, Friedman announces 200 pages into his book The World Is Flat that Globalization 1.0 was the era in which he was required to physically visit an airline ticket office in order to make his travel arrangements. According to the definition provided at the start of the book, however, Globalization 1.0 ended around the year 1800.

On the subject of India, Friedman goes from arguing that “Indian democracy” and “economic liberalization” have enabled the high-tech industry in Bangalore to flourish, to arguing two years later that Bangalore high-tech firms “thrive by defying their political-economic environment, not by emerging from it.” Indian “democracy” is meanwhile additionally credited with the fact that “rioting didn’t spread anywhere” after the 2002 pogrom incited by the Hindu nationalist government of the state of Gujarat, in which several thousand Muslims were massacred. The article is perplexingly titled “Where Freedom Reigns,” in spite of the massacre of Muslims.

A month after declaring the war-based democracy experiment in Iraq “the most important task worth doing,” Friedman announces that he doesn’t “want to hear another word about Iraq” given that there is a sniper on the loose in Montgomery County, Maryland, who is forcing him to become well-acquainted with the delivery man from California Pizza Kitchen and to “duck… behind a pillar” while filling up his car with gas. He fails to add this to the list of reasons America must cease its dependence on oil, though he does subsequently go from insisting that George W. Bush renounce his limousine and set a “geo-green” example to exulting the following year over the fact that he himself is being chauffeured around Budapest in one. (Friedman goes as far as to provide his driver’s website—www.fclimo.hu—so that everyone can witness the capitalist evolution and integration into the global economy of a “Communist-era-engineer-turned-limo-proprietor,” but refrains from mentioning that none other than Bush is listed as a reference on the company’s website.)

A few more quick examples of Friedman’s historical revisions:

In 2005 Friedman declares the need for “a proper civil war” in Iraq. In 2011 he miraculously displaces the blame for civil war-mongering: “For all of the murderous efforts by Al Qaeda to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened.”

In 2002 Friedman informs Saudi crown prince Abdullah that “the Jews of the Clinton administration are gone” and that their replacement “WASPs” of the Bush administration “couldn’t care less about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is not an issue that resonates with them at all.” In 2003 Friedman announces that the Bush team “has fallen so deep into the pocket of Ariel Sharon you can’t even find it any more” and that Bush may “be remembered as the president who got so wrapped around the finger of Ariel Sharon that he indulged Israel into thinking it really could have it all—settlements, prosperity, peace and democracy.”

And so on.

One of the more intriguing things about Friedman’s rewriting of history is that he relentlessly plugs his friend Dov Seidman’s book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life), according to which the centrality of blogs, Facebook, and YouTube to modern life ensures that “more and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased.” Friedman provides the following illustrative anecdote in 2007:

Three years ago, I was catching a plane at Boston’s Logan airport and went to buy some magazines for the flight. As I approached the cash register, a woman coming from another direction got there just behind me — I thought. But when I put my money down to pay, the woman said in a very loud voice: ‘Excuse me! I was here first!’ And then she fixed me with a piercing stare that said: ‘I know who you are.’ I said I was very sorry, but I was clearly there first.

If that happened today, I would have had a very different reaction. I would have said: ‘Miss, I’m so sorry. I am entirely in the wrong. Please, go ahead. And can I buy your magazines for you? May I buy your lunch? Can I shine your shoes?’

Why? Because I’d be thinking there is some chance this woman has a blog or a camera in her cellphone and could, if she so chose, tell the whole world about our encounter — entirely from her perspective — and my utterly rude, boorish, arrogant, thinks-he-can-butt-in-line behavior. Yikes!”

It goes without saying that defending Israel’s strategy of inflicting mass civilian casualties in Lebanon in 2006, for example, does not in Friedman’s world qualify as rude, boorish, or arrogant behavior. This item from 2010 meanwhile suggests that Friedman is not overly preoccupied with the prospect of domestic cell phone cameras and blogs.

Punditry, like banking, seems to be a profession free of accountability. The more Friedman is wrong, the more Sunday morning shows he gets invited on. Is it time to Occupy Tom Friedman’s house? (He certainly has the room.)

It is definitely time to occupy Friedman’s house. I would advise incorporating an Arab and/or Muslim military into the endeavor and referring to the “occupation” only in quotation marks, as Friedman does following the US invasion of Iraq.

Incidentally, given the schizophrenic nature of his discourse, Friedman could conceivably be persuaded to advocate for the occupation of his own house if he were assured that in doing so he would somehow remain relevant to the effort to recuperate US glory.

Despite marrying into one of the one hundred richest families in the US, Friedman recently attempted to co-opt Occupy Wall Street by classifying it as an “effective” movement (in an interview with MTV, no less). Perhaps as a next step he should consider channeling his affection for Google Earth and the role it allegedly played in sparking the Arab uprisings—by alerting Bahrainis to the dimensions of the ruling family’s palaces—into an investigation of what his own 11,400-square-foot house looks like from the air.

The Imperial Messenger: Tom Friedman at Work - an Interview with Belén Fernández

Great news, Friedman haters! Tomorrow is the official release of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work by Belén Fernández. It's the book I was born to read (or write, if I was smarter and not so lazy). Get this: Ms. Fernández actually read every Tom Friedman column since 1995 -- 3 times each! I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy so I fanboyed Ms. Fernández a slew of questions and she was gracious enough to answer. Part 1 of our interview is below. I'll post part 2 in the next day or two. To learn more about the book, please visit: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1024-the-imperial-messenger.

Why Tom Friedman? And can you talk a little about how the book is organized?

My decision to write the book was not the product of any sort of long-standing obsession with Thomas Friedman, whose journalistic exploits I remained mercifully immune to for most of my existence up until 2009.

Then, about midway through that year, the idea came to me suddenly when I noticed the $125 “Russian breakfast” option on the room-service menu at my five-star Havana hotel.

Kidding. In 2009 I watched with simultaneous fascination and horror as Friedman flitted on pedagogical missions from Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine to Africa, where he discovered the root cause of oppression in Zimbabwe by going on safari in Botswana.

Later that same year, Friedman’s decades-long lecture to the Arab/Muslim world on how to behave reached new levels of absurdity with his pronouncement according to which:

A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.

Arab and Muslims are not just objects. They are subjects. They aspire to, are able to and must be challenged to take responsibility for their world.

Arab/Muslim subjectivity was of course called into question not only by the fact that Friedman in this very same article instructed the Islamic world to engage in a civil war equal in ferocity to the US civil war, but also by the fact that—approximately 10 days prior to criticizing the infantilizing of Arabs and Muslims—he had remarked to an amused Fareed Zakaria of CNN that Afghanistan was like a “special needs baby” adopted by the US. (Friedman had refrained in this case from throwing in his regular complaint that the US was “baby-sitting a civil war” in Iraq—a complaint he apparently felt was not irreconcilable with his own declaration of the need for an Iraqi civil war.)

Anyway, it was this imperialist hubris and unabashed Orientalism that originally motivated me to write the book, which stars Friedman as mascot for the degenerate mainstream media in the US. Friedman’s treatment of the Arab/Muslim world is the subject of the book’s second section; the first deals with his views on the need for US dominance in the world and the third deals with his special relationship with Israel.

Did you really read every Friedman column since 1995? For me, getting through two a week is challenging enough. What was that like? Were there surprises? Was there a point when you were like, “What did I get myself into?”

Yes, I really did read every Friedman column since 1995—three times, in fact. Ialso read a number of his articles from 1981 to 1995, primarily the ones that the New York Times did not require me to pay for.

“What did I get myself into?” is a conservative way of phrasing the existential questions that plagued me throughout this project. My notes are largely composed of expletives, except for the occasional expression of joy whenever Friedman would go on book leave or be otherwise absent from his column for an extended period of time. Vacuuming and other such activities suddenly became really fun.

As for surprises, persons familiar only with Friedman’s post-95 incarnation as foreign affairs columnist—in his words, “tourist with an attitude”—might be surprised to learn that in previous years he was not licensed to pontificate about the “collective madness” of Palestinians or to prescribe the mass extermination of Arab/Muslim civilians, and that he even used to pen articles with titles like “Israeli Troops Shoot Arab Student Dead at Protest.” His 1984 piece “What’s Doing in Jerusalem,” in which he observed that “One of the most enjoyable ways to see some of Jerusalem's cultural offerings is to eat your way around them,” meanwhile underscores how much better off the world might be if Friedman’s musings on the Middle East had been restricted to the relatively innocuous realm of cuisine:

“Israeli duckling in a champagne and orange sauce is the house specialty at Jerusalem's premier French restaurant, the Mishkenot Sha'ananim on Yemin Moshe Street (225110), overlooking the Old City from the west. Dinner for two with wine approaches $100.”

Less surprising, but nonetheless revealing, is Friedman’s admission in his book Longitudes and Attitudes that, as “tourist with an attitude,” he has “total freedom, and an almost unlimited budget, to explore.” This only renders all the more distressing the fact that he does not utilize said budget or freedom to conduct any meaningful human interaction or to report international reality beyond the confines of the mentality espoused by proponents of US dominance and corporate globalization.

In the same book he boasts that the “only person who sees my two columns each week before they show up in the newspaper is a copy editor who edits them for grammar and spelling,” and that for the duration of his columnist career up to this point he has “never had a conversation with the publisher of The New York Times about any opinion I’ve adopted— before or after any column I’ve written.” Though it may come as no surprise that the Times does not feel the need to prohibit its employees from advocating for things prohibited by international law, such as collective punishment, the publisher might consider at least subjecting copy editors to a lesson in rectifying metaphorical incoherence.

Do you come away with a better understanding of Friedman’s popularity? He doesn’t write well, he’s not an original thinker, he’s not smart (watching him try to talk about anything besides his own columns is painful), he’s not entertaining. For me, it’s far easier to understand why people like Rush Limbaugh than Friedman. Did your research give you any insight into the Friedman phenomenon?

I think Mike Whitney explained the phenomenon well in a 2005 article for CounterPunch, written in response to Friedman’s approval of US-inflicted carnage in Iraq:

Friedman offers these outrageously callous judgments using his ‘trademark’ affable tenor that oozes familiarity and hauteur. The normal Friedman article assumes the tone of a friendly stranger, plopped on a neighboring barstool, pontificating on the world’s many intricacies to a less-knowledgeable companion. Isn’t that Friedman?

‘Let me explain the world to you in terms that even you can understand.’

And is he good at it? You bet. American liberals love Friedman; his folksy lingo, his home-spun humor, his engaging anecdotes. Beneath the surface, of course, is the hard-right ethos that pervades his every thought and word but, ‘what the heck’, no one’s perfect.

Indeed, Friedman sells the Iraq war as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” despite making subsequent assessments such as “The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a ‘geo-green’ strategy.” As I point out in my book, it is difficult to determine how many true “geo-greens” would advocate for the tactical contamination of the earth’s soil with depleted uranium munitions; why not introduce a doctrine of neoconservationism?

Other examples of Friedman’s hard-right ethos masquerading as liberal include his claim to support social safety nets, which in the wake of the 2008 financial recession quickly mutates into a campaign to slash entitlements worldwide. Friedman announces that, although it’s “really sweet” that elderly Brits enjoy subsidized heating and can ride local buses for free, Britain can no longer afford such excesses. Of course, Britain has somehow historically been able to afford other excesses, and Friedman lauded Tony Blair in 2005 as "one of the most important British prime ministers ever" based on the fact that he had gotten the Labour Party “to firmly embrace the free market and globalization—sometimes kicking and screaming” and that he had chosen to promote democracy abroad by anti-democratically taking his country to war: "In deciding to throw in Britain's lot with President Bush on the Iraq war, Mr. Blair not only defied the overwhelming antiwar sentiment of his own party, but public opinion in Britain generally."

As for Friedman’s endearing “affable tenor” and “folksy lingo” referenced by Whitney, other examples include the 2001 assessment that an American victory in Afghanistan is possible as long as the US recognizes that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas.” Folksy lingo like “God bless America” and “suck. On. This”—the latter being what US soldiers are supposed to tell Iraqis via a “big stick”—meanwhile presumably finds resonance among audiences seeking to defy feelings of individual and/or national inadequacy.

Tune in tomorrow (or the day after that) when Belén and I discuss reincarnation, Charlie Rose, and Occupying Tom Friedman's House. But don't wait until then to order your copy of the book!

Tommy the Robot

That explains everything, I thought, when I read the headline in Tommy's lastest: "How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?" The tone-deafness, the endless repetition ("the next six months will be critical"), the mangled metaphors, the difficulty mastering syntax, the callousness about human life. Tommy is a robot!*

Alas. The headline was a cruel tease. It's turns out its your job that's been outsourced, not Friedman's:

I’VE done a lot of television book interviews lately, and I continue to be struck at what a difference there is in the technology in just a few years’ time.

Here is a typical evening at a major cable TV network: arrive at Washington studio and be asked to sign in by a contract security guard. Be met by either a young employee who appears to still be in college or an older person who seems to have hung on with tenure. Have your nose powdered by that person. Have your microphone attached by that person. Be positioned in the studio chair by that person, and then look directly into a robotic camera being manipulated by someone in a control room in New York and speak to whoever the host is wherever he or she is. That’s it: one employee, a robot and you.

Tommy's math is a little telling here. He actually describes 4 jobs -- the security guard, the nose powderer/microphone attacher, the robotic camera operator, and the host -- but I'm guessing Friedman only counts his fellow bloviator, the host, as working. But regardless, it's a little touching that Tommy seems to miss his old makeup artist from the last time he made the talk show rounds. Maybe he's even a little concerned about all those Americans who don't have cushy pundit jobs?

Ha!

It has never been harder to find a job and never been easier — for those prepared for this world — to invent a job or find a customer. Anyone with the spark of an idea can start a company overnight, using a credit card, while accessing brains, brawn and customers anywhere.

Tommy goes on to point out that, thanks to sites like freelancer.com, you can make $268 designing a functioning dune buggy! By my calculations, all you need to make $50 K/year is 200 clients who want dune buggy designs. (Where's the Manson family when you need them?).

And dune buggy design isn't the only opportunity out there. If you can come up with 6 formulations of chewing gum for the Australian market, you could make $375. That's $63 - enough to feed your family for literally days! -- per gum formulation.

The point is that if you're struggling, you're not really trying. And that you're getting what you deserve since, more than ever, we live in a global meritocracy.

The term “outsourcing” is also out of date. There is no more “out” anymore. Firms can and will seek the best leaders and talent to achieve their goals anywhere in the world.

So cheer up, jobless! Your job hasn't moved overseas because companies are exploiting a cheaper version of you. It's actually because they've found a better version of you. Isn't it more comforting to know that the system works?

Of course, Tommy's been singing the flat world/technology "wow"/free trade song for years, but there's something about the present moment that makes even off-key. It's telling that on the same day that Friedman filed this piece of crap, his fellow op-eders Kristoff and Blow wrote about the exhilarating Occupy Wall Street movement. But maybe I'm being too hard on Tommy. A robot can only do what it's been programmed to.*

Fire Tom Friedman

*My view of robots is based primarily on bad fifties sci-fi. My apologies to today's robots who are undoubtedly much smarter, kinder, and better writers than Tom Friedman.