Tom Friedman is Full of Suck
NYT columnist Tom Friedman, the Hannibal Lecter of the English language, has been roundly smoted by better writers (Matt Taibbi especially) for his agonized mixed metaphors, as well as his blinkered observations about issues of wealth disparity formed during his years touring the great golf courses of the world. However, I was still left incredulous when I heard this gasser pass through his mustache on this past Sunday’s Meet the Press:
Let’s go to  30,000 feet for a second, ’cause that’s the context for this presidential debate on foreign policy. We’re in the middle of the breakup of two giant state systems. We’re seeing the failure of the European super state, in the crack-up of the Eurozone, and we’re seeing the failure of the Arab nation state in the Arab world. And it’s all happening at a time when the world has never been more interdependent. So we’ve got all these states now around the world, in the Middle East in particular as Helene [Cooper] said, that are too dangerous to ignore and too expensive to fix.”
The view from 30,000 feet, from the comfortable first class leather seats of a Dreamliner, is probably the only broad scope Friedman could hope to see the world from. This may explain why Tom can’t tell his asshole from his elbow.
First, the European states are not “dangerous”, nor are the Arab nations “expensive”, but in Friedman’s Cusinart brain the two situations are recipricol because Friedman can impart the word “state” in reference to both. This is just cleverness for its own sake gone amuck, which Friedman is famous for, but it is all the stupider because we are not seeing the “failure” of the “Arab nation state” at all! Egypt appears to be anything but unstable (excusing the tumult caused by the changing of the guard, the integrity of the nation is in good shape). Tunisia is likewise weathering the Arab Spring it launched with high marks. Libya, the outrage against our ambassador not withstanding, has not “broken up”, Saudi Arabia has not been touched by any of this, and Syria shows no signs of ceasing to exist as a nation regardless of how the civil war shakes out.
The idea that what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa is anything like the dissolution of a currency union is just a comparison of convenience, and further proof that Friedman’s world view is based on how cleverly he can put his opinion into Sphinx-like formulas.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKGX9tdPeN0&playnext=1&list=PL8463AFE548DAD651&feature=results_main[/youtube]
But Tom Friedman’s bilge was Shakespeare compared to the simply fantastic affront to conversation that was the Fox News Sunday broadcast of the same week.
Interviewing Senator Dick Durbin (D) on the matter of Benghazi, host Chris Wallace paused to roll footage of the Obama press conference that he held after the attack in Libya occured. What followed is literally the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen on what purports to be a “serious” news program. Obama delivers a few lines, and then Fox literally fast forwards the tape, chipmunk squeaks and all, to the next relevant remark, rather than simply cutting right to them.
This happens three times, Obama’s head waggling back and forth at high speed while squeals pierce the viewer’s ears. I almost have no words for this, except two for Dick Durbin, who simply sat and swallowed this whooppee cushion moment: FUCK. YOU. Chris Wallace is under contract to be a classless douchebag for Fox, but Dick could have plucked the mic from his lapel and walked off the stage, if only he were willing to acknowledge this explicit mockery of the Democrats. Even if he’d flipped Chris the bird on his way out  it still would have been more lordly than sticking around and serving as the butt of the joke.
George McGovern, I’m glad you died before seeing this. Sadly, your party buried you long ago.
so … this means no strip … right?
JY: I’M WORKIN’ ON IT!! Can’t I have a life outside of Weapon Brown?? I’m more than just musclebound men and explosions! Don’t force me to post my salami poetry! (Yeah, salami. It’s slam poetry about deli meats. It’s something new…oh! But I suppose since it doesn’t involve a cyborg you won’t come down to the Proving Grounds coffee house at 8 pm this Friday to hear it, will you??)
I demand salami poetry readings.
Srsly. I’ll need something to transition back to Beepo and Roadkill once Weapon Brown is over, and that sounds like a nice middle ground.
You seriously don’t like the rich, do you?
JY: Only the unproductive rich.
I didn’t take it as a hatred of rich people. I took it as a hatred of an undeserving tool who gets paid way too much to make the 1% feel better about themselves.
People are so quick to defend wealth in America. Like, faster than they are to defend their own self-interest. What’s with that?
For my part, I still have no idea how the Republican millionaires managed to engage the sympathies of their constituents over this whole 1% vs 99% idea, when it is the republican states that have not only the lowest average incomes, not only the highest unemployment, but naturally also the highest poverty.
How the FUCK do these red voters not pick up on the fact that the leaders they KEEP VOTING FOR fucking hate them?
I honestly have no idea how such self-harming voting is even possible. It’s kind of like voting for a guy who promises that employers will gain the right to summarily execute their employees for shits and giggles.
Thinking about your republican plague gives me a headache.
Who are the productive JY? I ask this as one who sees his nation dying, have we reached our zenith? Forgive the barb, but have we reached our Waterloo?
Holms: What you need to keep in mind about the (modern, Reagan-era) Republican party is that the whole point of the party is tax cuts for the wealthy, and secondarily deregulation for business interests. As you may have noticed in Congress the last four years, the GOP preferred to put up half a billion in Defense Cuts up rather than additional tax revenue in that whole ‘sequestration’ deal.
You may ask what about ending abortion? opening the Grand Canyon up to oil derricks? a constitutional amendment to protect the right of every citizen to own a bazooka? building a thousand-mile long wall along the Rio Grande? resigning from the United Nations?
All of those issues are Republican because they need more than the 1%-10% of White Males who either are filthy rich, or aspire to be. There’s lots of people voting against their self-interest because of these ‘social’ issues the Republicans flog every election. (They only got in trouble in states like Wisconsin and Ohio these last two years by actually trying to legislate their unpopular ideas into law.)
But if Romney loses, how does the GOP survive? If they seriously play for Hispanic votes, what do the Joe Arpaio Xenophobic White Republicans do? If they seriously play to narrow the gender gap, what do the Mike Huckabee Evangelical White Republicans do? If they play to the libertarian isolationist anti-war vote, what do the Dick Cheney Warmongering White Republicans do? And for that matter, If they play to the populist youth freedom/stoner/gay rights vote, what do the Rush Limbaugh Blowhard White Republicans do?
What pisses me off most about Friedman’s idiocy is that the European Union itself is in no danger whatsoever of breaking up. None. Zero. It is here to stay, permanently as any political organization can be, up to and exceeding the stability of the United States (which looks kinda strained at the seams these days – I would not be astounded to see secession in another twenty years, either of one or more Red States protesting rule by colored people and liberals, or by Blue States sick of paying the bills for the Red States).
AT MOST, all that will happen is that the monetary union will be restructured. Its not going to go away, but having multiple sovereign nations tied to a single currency with no single central bank was a bad idea to start with, and everybody acknowledges that now – the question is how best to fix it, but fix it they will. Even if that means jettisoning Greece. But they won’t jettison Italy because it’s not in anybody’s interest to do that; Italy is too big. A big mess, but big.
I’ll leave the Arab side of the idiocy to people who know something about the Middle East – which would be somebody other than Friedman – but on the Euro end, he’s just plain flat wrong.