Captain Obvious goes Clown Loco.

Hero/columnist goes fearlessly medieval: metes out fierce beatings to assorted potted plants, empty boxes.

Do not listen to the irresponsible rumor that Captain Obvious has been hospitalized for “observation”.

That a third-shift cleaning crew at the downtown offices of the New York Times discovered a near-naked, letter-opener-wielding Thomas Friedman leaping from desktop to desktop, chirping like a tree frog. Or that the NYT has denied the whole story, claiming that the janitorial staff were all still just joyously deep in their cups over a certain protest march that took place on Monday.

So please pooh-pooh any suggestion that he was found clad only in a loincloth made of discarded Home Depot receipts for Morning Glory starter kits. His belly distended and lips a-smear with seeds: a howling, tubby refugee from some bad, made-for-teevee remake of “Altered States”.

None of that is true, and none of that has anything to do with this article from the WaPo…

'60s Buzz Recycled

Teens Rediscover Morning Glories Can Be Used as a Hallucinogen
By Theresa Vargas

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 3, 2006; B01

They have such whimsical names as heavenly blue, crimson rambler and pearly gates, and delicate blooms that crawl quickly up trellises.

But when morning glory seeds aren't planted -- when they are instead ingested -- whimsical thoughts can crawl through altered minds with kaleidoscope-like visions.
And teenagers know this.

Once popular in the hippie era of the 1960s, morning glory seeds as a hallucinogen seem to have sprouted once again. Local gardening shops have noticed their seed stocks depleted by adolescent hands, and poison control centers in the District and its suburbs have received calls from hospitals with patients experiencing adverse reactions, or bad trips, from the seeds.

"They are certainly being used," said Chris Holstege, a doctor who runs Virginia's Blue Ridge Poison Center. "Kids are getting brighter. Between the Internet and magazines like High Times, they are learning about this."

Just a few weeks ago, he said, a mother called the center after finding seed packets in her teenage son's bedroom. She wanted to know what they were used for, Holstege said. A more serious call came from hospital emergency officials who needed to know how to treat an 18-year-old who had taken the seeds along with an antidepressant and cough syrup. His heart rate spiked to 150, his body went rigid and his mind reeled with hallucinations.

"These kids have a misconception that it's natural, that it's more safe" than other drugs, Holstege said. "They are not. It alters your perception, and that puts you at risk."

…
Jeff Davis, whose 16-year-old daughter knows of at least one boy in her Manassas high school who has tried morning glory seeds, said talking is the only way to stop the problem.

"I've never met a kid that is not more intelligent than their parents on the Internet," he said. "How can I prepare my kids for what they're going to face if I don't have a clue what they're facing?"

A few feet away, wearing all black on a sunny day, Matt Edelblute, 16, slouched with three friends on a bench near a skate park. Music from the punk band Morning Glory ripped through his headphones.

Without pause, Edelblute explained how the seeds are used. "You have to eat a lot of them," he said. "I know it lasts between six and eight hours." A friend of his had done it, he said, but he hasn't.

"I never felt I had enough time to sit there and eat 500 seeds," he explained.

So do not credit any stories that Friedman has been pounding seeds with Kool-Aid chasers when you read this piece by the Captain himself, doing what he does best: slapping a coat of paint over the rusting hulk of a bad idea that has bobbed again to the surface of his addled mind.

But, rather, as cautionary parable to you kids out there, let’s just say that certain Bad Things happen when let your mental coolants levels fall below the critical minimum.

With that in mind, let us read together this snip from behind the Shield Wall at the NYT. A fragrant fragment of an op-ed piece entitled “Let's (Third) Party”

What would OPEC do if it wanted to keep America addicted to oil? That's easy. OPEC would urge the U.S. Congress to deal with the current spike in gasoline prices either by adopting the Republican proposal to give American drivers $100 each, so they could continue driving gas-guzzling cars and buy gasoline at the current $3.50 a gallon, or by adopting the Democrats' proposal for a 60-day lifting of the federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon. Either one would be fine with OPEC.

So, to summarize, we now have a Congress proposing to do exactly what our worst enemies would like us to do — subsidize our addiction to gasoline by breaking into our kids' piggybanks to make it easier for us to pay the prices demanded by our oil pushers, so that we will remain addicted and they will remain awash in dollars.
With a Congress like this, who needs Al Qaeda?

Seriously, there is something really disturbing about the utterly shameless, utterly over-the-top Republican pandering and Democratic point-scoring that have been masquerading as governing in response to this energy crisis. The Republicans are worse, because they control all the levers of power and could move the country if they proposed a serious energy policy — but won't.

"We used to say the system is broken because it won't respond until there is a crisis," said David Rothkopf, author of "Running the World," a history of U.S. foreign policy. But now it's really broken, "because the system can't even respond to a crisis!"

What to do? I'm hoping for a third party.

…
"There is an opportunity here for someone who will seize it," said Micah Sifry, author of "Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America." That someone would have to be a more emotionally stable and energy-focused Ross Perot type. Because, added Mr. Sifry, "if the issue of the day in 1991-1992 was the ballooning budget deficit that we were not dealing with, then the issue today we are not dealing with is the energy and environmental catastrophe that awaits the next generation. It is as much a mortgaging of our children's future as the deficit issue. It needs the right leader, though."

…
Yes, our system is rigged against third parties. Still, my gut says that some politician, someday soon, just to be different, just for the fun of it, will take a flier on telling Americans the truth. The right candidate with the right message on energy might be able to drive a bus right up the middle of the U.S. political scene today — lose the far left and the far right — and still maybe, just maybe, win a three-way election.

First, Perot lost. Just in case Cap hadn’t noticed, he, uh, lost.

Second, purely for entertainment purposes, lets have a little fun with the Captain’s deathless prose, and ask the same question he poses in his first paragraph, but with a little tailoring.

The hem taken in a little and a different set of buttons.

So...

“What would NYT Op-Ed maroon Tom Friedman do if he wanted to keep America addicted to stupid? That's easy. After carrying Conservative water for years, bellycrawling all the way to Crawford and back on hands and knees and stubby tail begging Preznit Arbusto McSaudi to take our energy crisis seriously only to be whizzed on by the Lords of Oil and then having his cherished ideals set ablaze by one of Cheney’s famous scattergun trick-shots...

...he would take a scant, sideways glance at one Democratic proposal, throw up his tiny paws, squeak ‘Fuck It!’, and do what he always does: Declare the perfectly – nay, miraculously! -- equipoised, equidistant, equifucked failure of both sides and walk away shaking his pointy head.”

In his columns, years after year – between his quavering sobs of Stuff That Is Staggeringly Obvious To Anyone Who Has Read Anything Ever into the aural canals of the Rich and Oblivious -- Friedman has given the Conservative/Right every possible break, handicap, mulligan and benefit of the doubt they could ask for.

And then doubles it.

With rare exception, he has spilled his ink, column after column, pretending aloud that the despicable men who run the country were somehow just missing the point.

That their serial calamities and unbound imperial appetites were, somehow, just merry misunderstandings out of which he could jolt them if he just sucked their collective wangs hard enough.

Time and again he sprinted straight into the immobile, granite fist of the Wingnut Right.

Then got up, went back to the starter’s blocks, and ran at it again even harder, pounding himself insensate against the confluent impulses of the Republican Party -- racism, fascist and Dominionism -- all while conspicuously refusing to notice their existence.

This is why the Captain is at once pathetic and dangerous. Because having rammed his face to aspic on the anvil of Republican perfidy, he walks away cursing Republicans…and Democrats.

Advising, for the upteenth time, that the only solid, sober course is found by taking the grotesque ideology of the GOP, divide it by two, drive a stake into that patch of ground, and averring that’s where The Reasonable People live.

Which is bullshit. Tired, lazy, flabby bullshit.

For 30 years the GOP has been sprinting over the edge of the world, flirting ever louder with totalitarianism and theocracy…and pilot fish like Friedman have made a very comfortable living scurrying along behind them counseling a steady constant strategy of 50% capitulation, swaddled in words like “centerist” and “reasonable”.

And the only thing this tactic has succeeded in doing is encouraging the Right to race even further into darkness, knowing that scuttling appeasers like Friedman -- who have no ideology whatsoever but "divide by two" and no principle except to reflexively damn all sides equally regardless of the facts -- will always follow them in the direction of the abyss...halfway.

Friedman’s “extreme Left” produced Jimmy Carter, who took energy conservation and independence seriously and whose multiple initiatives were eviscerated...by Republicans.

The “extreme Left” settled on a Rockefeller Republican named Bill Clinton whose every effort to move the nation towards policies based on facts, reason and sanity was kneecapped...by Republicans.

The “extreme Left” ran with Al Gore – who, whatever else you want to say about him, was and is an environmentalist and energy policy rationalist of the first water. And unlike H. Ross Perot, Al Gore actually won. He actually captured the majority of the popular vote in this country and but for the rigged results in Florida, would be in the middle of his second term today.

These were the men at the top of the Democratic Ticket, so what Friedman demands you believe is that there was no fundamental difference between the energy/oil/foreign policies of Carter and Reagan.

Or Gore and Bush.

That they all need to be thrown under the same bus with the same vigor because they’re all equally bad and all equally unwilling to face the truth.

Which is idiotic. More than idiotic. It’s maliciously deceptive, and ultimately ends up bulwarking the Republican power structure.

How?

Well, the GOP navigate using a very simple, two-stroke engine.

First, their universal assertion that Unbridled Conservativism is a superior ideology to all others under all circumstance. Well, after five years of back-to-back-to-back corruption, incompetence, treason, ruin, debt, naked imperialism and assorted other catastrophes, no one but the hard-core, 33%, skull-fucked base of the Party buys that drivel anymore.

Conservativism, to anyone who still has functional frontal lobes, for the next generation at least, is a dead-loss. In Dubya/Cheney it reached it fullest, ugliest flower and showed its truest face..and the nation and the world have recoiled in horror from what they have seen.

Which is why the GOP has its second line of defense: The Battered Spouse Firewall.

Having pounded the country into the ground, spent us into penury with tax cuts for billionaires and fed our children into a mad, treachery-powered meat-grinder in Iraq, the GOP still looms drunkenly in the doorway. Stinking of death and lies, they lean right into the faces of gutless Moderates and growl, “Fuck you, bitch. However bad I am, don’t you know that Liberals Are Worse!”

And the Moderates crawl meekly back into the abattoir, while the Dobson Right pees into their fresh wounds and laughs.

And that’s the part that I have never understood.

As Moderates slowly wake up to the horror at the heart of their Party and it begins to dawn on them that everyone from Ken Mehman to Rush Limbaugh to Tom Delay has lied to them – hugely -- every fucking day about everything of consequence...they nonetheless continue to believe these same boldfaced liars are telling them the Gospel Truth about the Horrible Horrible Liberals.

And this is field that Captain Obvious tills to make his daily bread, which is what makes him so contemptible. Because while he does every so often correctly diagnose the problem – as he does here – he always dips into the same dishonest witchbag for the same patent medicine “cure”.

And in this case, the irony is especially tart.

Here we have Thomas Friedman, whining like fighter engine with its bearings on fire that the Bad Republicans stubbornly refuse to jettison their ideologically-driven delusions even though they are – by any objective standards -- clearly destructive.

He wants politicians to cut against their own political grain and make hard-headed choices based on the reasonable and available alternatives.

Fine. Good. Right there with you, Tommy-boy.

And yet in his very next breathe, Friedman shows how completely he remains a willing captive to his own pernicious and ridiculous theory. Because despite the evidence of his own senses, he cannot form his mouth to speak the simple Truth:
That Modern Republicanism IS what’s wrong with America.

That however scattered or ineffectual the Democratic Party may be from time to time, it is still a viable corpus, with a heart that is largely in the right place, a soul that still values the common good of our common humanity, a hand turned to casting out racism and bigotry instead of cultivating it, and a mind that tries to keep science one step ahead of lethal superstition.

That the Party of God has become our Enemy Within. The gargoyle that the Right has loosed in the American Temple and that is ripping it to rubble from the inside out. A mindless electoral killdozer, perverted from its own roots so fatally that there is no cure for it short of razing it to the studs and rebuilding it on First Principles.

But that would require actual risk on Friedman’s part.

That would require that he find a plot of land and a fixed principle that isn’t just a way-station on the floating ethics cable-car, drifting along lightly tethered to wherever halfway-between-Russ-Feingold-and-Jerry-Falwall happens to be today.

It would mean having the balls to step out and call the GOP on their bullshit without pre-backpedaling by buffering every critique and cowering behind this “but the Dems are just as bad” twaddle.

If he cares about the future as he claims he does, it would mean that he would have to stop fucking around. It would mean throwing in his lot with the one Party that still has something resembling a conscience and stands a chance of actually winning a majority of the hundreds of congressional seats that Friedman would need to move the mountains he has surveyed.

It would mean doing the hard, honest work with carrots and sticks to force it to reform, instead of evaporating into opium-eater fantasies of 3rd parties riding in like the cavalry and saving the day.

Fuck you, Friedman: Quit waiting for the Messiah and grab a mop, or STFU.

But sadly the day that happens is the day Tom Friedman’s book sales to conservative CEOs and Republican powerbrokers drops to nil, so don’t look for that dawn to break anytime soon.

Instead, expect Captain Obvious to continue to contort himself into ever more painful, absurd and topographically challenging configurations to avoid telling the whole, dangerous truth.

And to that end, expect him to continue to have futon-sized bales of morning glory seeds shipped in by the job-lot to help keep him trippy enough to actually believe his own foolishness.