The ‘Stache that Wouldn’t Die.

Captain Obvious to World: I apologize…for loving too much!

(All quotes and citations either approximate or given a shamefully mocking verisimilitude by me.)

I saw “No End in Sight” (NOW segment, review and video clips here) last evening after marking up what I was going to write about Captain Obvious’ appearance on the Cholly Rose Show (What with the war in Iraq reaching it’s eleven-hundredth “decisive stage”, hey, why not have the Moustache of Understanding back on? For an entire hour. To emote badly all over our shoes.)

And now I find that it is harder than I thought to finish this post off without letting the awful, grieving “Why in the name of God was this allowed to happen?” sensation that I took away from the theater inflect every inch of it.

“No End in Sight” is not the saddest movie I’ve ever seen, but it is possibly the most tragic. Precisely because it is a story told without frills or hyperbole, by level-headed pros and insiders, the sheer weight and magnitude of the Hell on Earth that the Bush Administration has unleashed on the world leaps immediately into awful focus and stays center-stage for the entire 1:42 run time.

And against that backdrop, the pompous, precious, clatter of Tom Friedman’s self-rationalizing fart-sniffery stands out like a yipping, attention-starved, diuretic teacup poodle running wild at a state funeral.

At some point you realize don’t just want to drop-kick the dog into a blast furnace, but you also want to track its trail of drool and poop back to its owner and ask: “What in the fuck were you thinking turning that mangy, howling, turd loose at these solemn proceedings in the first place?”

There was, of course, the obligatory commercial for The Book, featuring painfully unfunny Flatworld badinage about what Grandma Friedman told him as a mere barefoot hack with cheek of tan back in Minner-sowder.

What is Captain Obvious most afraid of trade-wise? Why, when he hears “some Democratic candidates who say ‘Woe is me!’ and want to build walls”, of course.

Problem is, I have not heard a single fucking Democrat moaning ‘Woe is me!’ and not a one of them wants to build walls.

Friedman notes that the downside of the blogosphere is that the norms of good journalisming aren't followed.

When I stopped laughing at this Emperor of Shallow -- this poster-child for Big Media intellectual dishonesty, who somehow never lacks for just the right jaunty, colorful, local cab driver in Bangalore or Qatar...to be on hand at exactly the right moment...to magically declaim the prefect quote...that just happens to slot exactly into the two, remaining empty column-inches of the twaddle Friedman just happened to be writing right then -- complaining that the Little People were not jounalisming right, I also noted that he dinged the blogosphere for “bad sourcing” and for the fact that the “dishonorable user” has lots of power.

So I promptly filed that under “Judith Miller”, cross-referenced it with “Fox News”, “Matt Drudge” and “Twenty Unrebutted Years of Hate Radio” and then immediately convened a Blogger Ethics Panel.

Captain Obvious continued…doggedly excreting little, empty, eyebrow-arched epigrams of Moustachy Enlightenment in exactly the same manner as a rabbit producing pellets.

Friedman: The things that are connecting us…(Lavish Shatner pause) are also dividing us.

Friedman: We were in touch with the Web, but Humberto (his humble native guide through the rain forest) was in touch with…(Lavish Shatner pause) the web of life.

Friedman: What can be done in business…(Lavish Shatner pause) will be done.

This last is, in fact, his Big Flat Rule of Business; the one he insists we all need to get used to.

Well, slavery “can be done”, right? And lucratively, too.

Child sexual exploitation for profit “can be done”.

Murder, blackmail and extortion “can be done”.

The wholesale looting of a country’s natural resources and intellectual properties “can be done”.

And have been done. And are being done.

Philosophically, gangsterism and robber-baron capitalism run along side-by-side: twin rails carrying nations and people packed into a “What Can Be Done” cattle-car into a Hobbsean abattoir where morality has been aggressively excised from the marketplace.

Yes, some jobs will always fly, fly away. Some parts of some industries will die or disappear over the horizon. But Friedman is simply, flatly wrong to conflate these thing into some Larger Morality and suggest that greasing the skids for a universal race to the bottom is a Good Thing.

That the proper reaction to the ugliness of unfettered globalization is, apparently, to relax, get some more C++ training, and be quick like a bunny to keep your family and your 401K out of the path of the avalanche.

He simply ignores the fact that these are human institutions, and can be moved by values as well as valuta. Dismisses the fact that principled men and women who believe in and work for environmentalism, worker’s rights, human rights and Fair Trade are not Evil Liberal Fortress America panic-peddlers who “want to put up walls”.

On Iraq...

Friedman: The only measure of the success of the surge…(Lavish Shatner pause) is if there is an Iraq.

Friedman: We have the military surge, but where…(Lavish Shatner pause) is the diplomatic surge?

Friedman: I’d send Big Time Serious Diplomats over and have them come back and tell me one of three things:

1. We can win.
2. We can partition.
3. We cannot win.

So Captain Obvious has boldly taken the whole “We will wait until Iraq sprouts wings and flies to the Arctic circle where we’ll call it Nour’Way” option.

Merciful Zule, what an ass. What an embarrassment, and yet there he and Cholly Rose sat, rubbing their tiny paws together, smirking, lobbing around meaningless platitudes and excitedly interrupting each other as if they were on the verge of personally developing -- then and there -- a working cold fusion reactor.

Or like two, basement-dwelling 40-year-old virgins breathlessly sharing ancient, yellowed smut mined from the neighbor’s dumpster.

Friedman: One good example is worth …(Lavish Shatner pause) a thousand theories.

Friedman: I do (believe we need a deadline). I’ve believed that now for a year and a half.

OK, doing the maths…year and a half…today’s the 8/18…carry the friedman unit…OK, that’d be on or about February, 2006.

So let us go a wassailing back to the wintry days when 2006 was only one month old:

First citation cluster via this invaluable timeline.

January 2006: "I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding..." --Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show"

March 2, 2006: "I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq." --Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on NBC's "Today" show

April 23, 2006: "So one way or another, I think we're in the end game in the sense it's going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us." --Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on CNN

May 11, 2006: ""We're going to find out... in the next year to six months -- probably sooner - whether a decent outcome is possible..." -- Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball"

Less than a year ago, on November, 29, 2006, (from the NYT via this site): "Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years.

Now lately Friedman had sidled quietly over in the general direction of the "deadline" side of the bunkhouse, but his is still a deadline-of-the-mind.

Instead of "Get the fuck out by ??/??/??" -- which is what an actual deadline would look like -- Friedman prefers the idea of a deadline.

A conditional, theoretical, “either we leave soon or, hey, just maybe…” deadline.

The threat of a deadline.

The notion of a deadline.

And even, festooned with “yeah, buts”, the lazy, Mindless-Reflex-Centrism, declarative-sentence-phobic Friedman always leaves himself a back door.

As in this NYT column from March of this year, which, near the top, offers this hopeful sentence:

"I hope the Democrats, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, keep pushing to set a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq..."

And then his sentiment collapses like public infrastructure under Republican rule when it comes to the details. (emphasis and “Lavish Shatner pause” added for entertainment purposes)

"The other useful function Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are performing is to give the president and Gen. David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, the leverage of a deadline without a formal deadline. How so?

The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, which means Sunni-Shiite negotiations — and such negotiations are unlikely to work without America having the “leverage” of telling the parties that if they don’t compromise, we will leave. (Deadlines matter. At some point, Iraqis have to figure this out themselves.)
...

As for General Petraeus, I have no idea whether his military strategy is right, but at least he has one — and he has stated that by “late summer” we should know if it’s working. As General Petraeus told the BBC last week, “I have an obligation to the young men and women in uniform out here, that if I think it’s not going to happen, to tell them that it’s not going to happen, and there needs to be a change.”

We need to root for General Petraeus to succeed, and hold him to those words if he doesn’t — not only for the sake of the soldiers on the ground, but also so that Mr. Bush is not allowed to drag the war out until the end of his term, and then leave it for his successor to unwind.

“But how will General Petraeus or Congress judge if the surge is working?

“It may be obvious, …(Lavish Shatner pause) but it may not be.
...

To his credit, Rose did ask something like the following: People want you to write a column apologizing for being such a relentlessly asshatted moron. What say you?

Which – although it had the sharp stink of a well-rehearsed puppet show -- I do believe is the very first time anyone has dared to ask Captain Obvious that question.


Friedman: If you look at what I wrote before the war…that this was really important, and I won’t apologize for that. I won’t apologize for believing that unicorns are wonderful.

Friedman: It was hope over experience…

Friedman: After 9/11…

Friedman: Very much affected by my travels in the region (so many cab drivers told me of their great love of my American dollars.)

Friedman: The pathologies of the region are so deep…

Friedman: If I’m guilty, it’s of three things.

Notice how creepily Friedman deploys the First Person Pronoun: as if he and Iraq were personally in divorce court together, and he’s on the stand, fetal-ed up in an angry ball, moaning how he did everything he could, and how it was all her fault.

Friedman: To just go on like this. The chase some rainbow…

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) wanting it more than they did. So many people wanted this to work. (I was too good a husband.)

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) misunderestimated how broke(n) Iraq was. It was even more broken than I thought. (She was more fucked up than even I, The Noble Moustache of Understanding, could redeem.)

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) misunderestimating the depths of depravity of our opponents. (I was just trying to do what was best for this poor, ignorant, emotionally unstable woman, and she cut my balls off. It’s almost as if she didn’t want me there anymore?)

What doesn’t he mention as one of the The Three Things he feels he just fucking blew is Rumsfeld

Or Bush.

Or Cheney.

Or Powell.

Or Rice.

Or Kristol.

Or Wolfowitz.

Or Feith.

Or Perle.

Yes, he does get cranky at the Administration for believing the decapitation and reformatting of Iraq would be easy. Yes he does “damn them” for putting in “just enough troops to lose”. But he stands strongly by his “tilt theory”...

Friedman: Like with the former Soviet Union, which world leaders combined to give a positive slope that may manifest itself into a really new Russia in a generation, I thought is we could just take a country in the heart of the middle east and “tip is upwards” then…

Really? And when exactly was it, Tom, that be bombed the guts out of Russia, invaded, disbanded the Soviet Army, and set up a pasha palace in Moscow?

Friedman: I wanted to find a way to collaborate with people there to build a different future. Not “war” necessarily…

Ah, and there it is; the Big Lie at the heart of Friedman’s timorous, NeoCon soul. He sets up a theoretical problem that can only be “solved” on his timetable militarily, and then flees in horror when the consequence of that militarism become apparent.

Sorry, Tom, but under the simple doctrine of “when you will the ends, you will the means” there is no escaping your complicity.

Oh and in case you’re wondering, “they” are angry at our conquest and illegitimate occupation “because of the pathologies in the region”.

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) being too hopeful.

Shorter Captain Obvious: I loveses too much! I careses too deeply. Look! Look how I bleed!

Friedman: Color me foolish, but when it came to this issue I kept my politics at the door. I will think about things irrespective of whether or not I like or agree with this Administration.

Friedman: We didn’t to the basics.

Other, shorter Friedman: Fuck you. I’m not taking back anything. I’m not apologizing for anything.

Friedman thought we could march in and democratize a foreign land at the point of a bayonet. He still believes it.

And of course, ever the Neocon, Flathead Tom leaves the door open for making the same blind-drunk imperial mistakes over and over again.

Friedman: (In Iraq) “we didn’t have a proper lab test” for my Genius Neocon theories. I still think using Western Christian Occupiers with Swords to humiliate the Brown Hordes into beat their swords into plowshares is a fucking brilliant idea.

Over in the Better Universe, Charlie Rose would’ve slung an M16A4 M4* and an Army contract across the table and said: “OK, dickhead…(Lavish Shatner pause) suit up or shut up.”

But this is not that Universe.

*(Thanks, Robert)

Someone Told Tom Friedman About Fox News and It Made Him Very Sad

Into Tom Friedman's palatial office glided one of his many, interchangeable, vaguely androgynous assistants.  From collar to crepe shoes Assistant #7 was dressed in the obligatory, all-black, Ninja-casual-by-of-Eddie-Bauer attire of TED Talk mic-runners.  

Assistant #7 bore a small, white box, which was placed on Friedman's massive cocobolo desk.

Assistant #7 picked one of the ornate, $10,000 sandalwood command staves (one of those long sticks used to push flags around on a war room map) from the $200,000, hand-carved umbrella stand next to the desk and used the stave to slide the white box across the desk towards Friedman.  The command staves were a gift from Friedman's very dear friend Bibi Netanyahu for Friedman's good service.  The umbrella stand had been a gift from the late Ahmad Chalabi, also for Friedman's good service. Putting them together like that was apparently a private joke between Friedman and the Almighty which the assistants do not even pretend to understand.  

Friedman accepted the box, dismissed Assistant #7, and slit the box open with the priceless, Shang dynasty jade knife that had been gifted to him by Xi Jinping for Friedman's good service.  

The hike back from the desk to the massive, inlaid Brazilian Rosewood doors of Friedman's office takes about five minutes, so Assistant #7 was still within earshot when Freidman began weeping and pounding his desk with his tiny, old-man fists and moaning "Nooooo".

Assistant #7 had brought Friedman bad news.  

The box contained curated copies of the Fox News text messages, emails and testimony from the Dominion Voting Systems court case that had been made public over the last week.  These text, emails and testimony had all been widely available and reported, but had passed beneath Friedman's notice until now since there had been no plucky foreign cab driver available to tell him about it.

Friedman composed himself, flicked one of the intercom switches on his desk, and barked "Copy!' into the microphone.   A nondescript voice -- that sounded as it it were coming from someone  who was dressed, from collar to crepe shoes, in the obligatory, all-black, Ninja-Casual-by-Eddie-Bauer attire of TED Talk mic-runners -- replied "Ready."

Friedman began to dictate.  Just fragments.  Stray balloons, each bearing a basket of solid gold thought eggs, which he would stitch together later into a gilded balloon tapestry of words eggs.  

It's called a "process" people.  All the greats have one.  

We’ve learned a lot in recent days about both Fox and Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has just started running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Brief driftglass aside: No, in fact we knews all we ever needed to know about Fox News about a quarter of a century ago.  And Nikki Haley gladly bent the knee to Trump, so a complete dead-loss there too.

Friedman continues with the balloon eggs:

We all sort of knew the truth about Fox, but now there can be no doubt...

Brief driftglass aside: "Now"?  Really?  Just now?

More balloon eggs:

Before, during and after the 2020 election, it was not crazy to assume that Fox’s main prime-time hosts — Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham — actually believed some of the pro-Trump, election-fraud conspiracy theories and theorists that they were putting on the air. But now we have learned...

Brief driftglass aside: "But now we have learned..."?  Really?  Again?  And what the fuck is it with you beltway goofs handing out benefits of the doubt to traitors and pathological liars like you're passing out Funyun samples at a FritoLays trade show.  No, no and no again.  It was 100% crazy to assume that the Fox News congenital liars, with decades of lying experience behind them, believed for one second that the election-fraud sedition they were spouting was true.  

More balloon eggs:

I’ve never met Haley, but from afar it seemed...

Say, do I smell that same famous Friedman brand of top-shelf, shoe leather "I've never been there, but trust me..." reportage that paved the way for Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck?

Then comes the Friedman brand interminable list of things that shoulda/coulda happened.

She could have said...

Haley could have added...

Haley could have then pivoted to... "Legal immigrants grow our pie..."

Friedman in still unsure how pie works

Sure, that kind of speech would have challenged the Republican base, but I bet it would have energized many others — particularly independents and moderate Republicans looking for alternatives to Trump.

In this sense, "independents and moderate Republicans" are the electoral WMDs of American political journalism.  Hacks like Friedman are absolutely sure they're out there somewhere, hidden but in great abundance...and their unshakable faith in the existence of vast numbers of independents and moderate Republicans ationalizes every other stupid thing they believe...despite the fact that people have been sifting the political sands for decades in search of independents and moderate Republicans and haven't found any.  

And then comes the part where I just start banging my head on my tiny, plastic desk -- 

-- in time with In The Air Tonight.

Here’s Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal on Haley’s presidential announcement

For at least a generation, there have not been more than a dozen sentient human beings outside of Friedman's Beltway circle jerk who have cared one iota for what Nooners has thought about anything.   And yet here she is, Wall Street Journal Peggers, being quotes by New York Times' Mustache of Understanding with real "That's it!  Case closed!" energy.

Assistant #7 slipped out the door as Friedman shifted from lachrymose over his recent discovery that Fox News is a shithole of greed and perfidy to bellicose over his recent discovery that Fox News is a shithole of greed and perfidy.   Friedman wasn't just up on his tiny feet, but had mounted the desk and was shaking his wee fists at the heavens, thundering that at least, by god, there remained Extremely Respectable media like The New York Times as a bulwark against those skeevy Conservatives and the filthy, lying media that gave them cover.

Walking back to wherever it is that such people go between errands,  Assistant #7 passed the open door of Friedman's New York Times colleague, skeevy Conservative Bret Stephens, putting the finishing touches on his latest filthy, lying column for the Extremely Respectable media that gives both him and David French and David Brooks and Stephen's ex-wife Pamela Paul and Tom Friedman cover.  

The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?

“Do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy.

By Bret Stephens

The public reaction to Stephens' column was swift and abundant.

In today’s column from Bret Stephens — https://t.co/nz89oeceXB — he writes triumphantly that a research study has shown unambiguously that mask mandates on the population level don’t work. Compare the column with what the cited study actually concludes (below).

Geez. pic.twitter.com/pcD9kvpGpC

— Craig Gurian (@pursuethefacts) February 22, 2023

The NY Times lost me as a subscriber when they took Bret Stephens on as an opinion writer. https://t.co/oak9GbZov8

— Joan Walton (@HandibodeJ) February 22, 2023

Bret Stephens: Masks Don't Work, Says Science* (*Science Does Not Say This) by @SER1897 https://t.co/7LBBRBLoFM

— Wonkette (@Wonkette) February 22, 2023

The @nytimes' Bret Stephens prints the outright false claim that we have "rigorous," "comprehensive" evidence that even N95 masks do absolutely nothing. This is dangerous and wrong. pic.twitter.com/uIgZyk1lfL

— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) February 22, 2023

 

The idea of  putting  Stephens and David French and David Brooks and Stephen's ex-wife Pamela Paul and Tom Friedman all together under the same masthead, all bitching about incompetence, lying and the terrible bad faith of those people over there while never daring to glance at each other, is apparently a private joke between the Sulzberger family and the Almighty which the assistants do not even pretend to understand. 

Burn The Lifeboats

The Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column

Before I serve up a few droppings from today's Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column, I commend to your attention these excerpts from Columbia Journalism Review's article from five years ago on the phenomenon of the Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column (which I originally commended to your attention four years ago) to underscore just exactly how extraordinarily terrible and lazy The Mustache of Understanding really is:

Over the weekend, The New York Times op-ed page published one of Tom Friedman’s periodic columns about the need for a uprising of the “radical center.” It was, unsurprisingly, terrible. Though the details of these columns change with each iteration—this one relied heavily on a new initiative called Americans Elect, which brings together two of Friedman’s favorite things, wealthy people and the Internet—the basic wrongheadedness does not.

Friedman’s idea seems to be that if only we can find some reform that will allow us to “break the oligopoly of the two-party system,” it might, someday, be possible for someone who holds 90 percent of Barack Obama’s stated policy positions—plus support for a carbon tax—to assume a position of power. Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—maybe because some fantasy vice president (Michael Bloomberg?) applies some of his “pragmatic independent” pixie dust?—political dysfunction disappears, and a magical new era of “superconsensus” to solve our “superhard” problems is ushered in. Startlingly, this consensus seems to closely reflect many of Friedman’s personal policy preferences.

Friedman has been engaged in third-party wishcasting for at least five years now; Brendan Nyhan’s excellent, running blog post on third-party media hype records that back in the 2006 election cycle, Friedman longed for a “Geo-Green Party.” His “radical center” phase, though, seems to be inspired by the Tea Party era. Friedman has devoted columns to this mythical middle at least three times since spring 2010. They’re as predictable as the tides, or a hackneyed lede about a conversation with a taxi driver or tech entrepreneur.

...

Five years ago Friedman's ridiculous Magical Third Party fetish was already an running joke.

And today?

Dump the G.O.P. for a Grand New Party

Thomas L. Friedman JUNE 7, 2016

Yay!

This is followed by a bill of indictment laid at the foot of the Party of Lincoln for their bad behavior over the last 10 months --

Today’s G.O.P. is to governing what Trump University is to education — an ethically challenged enterprise that enriches and perpetuates itself by shedding all pretense of standing for real principles, or a truly relevant value proposition, and instead plays on the ignorance and fears of the public.

--  that looks remarkably similar to the bill of indictment which the Dirty Hippies have been roundly mock and ignored for laying at the foot of the Party of Lincoln over and over again for the last 20 years.

Mr. Friedman concludes that he knows so many rich idiots whose brains have turned to pudding from reading too much Tom Friedman "so many thoughtful conservatives" who are appalled at what has happened to their party and that one of them...

...has got to start the N.R.P. — New Republican Party — a center-right party liberated from all the Trump birthers, the Sarah Palins, the Grover Norquists, the Sean Hannitys, the Rush Limbaughs, the gun lobby, the oil lobby and every other narrow-interest group, a party that redefines a principled conservatism.

Mr. Friedman speculates that one of the reason for the rise of Trump is that voters have become cynical because they see politician as a clutch of cynical, clueless hacks who keep their jobs by telling their base whatever they want to hear, regardless of how false or inane or ludicrously impossible it may be.

I'm pretty sure that no one in Mr. Friedman's circle of friends has any idea that this is exactly what many of us think of professional political pundits like Tom Friedman. 

When The Only Tool You Have

is a multi-billion dollar real estate empire (Caution: Huffington link)

...
As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

...Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he's married into such a giant fortune, it's probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that's more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he's coming from.

Mind you, I don't think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman's not everyone. He's not just "doing pretty well" and is not just any old columnist. He's not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire - he's member of one of the wealthiest families in the world...

...I suppose every problem looks like a bad sub-prime mortgage (From the Mustache of Understanding):

Barack Kissinger Obama
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 25, 2011

...
In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama handled his role exceedingly well.

No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
...

A bad sub-prime mortgage that everyone who graduated Villager Courtesy Class will now obligingly forget that you, Tom Friedman, were leveraged into up to your fucking Pornstache.


And which you, Tom Friedman, remained leveraged into up to your fucking Pornstache while calling for shoveling ever more blood and treasure -- other people's blood and other people's treasure -- into the maw of Operation Clusterfuck for one, agonizing Friedman Unit after another...

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006.

A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future. The Huffington Post cited it as the "Best New Phrase" of 2006.

The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated use[10] of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times, in which he stated: "The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."

...long after it was perfectly clear to the rest of the sentient Universe that you and your Neocon cuddle buddies never had the slightest fucking clue what you were talking about, and were just making shit up to postpone your day of reckoning; that day that managing editors and producers began either throwing you ass-over-Pornstache out the door for daring to show your face in an American news outlet ever again, or at a minimum insisted that every time you tried to sneak a sentence like this

"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations."

into an American news outlet, you be required to change it to

"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney and I, Thomas L. Friedman, thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations."

followed by a solid , three-column wall of 75 point, Railroad font "I am so fucking sorry"'s before permitting it to be published or aired under their masthead.

Well, you needn't have worried, Tom: your day of reckoning never came and will never come.

You are rich beyond the dreams of Avarice and in the Mainstream Media, that is all that matters.

Like Jethro Bodine being indulged his every whim and crackpot fantasy

-- from playing at guru to "double naught spy" -- because of his uncle's fabulous wealth, no matter how many times you publicly and spectacularly trip over your own dick, your media pals will continue to invite you back onto their teevee shows and into the pages of their publications forever.

Continue allowing you to ramble on like a four-year-old on acid while you pimp your latest heaving mound of terrible prose to clueless American CEOs, who -- because you are rich and will continue to appear on your pals' teevee shows forever -- will continue to look to you to explain to them in keening bursts of lobotomizingly-bad metaphors that Technology is Good, Innovation is Important, Centrism is Awesome and a laundry list of other things are either as completely ass-end-up wrong as your "Suck On This" foreign policy, or were obvious to everyone else 20 years ago.

(Mr. Friedman might have had more to say after those two paragraphs, but after allowing them into my head, my optic nerves went on a wildcat strike and refused admittance to any more of The Stupid. My vision slid harmlessly down the rest to the page like olive oil down a glass mountain...

...until it slammed into Mr. Friedman's final, fetid sentence:

"So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president — not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we’ve done more nation-building at home.

At which point I staggered -- stiff-legged, glassy-eyed and stone-tongued -- away from the computer, mourned silently that such a gargantuan pit of bromide assfoam as Tom Friedman was allowed anywhere near the language of Shakespeare, and did not regain the power of speech until I had rinsed out my head with some Raymond Carver.)

The Legend Lives on from the TED Talks on Down

Of the big fake they called 'Both Sides Tommy'...

Tom Friedman was in the Grand Salon of the RMS Both Sides Do It when his magic cab driver brought the dire news.

"Ship's going down sir."

Friedman sighed.

"Again?"

"Again, sir."

Shit.  He had just finished his Cockie Leekie (sublime!) and was preparing to tuck into the Fillets of Brill.  This would certainly interfere with galley service.

"You sure?"

His cabbie shrugged.

"Look at the floor, sir."

Friedman peered owlishly over the lip of the table and, damn, if the Grand Salon wasn't already under two feet of frigid water and was filling up fast.  Spittoons, peasants and the shattered remains of the EPA bobbed lifelessly in the rising Republican tide all around him.  Outside, the corridors were full of terrified passengers scrambling to find some way out.

Friedman sighed again.  So much for the mighty and "unsinkable" Both Sides Do It.  Quick action was called for before galley service deteriorated completely.

"Very well.  Tell the steward to pack -- carefully! -- my baked potato, custard pudding, veal and ham pie, Galantine of chicken and apple meringue pasty in take-away boxes. And do not expect a tip."

His cabbie shrugged again, pointing to the frozen corpse of the head chef as it floated past.

"I don't think that will be possible, sir."

This was intolerable.

"Jesus, Mary and Davos!" Friedman exclaimed.  "And the cheese course?"

"Unsalvageable, sir."

"Very well then,"  Friedman said, climbing on his cabbie piggy-back style.  "Bear me to the lifeboats."

Cabbie began slogging through frozen detritus of American democracy towards the port side boats.

"Where do you think you are going?"  Friedman barked.

"To the boats, sir."

"Luggage first, man."  Friedman said. "Luggage first."

Later, carrying Tom Friedman and his 27 steamer trunks filled with priceless New York Times columns, two dozen, identical faux-ninja black lecture togs and several hundred irreplaceable and as-yet-unsold copies of The World Is Flat, Friedman's cabbie finally made it to the port-side "A Third Party Will Save Us" boats only to find that they had all already been launched --

The Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column

Before I serve up a few droppings from today's Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column, I commend to your attention these excerpts from Columbia Journalism Review's article from five years ago on the phenomenon of the Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column (which I originally commended to your attention four years ago) to underscore just exactly how extraordinarily terrible and lazy The Mustache of Understanding really is...

-- and had all promptly shattered and sunk moment they hit the water.

"Looks like our options are narrowing, sir."

Friedman glared at presumption of cabbie's use of the word "our" but said nothing.  After all, he still needed stoop labor with a strong back and sharp elbows to carry him and his 30-years of shitty ideological baggage to safety.

Cabbie bulldozed their way through the panicked throngs until, at last, they arrived at the last place Tom Friedman ever wanted to be.  A line of small but yar vessels, each with the motto of The Professional Left Podcast -- 

#BothSidesDont

-- proudly stenciled on the side.

"By the authority vested in me by The New York Times, the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Pulitzer Committee I hereby commandeer three -- no, four! -- of these vessels for the sake of humanity and the future of civilization!" Friedman declared imperiously, and presented his impeccable Beltway credentials...which he had hastily typed up on the way over from the Grand Salon while riding on cabbie's shoulders (emphasis added):

The American Civil War, Part II

The nation is deeply divided, with each side seeing the other as “the enemy.”

...In essence, we’ve moved from “partisanship,” which still allowed for political compromises in the end, “to tribalism,” which does not, explained political scientist Norman Ornstein, co-author, with Thomas Mann, of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.” In a tribal world it’s rule or die, compromise is a sin, enemies must be crushed and power must be held at all costs.

It would be easy to blame both sides equally for this shift, noted Ornstein, but it is just not true. After the end of the Cold War, he said, “tribal politics were introduced by Newt Gingrich when he came to Congress 40 years ago,” and then perfected by Mitch McConnell during the Barack Obama presidency, when McConnell declared his intention to use his G.O.P. Senate caucus to make Obama fail as a strategy for getting Republicans back in power.

They did this even though that meant scuttling Obama’s health care plan, which was based on Republican ideas, and even though that meant scuttling long-held G.O.P. principles — like fiscal discipline, a strong Atlantic alliance, distrust of Russian intentions and a balanced approach to immigration — to attract Trump’s base...

It killed him to write it.  Killed him.  Worse than being denied his cheese course.  Worse than no longer having an open invitation to tongue baths on The Charlie Rose Show.  But there was no other way.  And thus did Tom "Both Sides Do It" Friedman find himself the captain (hell, admiral) of a tiny fleet of #BothSidesDont vessels stolen from the very same dirty hippies he had spent his career mocking and despising.  A sturdy flotilla, lashed together with souvenir gift bag scarves from the World Economic Forum (killed him to do that) and powered by cabbie's strong biceps bending the oars.

Cabbie rowed hard until they were clear of the immediate danger, but other than the blazing fires that a cackling, mad-eyed Hugh Hewitt was setting on the deck ("Burn it!  Burn it all!") as the great, dying luxury liner moaned and cracked and slid beneath the waves, nothing but the stars in the moonless sky could be seen.

Cabbie stopped rowing as they faced an empty, black horizon in all directions.

"So where exactly are we going, sir?"

Good question.

Friedman retrieved the commemorative spyglass they had awarded him at the Chicago Humanities Festival several years ago after he gave a speech explaining in great, saccharine detail how everything that was happening now could now possibly ever happen.  

He scanned the night, looking...looking...  Then, just at the place where the sky kissed the sea,  a flicker of light.  

"There!"  he cried.  "Head there!"  

"Where sir?"

"There, you fool!  Right where I am pointing!" (emphasis added)

When I look at all the people today who are propelling their political careers and fattening their wallets by dividing us, I cannot help but wonder: Do these people go home at night to some offshore island where none of this matters? Do these people really think their kids aren’t going to pay for the venom they sell and spread? Don’t worry, I know the answer: They aren’t thinking and they aren’t going to stop it.

What stops it? When a majority of Americans, who are still center-left and center-right, come together and...

"Faster, man!  Put your back into it!"

As they slowly picked up speed, Friedman could practically smell the Galantine of chicken, the apple meringue pasty, the tasty cheese course and the Pulitzer Prize that would surely be waiting for him once they reached their inevitable destination.

Pay The Writer

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Dean of the Dead" Edition.

This Sunday, the word came down "ex cathedra" from the Beltway's new Dean of the Dead and official Broderite necromancer, Tom Brokaw, that the Mainstream Media will be on-board with the Republican program of massive and sustained lying, just as long as they keep the ratfucking out of the front parlor and don't startle the horses in the street.  

MR. BROKAW:  One of the problems I have, in fact, was though-- was that, Carly [Fiorina], with all due respect, was that for example, Congressman Ryan overreached a couple of times and got caught in those overreaches...

Only in the dustiest and most desolate basement of the King's English does the definition of what Paul Ryan did ("Lying") overlap in any way with Tom Brokaw's craven, puff-pastry euphemism ("Overreach") for Paul Ryan's lying.  To any long-time observer of the social habits of the Beltway petting zoo, Mr. Brokaw is not running away from the word "lying" because like "Lily Ledbetter" and "LGBT", it uses that "L"-sound that Mr. Brokaw is so comically unable to say.  Instead, as Heather from "Crooks and Liars" points out:

David Broder might be gone, but I think after this week, between his performance on Morning Joe playing the false equivalency game and now his excusing of Paul Ryan's lies in an extremely lame rebuttal to Newt Gingrich and Carly Fiorina's hackery on this Sunday's Meet the Press -- we can rightfully crown Tom Brokaw the new king of High Broderism. 

Or at least the king for this week. There are too many others out there lined up to regularly take his place among the beltway Villagers in the media. Apparently lying your ass off for an entire speech to the point where everyone knows your hair's on fire whether they want to admit it or not is now "overreaching."

Of course, the whole panel wasn't just bad, but David Gregory-brand awful.

Gingrich lied:

MR. GINGRICH:  You know, this is-- but this is one of the great myths to this city.  The president got the stimulus plan he wanted with no elected official having read it.  He got every single dollar, every single power.  The President rams through Obamacare, the largest change in the size of government in modern times, got it done.  The-- the reason people say he didn’t get anything done is it is failing.  I mean, Liberals can’t get up and say, gee, we passed everything we wanted to under-- under the Democratic House and Democratic Senate, and in 2010, we were repudiated and by the way, none of it worked.  

From Carly Fiorina (borrowing Peggy Noonan's alky-Carole-Channing whisper for the occasion) lied:

MS. FIORINA:  But I think what is absolutely fair is to say that President Obama, for two years, had a Democratic-controlled Senate and a democratically controlled House.  So it wasn’t a question of Republican intransigence.  They didn’t have the power to stand in his way.

But since, as usual, no Liberal was invited to the party, no one was there to stand up for the Truth: no one there to try to shame David Gregory into doing his damn job, to ask Tom Brokaw why Paul Ryan's lies ruffle his petticoats but Gingrich's do not, or to just stuff Fiorian's lies and Gingrich's lies back down their throats.

There was only Tom Friedman and his Mighty Mustache of Understanding

Oh my sweet, skiffle-playing Jesus:

MR. FRIEDMAN:  Yeah, you know, David, I-- I’ve read all those articles this morning and I find them interesting, because, in one of the critiques I’ve had of President Obama myself is that, one of the lines you get to the White House is, you don’t understand how bad those Republicans are.  They’ve been trying to block us from day one.  To which I say I totally get it.  It’s-- it’s, you know, it’s obvious to me.  I have one question, why are they getting away with it?  Why is the American public not sharing your view?  And one of the things I’ve never understood is why the president never leveraged the American people.

Maybe, Tom, the reason "leveraging the American people" hasn't worked so great is that because for the last few decades the means of reaching and persuading the American people -- the media -- has been occupied by a hostile force bent on suffocating that lovely ide in the crib.

Maybe you recognize some of members of that hostile forces sitting, as they were, right across the table from you this morning.  

Maybe because every single fucking time anyone tries to "leverage the American people" into, say, demanding that Conservative liars and traitors and frauds be held to account for their lies and betrayals, the Beltway media has made sure that message gets smothered in the crib by overpaid, talent-starved, job-for-life, "Both Sides Do It" Centrist trolls.

Like, say, Thomas L. Friedman.  

Here are a couple of sample of links drawn from across internet, but Tom Friedman's world-class hackery and cartoonish incompetence has been such a pillar of the internet for so long that a simple search for "Tom Friedman" and "Centrism" or "Iraq" or "Hack" will yield you literally thousands of others.

From "The Plum Line":

The Centrist Dodge

... 

How does Friedman deal with the fact that he and Obama roughly share the same vision? There’s the above approach — pretend Obama hasn’t been clear about what he wants. Friedman has adopted other dodges, too. He has claimed that Obama’s version of the Grand Bargain doesn’tgo far enough, because a Grand Bargain absolutely must contain entitlements cuts. Again, Obama and Dems have signaled a willingness to cut entitlements, dismaying many on the left. And even when Friedman admits that Republicans are more to blame for the lack of compromise, he makes up for it by somehow simultaneously claiming that “history” will hold Obama more accountable for failure to reach a deal. 

Friedman would not have to resort to such contortions if he would just admit the obvious: Obama and Dems are the ones who roughly inhabit the ideological middle, as Friedman himself has defined it. Friedmanagrees with them on the broad strokes of what need to be done. 

Paul Krugman recently wrote that anyone who pretends that one side isn’t far more responsible than the other for what’s happening right now is "part of the problem.” Coming from a columnist as influential as Friedman, the claim that we don’t know what Obama wants in the way of deficit reduction, and the suggestion that this is a key reason the supercommittee is careening towards failure, are deeply irresponsible and risk badly misinforming the public.

Eschaton:

The One True Wanker of The Decade
Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites. 

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything.The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.  

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

Across the dial reactions varied, but they stayed within the acceptable Beltway Villager parameters:  for example, George Will did everything but a victory dance around a pile of burning books to celebrate the coming of the New Dark Age, while unfailing obedient Republican sock-puppet Matthew Dowd got a little squeamish, pulling a face like he had bitten into a live rat and making vague noises about "stretching  the truth" (I have a strong feeling that somewhere out there, someone higher up the GOP food chain is having a chat with Mr. Dowd and explaining to him the finer points of the terms "Faustian" and "bargain" -- 




-- the two words by which his career, and so many others, hang [video is Not Safe for Work].)

This is why Sunday was a kind of a Big Fucking Deal.

It signaled exactly how the Beltway media -- the same bilge-peddlers who gleefully sold popcorn at every wingnut witch hunt during the Clinton years and closed their eyes, hid under the bed and sucker their collective thumbs as the Bush regime rampaged across the pages of history -- plan to handle the Bullshit Blitzkrieg 

that is to coming to a teevee screen near you.

Prepare for an ugly Fall.

Tommy Can You Hear Me?

Can you feel me near you?

The Moustache of Understanding -- he who has been profoundly wrong about everything from the nature of the free market (from Thom Hartmann) ...

...
Had South Korea adopted the "free trade" policies espoused by [Thomas] Friedman and The New York Times, it would still be exporting fish and still have a per-capita income like Kenya's.

Another great example of this is Toyota's success with their luxury car the Lexus. Toyota has been touted by free traders as a clear example of why free trade works, mostly because of the widely cited example outlined in Thomas Freidman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

But again, at a closer look, the reality is the opposite of what Friedman naively portrays in his book. In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950's. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM.

Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.

... to foreign policy, and so spectacularly and publicly wrong about Iraq and the Bush Administration that blogger Atrios named the infamous "Friedman Unit" after Tommy-boy (From the dkosopedia)...

"The term is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006, in reference to the discovery by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of journalist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the time period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making these six-month predictions since November 2003.)

-- was back again.

Not that he'd ever been away, of course -- The 'Stache That Wouldn't Die

is the billionaire, Neocon centrist nose-tackle of the Fightin' Villagers journalism All Star team -- but he was on my teevee again for reasons that no one in the American media has the nerve to come right out and admit.

He had brought his moth-chewed, maudlin, context-free brand of wide-eyed, breathless know-nothing reportage on matters which would already be obvious to the averagely bright eleven-year-old back to the Cholly Rose show.

Which, believe it or not, marked a staggering 66th appearance

for Captain Obvious on ol' Cholly Rose's Soft Ballin' Dance Party.

And he was pushin' a new book.

Not a new-new book, mind you.

An old book, (I think it might have been called "Rot, Scat and Shrouded", but I couldn't clearly make it out over the sound of me cursing God) but Tommy Friedman wants you to know that he has rewritten the entire front end. The first three chapters? Redone! Now with 35% more cliches, maudlin tripe and saccharine homilies apparently gleaned from reading Bazooka Joe comics and other, smarter people...and just in time for Christmas!

So Joy to the World.

One assumes that if the quality-arc of his writing continues along the same trajectory, his next book will consist of a Kindle-downloadable series of McDonald's cash register-type icons which, when pushed, will extrude little poo-ribbons of Friedmanistic wisdom.

You'll be able to buy it at the convenient, regional Hypermall that his wife's real estate company will have helpfully erected on the rubble of your local mom-and-pop story, and then your real fun times can begin. After that you'll be able string your oven-fresh Friedmanistism together into epigrammatic one-act Noh playlets if you wish. Or play 'em like guitar chords ("My baby done left me/'cause my world's too flat/at least that's what she heard/from some billionaire twat"). Or mix and sample them for the blissed out masses writhing on the dance floor at the nation's now-abandoned Hypermalls in the frenzied, all-night Moustache Raves that are surely in our future.

The only limit will be your imagination, but sadly that's all still in the happy, sparkly Tomorrow.

Here and now you still have to made do getting your Fried Green Conflatos the same place as the rest of us: on the editorial page of the New York Times, at the Mouse Circus, in every book story in Christendom, and of course on The Cholly Rose show, where Captain Obvious may have finally given up wearing his signature creepy, all-black Vietcong/Star Trek villain unitard

but where he is still to be found, as in the days of old, hoppin' and poppin' and squiginfiying like somebody had shoved a particularly itchy baby olive tree up his ass.

One of the first thing Friedman wanted us to know is he's thinking about stuff.

Thinking hard.

One of the next things Friedman wanted us to know during this 66th appearance on the Cholly Rose Show was that:

"Afghanistan is like adopting a special needs child."

And no, I am not kidding.

This is when the world started going a peculiar shade of dove-gray and I started losing track of time, so I cannot be specific about the exact moment, but at some point after that Friedman went on to say that he didn't "want the moonshot of my generation to be trying to fix the most dysfunctional Muslim country in the world." Forgetting, somehow, that the moonshot of Thomas Friedman's generation...was the fucking moonshot.

Later, as I began to lose consciousness from my brain burrowing out of my skull to escape the freakish horror unfolding before me, I could swear I heard Friedman chirp out the phrase, "Up yer nose with a rubber hose!", in response to some issue over which non-Thomas Friedman Americans are currently fighting and dying far away from home.

As I passed out, it occurred to me that Cholly Rose is a pretty tall guy.

Plenty tall enough to kick Friedman's nads all the way up into his tummy, even from across his interview table.

And yet for some reason he didn't.

Instead he made a series of complicated clicks and hand gestures that I believe translates from Bohemian Grovian into:

"Please come back on my show soon for a 67th appearance to insult my viewer's intelligence. Perhaps next time you could spend an hour reading us the labels on whatever happens to be in your underwear drawer?"

10 Years After: 2012 -- Redundancies

The 10th blogiversary fundraiser continues with the Presidential Election year of 2012.

Some people forget that the New York Times keeps a tiny, backup Conservative on-hand.

Just in case.

The NYT's Auxiliary, Backup Conservative 

Would like to share his thoughts with you.

The address made plain what has been increasingly obvious for some time. After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist.

Like the many of his compatriots within the ivied cloister of our Establishment Punditocracy -- from David Brooks and his ludicrous asymmetriphobic obsession with Centrism to Tom Friedman and his embarrassing public extrusions of rambly, malformed English in defense of Third Party fairy tales (from the Columbia Journalism Review) --

Over the weekend, The New York Times op-ed page published one of Tom Friedman’s periodic columns about the need for a uprising of the “radical center.” It was, unsurprisingly, terrible. Though the details of these columns change with each iteration—this one relied heavily on a new initiative called Americans Elect, which brings together two of Friedman’s favorite things, wealthy people and the Internet—the basic wrongheadedness does not.

Friedman’s idea seems to be that if only we can find some reform that will allow us to “break the oligopoly of the two-party system,” it might, someday, be possible for someone who holds 90 percent of Barack Obama’s stated policy positions—plus support for a carbon tax—to assume a position of power. Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—maybe because some fantasy vice president (Michael Bloomberg?) applies some of his “pragmatic independent” pixie dust?—political dysfunction disappears, and a magical new era of “superconsensus” to solve our “superhard” problems is ushered in. Startlingly, this consensus seems to closely reflect many of Friedman’s personal policy preferences.

Friedman has been engaged in third-party wishcasting for at least five years now; Brendan Nyhan’s excellent, running blog post on third-party media hype records that back in the 2006 election cycle, Friedman longed for a “Geo-Green Party.” His “radical center” phase, though, seems to be inspired by the Tea Party era. Friedman has devoted columns to this mythical middle at least three times since spring 2010. They’re as predictable as the tides, or a hackneyed lede about a conversation with a taxi driver or tech entrepreneur.

--  I long ago lost interest in the meat and taters of what Mr. Douthat had to say about pretty much everything.

Instead, like Brooks and Friedman, it is the mere fact of  Mr. Douthat's existence that I find fascinating. As if the Opportunity rover had suddenly spotted a Fiddler Crab wandering the surface of Mars while singing honky-tonk in Portuguese, or an archivist had unearthing a manuscript proving that Leonardo da Vinci was 77 meters tall and that he invented bar codes and Velcro, it would not be the physical size of such  discoveries -- their weight or height -- that would make them profound, but the implications of those discoveries which would reorder our thinking about the Universe.

Thus it is with Ross Douthat -- a silly little man scuttling across the surface of a world where every notion of common sense and meritocracy says he should not be.  And scuttling right along beside him?  Mr. Brooks and Mr Friedman, each also blithe defying the laws of logic and competence and prospering in an environment where they really, really have no business existing at all.  All protected within an expensive and well-maintained media bunker which prevents any of the consequences of their follies and idiocies from blowing back on them in the slightest degree.

It is a puzzle, and as someone who is both very interested in how all kinds of organizations perform -- in how and why they succeed or fail or bamboozle themselves into committing suicide -- and who also loves fiddling with minimum information puzzles, I find it almost irresistible to try and deduce what possible concatenation of dysfunctions, delusions and very poor management decisions must have taken place at the New York Times to result in them simultaneously ensconcing Messrs. Douthat, Friedman and Brooks together on the editorial page of America's Newspaper of Record.

Such is my curse.

The NYT's Auxiliary, Backup Conservative

Would like to share his thoughts with you.

The address made plain what has been increasingly obvious for some time. After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist.

Like the many of his compatriots within the ivied cloister of our Establishment Punditocracy -- from David Brooks and his ludicrous asymmetriphobic obsession with Centrism to Tom Friedman and his embarrassing public extrusions of rambly, malformed English in defense of Third Party fairy tales (from the Columbia Journalism Review) --

Over the weekend, The New York Times op-ed page published one of Tom Friedman’s periodic columns about the need for a uprising of the “radical center.” It was, unsurprisingly, terrible. Though the details of these columns change with each iteration—this one relied heavily on a new initiative called Americans Elect, which brings together two of Friedman’s favorite things, wealthy people and the Internet—the basic wrongheadedness does not.

Friedman’s idea seems to be that if only we can find some reform that will allow us to “break the oligopoly of the two-party system,” it might, someday, be possible for someone who holds 90 percent of Barack Obama’s stated policy positions—plus support for a carbon tax—to assume a position of power. Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—maybe because some fantasy vice president (Michael Bloomberg?) applies some of his “pragmatic independent” pixie dust?—political dysfunction disappears, and a magical new era of “superconsensus” to solve our “superhard” problems is ushered in. Startlingly, this consensus seems to closely reflect many of Friedman’s personal policy preferences.

Friedman has been engaged in third-party wishcasting for at least five years now; Brendan Nyhan’s excellent, running blog post on third-party media hype records that back in the 2006 election cycle, Friedman longed for a “Geo-Green Party.” His “radical center” phase, though, seems to be inspired by the Tea Party era. Friedman has devoted columns to this mythical middle at least three times since spring 2010. They’re as predictable as the tides, or a hackneyed lede about a conversation with a taxi driver or tech entrepreneur.

--  I long ago lost interest in the meat and taters of what Mr. Douthat had to say about pretty much everything.

Instead, like Brooks and Friedman, it is the mere fact of  Mr. Douthat's existence that I find fascinating. As if the Opportunity rover had suddenly spotted a Fiddler Crab wandering the surface of Mars while singing honky-tonk in Portuguese, or an archivist had unearthing a manuscript proving that Leonardo da Vinci was 77 meters tall and that he invented bar codes and Velcro, it would not be the physical size of such  discoveries -- their weight or height -- that would make them profound, but the implications of those discoveries which would reorder our thinking about the Universe.

Thus it is with Ross Douthat -- a silly little man scuttling across the surface of a world where every notion of common sense and meritocracy says he should not be.  And scuttling right along beside him?  Mr. Brooks and Mr Friedman, each also blithe defying the laws of logic and competence and prospering in an environment where they really, really have no business existing at all.  All protected within an expensive and well-maintained media bunker which prevents any of the consequences of their follies and idiocies from blowing back on them in the slightest degree.

It is a puzzle, and as someone who is both very interested in how all kinds of organizations perform -- in how and why they succeed or fail or bamboozle themselves into committing suicide -- and who also loves fiddling with minimum information puzzles, I find it almost irresistible to try and deduce what possible concatenation of dysfunctions, delusions and very poor management decisions must have taken place at the New York Times to result in them simultaneously ensconcing Messrs. Douthat, Friedman and Brooks together on the editorial page of America's Newspaper of Record.

Such is my curse.