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The ‘Stache That Wouldn’t Die.

I suppose there is no reason to be greatly surprised that Tom Friedman’s column today -- "Intercepting Iran’s Take on America" -- is his 1000th retread of the “Other Guy’s Speech as I Would Have Written It” shtick. Typing up bad impressions stuffed to the eye sockets with pedantry is a time-honored lazy-writer’s trick (having used it myself I should damn well know) but even for a hack, third-rate, full-shot-short-of-a-boilermaker writer, Captain Obvious falls back on that hagged-out trick an awful lot.

(Which is one more promise I can make to the NYT: top value for their pundit dollar when they’re paying for my beer and skittles and occasional trips abroad to investigate, oh, let’s say, supermodel sex junkets.)

The other thing is, while I am very ... reasonably ...comparatively ... moderately ... marginally know how to spell “low maintenance”, you gotta watch Friedman like a you gotta watch Private Pyle


on jelly donut patrol.

Because just when you think that the worst crime Captain Obvious is perpetrating this time is the debasement and pifflization of my favorite language, he goes suddenly malevolent and slips the razor blade into his mushy apple of a column.

So today, the Captain boldly leaps right into the NIE controversy thusly:

"There are two intelligence analyses that are relevant to the balance of power between the U.S. and Iran — one is the latest U.S. assessment of Iran, which certainly gave a much more complex view of what is happening there. The other is the Iranian National Intelligence Estimate of America…"

That’s right; by skipping boldly over the whole, tawdry “Holy Mother of God, just when you thought the Bush Regime could not possibly humiliate itself further, or wank away even one more ounce of our Precious Bodily Credibility…” aspect of the story, and fictioning up a whole ‘nother “IE” -- an “Iranian National Intelligence Estimate” – the Captain curries himself a whole ‘nother hobby horse to ride.

The Captain then spins dramatically away from the audience, spirit-gums an even more massive and ominously sincere moustache over his own, permanently-affixed Moustache of Understanding, whirls back even more dramatically, and finishes his opening paragraph with (emphasis dramatically added):

"… which — my guess — would read something like this:"

(Looks vaguely Heavenward while dramatically narrows eyes, pulls his crushed-velvet, drama-infused “Suck On This” cape around him [very dramatically], his and curls his tiny and nearly-human-looking hands into very dramatic, pudgy, talon-like thingies, and intones…)

"To: President Ahmadinejad

From: The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence

Subject: America"

Then he spends a lot of rarefied columnage nagging “Americans” for being stupid.

Also lots of other words are “in quotes”, which further heightens the Captain’s sense of drama…if one were to define “drama” as, say, Steven Segal trying to head-butt his way through “Lear” by flourishing wildly-out-of-place menacing looks every few seconds.

And going “Bwahahahahaha!” a lot.

With his arms akimbo.

Is it all creepily pathetic? Pathetically hilarious? Hilariously creepy?

Must I choose?

Suffice it to say I ground a solid quarter inch of enamel off my back molars reading the damned thing: half for yet another reminder of just how utterly, breathtakingly, talentless Friedman really is when it comes to the simple craft of writing, and half for reading it in the acutely painful light of the fact that he gets paid enormous sums of money for producing excrement that is almost always this bad or worse.

So having wowed us with his impish “quotiness” and ability to perfectly mimic the creative writing efforts of an imagination-challenged fifth-grader scrambling to throw something together before the bell rings, he reaches Three!Count!Em!Three! conclusions, which I will quote verbatim.

"…
We now have “high confidence” that America is on a path of self-destruction, for three reasons:"

And here – right here -- is the point in the piece where Friedman stops being a sad shit-stained clown of a man and lets his ugly, twisted little heart shine right through.

"First, 9/11 has made America afraid and therefore stupid. The “war on terrorism” is now so deeply imbedded in America’s psyche that we think it is “highly likely” that America will continue to export more fear than hope and will continue to defend things like torture and Guantánamo Bay prison and to favor politicians like Mr. Giuliani, who alienates the rest of the world."

Notice that Friedman repeats the word “America(n)” three times.

Because like Joe Klein and David Brooks and David Broder and all the rest of his litter mates, in the end Friedman is just a coward who, long, long ago started giving the wingnuts his milk money in exchange for them not beating his flat head into 'stache soup.

Like all the rest, Friedman’s pact with his personal Devil is that he will never, ever, ever form his mouth to speak this simple, ugly fact about American politics: Conservatives Are The Problem.

Everything else, however “true” it may be, is nothing but interesting architectural ornamentation on the brutal reality that, in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.

Friedman cannot bring himself to “report” on this simple, observable “reality” that anyone with half a mind and three working senses can perceive all around them; the same reality that the Conservative John Dean wrote about in “Conservatives Without Conscience” or the Conservative Kevin Phillips wrote about in “American Theocracy”. That America is being destroyed at every level by the deliberate actions of Authoritarian, and that with virtually no exception, all the fucking Authoritarian are now conveniently gathered in one political Party.

But to face that vital and overwhelmingly obvious fact, Captain Obvious would have to give up being a lying, gutless “Add both sides and divide by two” Centrist.

And the minute that happened Friedman would perish in a puff of epiphanic stink, so don’t hold your breath.

No 9/11 hasn’t made America stupid and afraid, Tom, so how about you sit back and see how that paragraph would read if we Secretly Substitute some stone-ground Accuracy for your usual Centrist Feculence:

9/11 has made America Conservatives and Useful Idiot 'Liberal' Hawk columnists like me afraid and therefore stupid. The “war on terrorism” is now so deeply imbedded in America’s the Right Wing Death Cult psyche that we think it is “highly likely” that America Republicans will continue to export more fear than hope and will continue to defend things like torture and Guantánamo Bay prison and to favor politicians like Mr. Giuliani, who alienates the rest of the world.

See what a difference a little truth can make, Tom?

Now let’s do the same with your second “conclusion”, because it isn’t “the U.S.” which opposes higher taxes to pay for vital infrastructure, is it Tom?

And it isn’t some politically non-denominational “primary campaigns” that have been reduced to flatter-the-simpleton panderfests focusing on gay marriage, flag burning and Biblical literalism, is it Tom?

See how it reads, Tom…

Second, at a time when America’s bridges, roads, airports and Internet bandwidth have fallen behind other industrial powers, including China, we believe that the U.S. Conservative Feudalist “Club for Growth” reptiles opposition to higher taxes — and the fact that the Republican primary campaigns primary campaigns have focused largely on gay marriage, flag-burning and whether the Christian Bible is the literal truth — means it is “highly unlikely” that America will arrest its decline.

…when you’re not too fucking chickenshit to tell the plain truth?

When you don’t feel you have to torture the facts so you can still pretend that Centrism is anything but a synonym for “lying media whore”?

Third, all the U.S. presidential candidates Republican Candidates are distancing themselves from the core values that made America such a great power and so different from us — in particular America’s long commitment to free trade, open immigration and a reverence for scientific enquiry wherever it leads. Our intel analysts are baffled that the leading Democrat, Mrs. Clinton, no longer believes in globalization and the leading Republican, Mr. Huckabee, never believed in evolution.

Yes, Tom; because being an dutifully MSM Villager means you actually have to put yourself over and over and over again in the ridiculous position of arguing that someone insisting that a few of the more ruinous effects of Global Capitalists Gone Wild “free trade” might need to be humanely mitigated…. is exactly as bad as the man running for the leader of one of the most technologically advanced and dependent civilization on Earth professing his belief in the scientific superiority of a Bronze Age superstition.

“U.S. politicians seem determined to appeal either to the most nativist extremes in their respective parties — or to tell voters that something Americans call “the tooth fairy” will make their energy, budget, educational and Social Security deficits painlessly disappear.”

"... nativist extremes in their respective parties"?

OK, does anyone know what an Extreme Nativist Liberal might look like, because I don’t know as I’ve ever seen one?

For that matter, does anyone know any Progressives who believe for a minute that our nation’s energy, budget or educational problems are going to “painlessly disappear”?

Fifty years from now, one of the enduring mysteries of America in the late-20th and early-21st centuries will be the delusional, often borderline-catatonic behavior of the media.

They will say “If, out of some deranged abuse of the concept of ‘objectivity’, any meteorologist of that era had simply refused to report on a hurricane bearing down on coastal cities -- or had refused to attribute the aftermath of destruction and loss of life to the hurricane out of a fear of being ‘judgmental’ -- that meteorologist would have been fired instantly and probably tried and convicted for a variety of charges of fraud and acts against the public good.”

They will say “And yet virtually all main stream political journalists of that era, when confronted with the fact that really evil men with really evil motives drive the Republican Party, simply refused to acknowledge their existence. Refused to see the unique, overwhelming and malignant influence on civil society the theocrats and fascists were having, or the tremendous destruction they were leaving in their wake.”

They will say “In that era, people who got paid handsomely to tell the truth, spent enormous amounts of time and money to make sure that one of the Big, Important Truths of their time was never spoken aloud or in any way acknowledged."

They will say “And once the Big Lie of that era -- that both sides must be either painted as exactly and equally wrong all the time about everything, or whatever it was it was Clinton’s fault -- was punctured, the Great Media Ponsi Scheme collapsed almost overnight.“

They will say “And that was the day the journalismist career of Tom Friedman ended."