A Scammer Darkly

One of the old haunts I almost never visit anymore is the Charlie Rose Show.

Back in the days when the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was trying on new names. I would drop in every now and then to enjoy the show's leisurely pace and unusual cross-section of authors, artists, entrepreneurs and political-types.  But that was many years ago, and the life has long since leaked out of the old place, and what was once interesting and distinctive has become waxen and moldered: the Bransen of political opinion shows where the stars of yesteryear can still wow their octogenarian fans with their greatest hits of the 1990s.

Hey look, there's Tom Friedman talking about China...jobs...and the internet!

And there's Donald Rumsfeld talking about fucking app development?!

And there's David Brooks playing name-drop bingo with Charlie Rose and crying softly into his $36 artisanal craft beer over how sad it is that Both Sides...Both Sides...Both Sides...have let him -- and, by extension, every Reasonable Person in America -- down so terribly (sorry, no shorter clips were available, so watch or don't watch, I get paid either way!)

But here's the thing.  This interview -- which, I'll grant you is mostly a meandering hot-air balloon excursion through the usual Brooks flapdoodle -- does have both real, morbid entertainment value and provides (what I am sure was) unintentional insight into the Broken Beltway Brain.  Because once you jettison all of Brooks' ponderous blather about The Nature of Love and God and Man and subtract out the side-trips through his "writing process" (Piles, Charlie.  Lots and lots of piles all over my living room.) what you have is a living portrait of a Substance-D junkie from "A Scanner Darkly".

A split-brain impairment in which the two haves of the patient's brain no longer even speak to each other but instead are in a state of constant conflict.

So, during the first part of the interview, the left half of David Brooks' brain was deeply shaken by the discovery that his Republican party is full of...well...Republicans!

At the 2:30 mark, Brooks cops to having missed the rise of Trump completely.

Brooks:  I messed up big time in not knowing Trump was coming.  And so when something like that happens  you take a look at yourself and you think "What did I miss about America?"  And...I'm...too much in the Acela corridor.  I've gotta get out.  That's one thing.  

But he's gonna do better!

Brooks:  Believe me, I travel every week, but I'm at a college here...so I'm always within the bubble.  And so I've gotta get out.  But then the other thing is, like, I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, so it's time to take some chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal -- the emotional realm, and I've...got nothing to lose...

Carmine Falcone would disagree:

People from your world have so much to lose. Now you think because your Thatcher and your Reagan have gone tits up you know about the ugly side of life, but you don't. You've never tasted desperate. You're David Brooks, the prince of the Acela Corridor, you'd have to go a thousand miles to meet someone who didn't know your name. So don't come down here with your anger, trying to prove something to yourself. This is a world you don't understand. And you always fear what you don't understand.

Carmine speaks truth.  Brooks is incapable of doing better because he can still afford to keep what he fears on the other side of a mountain of money and privilege.

At the 13:47 mark, Mr. Rose gets back to asking how in the name of TED Talk Jesus did all of this awful shit happen!?

Rose: So tell me back to what you referenced...how has your evolution taken place on the question of Donald Trump?  Where was it? What was the interim? And where are you now?

Brooks:  Well I just...

Rose:  Because you've been very strong...

Brooks:  Well, I mean, I didn't take him seriously for the longest time.  'Cause I knew there was dislocation -- there was this coalescence of the dispossessed out in the country. But I didn't take...think they would turn their dispossession to him.  Just 'cause I don't think he answers any of their problems.

Rose:  But do you know why they think he does?

Brooks:  Yeah.  I think...

Rose:  That's almost a more crucial point.

Brooks:  That's correct.  And so I think there are a couple of things going on here.  One, people are into manners.  They...they're...they're...attracted by revolutions in manners more than revolutions in policy.  And he has revolutionized the manners of how you run for president.

Rose:  What does that mean, "the manners of how you run for president"?

Brooks:  Well, so the first debate he had already insulted Carly Fiorina's face.  And Rand Paul was over there saying that "I'm not going to insult his looks, but I have a lot to work with over there." And that's just a way of talking that nobody had ever run for president that way.

Brooks:  So it's hyper-aggressive.  He took the style of professional wrestling, and he brought it to politics.

There follows a long discussion of masculinity which I will spare you.

Rose:  ...but does he mean what he says and say what he means?

Brooks:  [Trump] has a heartless view.  I get increasingly repulsed by him, to be honest.  I've rarely been this motivated, frankly, by a political figure in a negative way.  Also partly because I think he is taking a lot of people who have taken their economic lumps and he's telling them...

Rose:  He's telling them "I'm your hero".

Brooks:  It's authoritarian.  "They're all stupid and I can solve it simply".  But also, "You may not be thriving, but at least you're better than women, , and you're better than Muslims, and you're better than Mexicans."

After that, more yadda yadda yadda but, yes, Mr. Brooks grudgingly admits that Donald J. Trump will probably be the nominee of his party.

Rose:  So how did it happen?

Yes indeedy, that is the question.  How the name of God and Calvin Coolidge did this horrifying slab of fucking-awful come to be the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination of your party, David Brooks?

Brooks:  I think there are two big things.  One, much discussed, there is a Nicholas Confessori piece in the front page of the NYT that the Republican party was basically the party of the white working class and they spent 25 years harvesting their votes and offering them nothing.  And so that's one.

The second thing is that there is a slow-building, anti-political wave in this culture that's been going on for 30 years.  We live in a diverse country.  There are two ways to govern a diverse country.  One is through politics, which is through negotiation and style and compromise -- which is unsatisfying.   You do a deal with people you disagree with, but you have to listen to them, you acknowledge [them].  So that's politics.  The other way is through force.  You just get a strong man to bully his way through.  And so we've gotten sick of politics, sick of compromise, and especially in the Republican party, the willingness to compromise has become sort of a sign of weakness.  And so the only alternative is force.  And so there has been this tolerance of an authoritarian personality type...

Mr. Brooks loves his passive voice like a dog loves licking his junk, and he'd rather chew his own arm off before bringing Hate Radio and Fox News into this, but buried in this pile of words was at least an acknowledgement that 1) GOP elites like David Brooks have been conning the base into voting against their own interests for 25 years, 2) "Compromise" has become a deathword within the Republican party and, 3) the GOP base are flocking to "an authoritarian personality type":

Brooks:  Do we think the State Department is filled with idiots right now?  I mean, problems are complicated and the big problems of the world are not a question of one person calling another and being really tough on the table.  The big problems of the world are structural.

Rose:  So you think you were wrong?  That you had somehow been on the Acela too much and had not done what?

Brooks:  As I say, I'm out in the country ... every week I'm somewhere ... but somehow I didn't see it coming.  I'm...I'm...I'm...I was not alone in that. A lot of us didn't see it coming.

Rose:  Oh I don't know anybody that saw it coming.

Brooks (smirking):  Yeah, I'm sure now there are people claiming they did but...um...

Hey, laughing boy, I'm not surprised that you have no idea who we are since we're never asked to pull up a chair at the Big Acela Table. but some of us really did see this coming.  And that scares you shitless.

Brooks (continues):  ...in part because we've seem this kind of candidate rise and fall.  And the party that has nominated Mitt Romney and John McCain and Bob Dole and George W. Bush nominates a certain kind of person, and suddenly we've got a black swan.  Nontheless, there are a lot of Trump voters, and I would run into them but I wouldn't...I didn't take it seriously.  Enough.  Just maybe blinded by my own prejudices.  And I've had trouble trying to think through the people who do vote for him.  How does one regard them?  And so I have some level of sympathy becaus obviously they're...they've been dislocated by the modern economy and technology.  On the other hand, I think they're supporting a guy who is polluting the cultural atmosphere in which we our kids are raised... And I think voters have to have some culpability for that.

Brooks:  The Republican party had grown obsolete.  It had been imprisoned by Reaganite categories which were great for the 1980s but, hey, it's 26 years later.  And Donald Trump was the agent of Death for that old structure.  And that old structure is never coming back.  ...  The problem with the Reaganite Orthodoxy which imprisoned the Republican party was that you had all these big problems -- wage stagnation, inequality -- and the Republicans couldn't have any response because they didn't believe in government for anything.

Thus concludes the left brain portion of our show.  And what have we learned?

That for 25 years the GOP base has been too stupid or brainwashed to notice that they've been screwed, blued and tattooed by their leadership.

That they're dumb enough and angry enough to elect an outright thug and fascist.

That they believe you can't spell "compromise" without "Dirty Commie Bastard!" and Better Dead than Red, bitches!

And that while the lowliest Liberal bloggers have been warning about these conditions within the GOP for years,  America's Most Respected And Highly Paid Conservative Public Intellectual was caught completely by surprise.  But he promises to sojourn into the heart of American darkness and compare notes on Edmund Burke with shit-shovelers in Nebraska and pawn brokers in Kansas, so it's all cool.

And then, around the 33:10, the Beltway factory default Both Siderist setting in Mr. Brooks right brain kicked in and the lying begins.

Brooks:  I have come sympathy for Sanders because he is a man of integrity and consistency. But we have to think for all of our candidates, "execution strategy".  How is any of this going to happen? And I'm  not sure any candidate really solves it.  I'm not sure the primaries allow them to solve it. How ya gonna get 60 votes?

Stop.  Stop right there and unpack why you need "60 votes".

You need 60 votes to overcome the Republican strategy for the last seven years of obstructing and filibustering  every single fucking thing Barack Obama has proposed, no matter how reasonable or moderate.  A strategy to which the Republican party has been so lockstep asshole dedicated that they have been willing to filibuster their own bills just to they could deny Barack Obama anything that resembles a "win".

From Media Matters:

Quite predictably, that problem has only worsened since 2012, which is what Mann and Ornstein address in their latest offering, "It's Even Worse Than It Was." 

"It is the radicalization of the Republican party," they recently wrote, "that has been the most significant and consequential change in American politics in recent decades." 

"The radicalization of the Republican party" -- talk about the topic the Beltway press simply doesn't want to dwell on, let alone acknowledge. Instead, the press has clung to its preferred narrative about how the GOP is filled with honest brokers who are waiting to work in good faith with the White House. Eager to maintain a political symmetry in which both sides are responsible for sparking conflict (i.e. center-right Republicans vs. center-left Democrats), the press effectively gave Republicans a pass and pretended their radical, obstructionist ways represented normal partisan pursuits. (They didn't.)  

Today's Republican Party is acting in a way that defies all historic norms. We saw it with the GOP's gun law obstruction, the Violence Against Women Act obstruction, the sequester obstruction, Supreme Courtobstruction, minimum wage obstruction, 9/11 first responder obstruction, government shutdownobstruction, immigration reform obstruction, Chuck Hagel's confirmation obstruction, Susan Rice secretary of state obstruction, paid leave obstruction, Hurricane Sandy emergency relief obstruction, the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act obstruction, and the consistent obstruction of judicial nominees...

Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Rose.  Please proceed....

Rose:  You would think that somebody running for president would have thought of it.  That's what you would hope. ... 

Brooks:  I think what Barack Obama taught us, it's not enough to be a skilled politician. He came in wanting to transcend every line you could imagine and create a governing majority. But his policies that he came in with were orthodox Democratic policies. So you have to have a set of policies that cuts across lines.  That's a little from column A and a little from column B.

Bull---shit.

As everyone (except, apparently, Charlie Rose and David Brooks) remembers, Barack Obama's signature first term achievement was the passage of the Affordable Care Act to fulfill his signature campaign promise of fixing our tragically broken health care system,  The ACA was in no way orthodox Democratic policy -- it was a scaled-up version of the Conservative Heritage Foundation's health care proposal from the mid-1990s, which had been proudly implemented in Massachusetts by its Republican governor, Mitt Romney.

The ACA also infuriated President Obama's Liberal base because it unilaterally eliminated both the possibility of a single-payer system, and even the much-weaker alternative of the so-called "public option".  In addition.  President Obama went hat-in-hand to his vanquished opponents and asked them pretty, pretty please to participate.  To bring their best ideas to the table, because while he had a sweeping mandate to get 40 million uninsured Americans covered and control health care costs, he made it abundantly clear that he didn't care how we did it.

The "loyal opposition" told him to fuck off, and instead of constructive dialogue we got two years of wingnut-media-driven death panel and birther hysteria and other poison fruits of the Caucus Room conspiracy:  that well-documented cabal of GOP leaders who met in secret to plot how best to destroy the newly-elected President as he tried to navigate the worst financial debacle in 74 years and get us out of two, disastrous Republican wars.

And the thing is Mr. Rose and Mr. Brooks know all of this perfectly well.  They're simply lying -- lying automatically -- because when facts run inconveniently contrary to their Beltway fairy tales...those facts are tossed out the nearest window.

Rose:  He thought he could prevail.  He thought his own pursuit of bipartisanship ...would overwhelm the opposition.   

Brooks:  I think he had a genuine transpartisan aspiration but his policies were not transpartisan. They were very predictable.  

Mr. Brooks then makes up a completely imaginary "poverty policy" for which he provides absolutely no details but which he is sure would definitely get 60 votes by giving both "progressive Democrats" and "evangelicals" something.

Blah

Blah

Blah

Brooks: ...but you've got to be willing to step outside of the orthodoxy of your party and say I'm going to take a little from them, and a little from us.

Rose:  And why was he incapable of that?

Brooks:  Because the people in your own party go crazy if you step outside.

Rose:  How do we change the politics then?  So that it's not destructive.

Brooks:  Partly it's the donors.  The people who rise in Congress tend to be partisan.  But it's also leadership.  You have five people at the top of this society -- the four congressional leaders and the president -- and they have to say "This is over".  We have to cling together...grab you by the hip and walking through this.  And we are going to govern in a bipartisan way.

 Let's let Media Matter have the last word, shall we?

The 2014 obstruction of the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act was especially galling, as a single Republican senator blocked a vote on the crucial veterans bill.

At the time of the bill's blockade, Media Matters noted that there was virtually no coverage of the radical obstructionism on CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC or PBS, as well as news blackouts in the nation's six largest newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, The Denver Post, and Chicago Tribune

In other words, the GOP's radical brand of obstructionism not only doesn't get highlighted as something notable, radical, and dangerous; it's often met with a collective shrug as the press pretends these kind of nonstop impediments are commonplace...

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.” 

-- Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

Spins and Roses -- UPDATE

This time around and right on schedule, it fell to the vapid, unctuous Charlie Rose to let one of the Villager's favorite naughty clowns

back out of the penalty box (h/t Harvey Chess)

I guess since David Gregory

was tapped to retrieve the little lost lamb de jour last time -- expertly fellating disgraced Republican pervert Newt Gingrich back to Beltway Respectability at the tail end of 2010 -- it's only fair that Rose would have to be the one to lay back and do his bit for the Empire.

I also note for the record that Rose performed his duty almost exactly one month to the day after Halperin fell from grace from the Village which (for what I assume are accounting and HR reasons) is now the standard time-out for bad little Beltway monkeys who get caught flinging the wrong brand of poo and which (were I a better writer) I might describe as "In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed/ Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love/ Over the nasty sty...".

Here are some highlights of the conversation (that included Peter Orszag, Al Hunt and John Heilemann) which includes a fairly exactly transcription, an occasional aside from me, and some stuff I threw in to be mean because, frankly, until I saw the video I had almost managed to blot from my mind exactly how much of a zombie-affected waste of carbon Halperin is.


First comes the pure, Centrist chum.

Halperin: I think you can say that theres the glimmer of the possibility of bipartisan cooperation, which we need on almost every issue that's facing the country today.

Halperin: Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner voted for the same piece of legislation today. That's a good thing.

Halperin: Very challenge facing the country now going to require John Boehner and Harry Reid and President Dick to have an agreement on how to dick thing forward...

Rose: Does Obama have a plan?

Halperin: He has one or two things he trots out every now and then. Increasing exports. Patent reform. But they all suck and the public will think they're stupid.

John Heilemann: This has all been very polite, but I don't have anything like the optimism
of Mark Halperin.

driftglass: the "optimism of Mark Halperin"? This is my esophagus, filling with vomit.

John Heilemann: This whole thing has been an embarrassment...and a spectacle, that has ended up with a deal that's a sham. An object lesson in eveything that's wrong...everything that's dysfunctional about Washington...Both parties...everyone has made a fool of themselves in this process.

John Heilemann: It's great that we didn't have a default, but default should never have been on the table in the first place. Neither side really compromised. Democrats were beaten into submission on a few issues, but no one gave to accomplish something great here.


Rose: Who are the political winners here?

John Heilemann: The only political winner I see right now is the Tea Party. ... Which came in with a very clear set of goals. They kept demanding. They banged their hand on the table and serially for the last three months Democrats gave in on everything that they wanted to the point where the Tea Party got 95% of what it was demanding.

driftglass: You will note that Heilmann doesn't even pretend to reconcile his two, diametrically opposed observations. That "neither side compromised" but that "Democrats gave in on everything that they wanted to the point where the Tea Party got 95% of what it was demanding". And that this was somehow the fault of both sides.

But out of this cesspool of failure and madness, Halperin finds a hero.

Care to guess who?

Halperin: For what [Boehner] was trying to do, I think he did a pretty good job. ,,, [Republicans] largely controlled the contours and the terrain of this deal. A very cool customer as he always is in talking to his members, knowing where the votes are. It's a credit to his experience and his demeanor.

driftglass: Sure Boehner knew where the votes were, because most of the time they were in Cantor's pocket, and Boehner had to beg like a dog and fail repeatedly to get his own people to follow him before Cantor let him touch them. But facts never penetrate Halperin's big, Lucite noggin.

Observe now Halperin's complete, psychotic incomprehension at the motives of human beings.

Halperin: Its still not clear to me how Democrats are living with themselves over this deal.
Because they control more of the government. It's still not clear to me why they gave in...

...wait for it...

...wait for it...

...except that they weren't willing to default.

That's right. Mark Halperin genuinely does not understand why someone would not be willing to blow up the world economy in order to win a political fight. Which is why his next statement is no big surprise.

Halperin: McConnell is the Big Winner of inside politics; of enhancing his status among elites.

Observe now -- when asked the question of whether the GOP will appoint Teabaggers to the Super Duper Congress and thus destroy any chance of any tax increases of any kind -- how Halperin instantly and completely reverses his own assessment of the wise and strong leadership of the GOP.

Halperin: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell would be killed by their Party if the appointed anyone with the least bit of squishiness on the question of tolerating revenue... I don't think they can appoint anyone moderate.

Hey, what about progress in the Super Duper Congress now?

Halperin: Gonna be tough because Republicans are gonna insist on burning "Obamacare" to the ground and pissing on its ashes, and the crazy Left probably won't go for that. Also dick, dick, dick, dick ,dick.


Halperin: I am mystified... Every poll shows that the public is completely sympathetic to the "balanced way" Obama was proposing. And yet the Tea Party sensibility dominated...set the table for the terms of the discussion.

Rose: What could Obama have done differently?

Halperin: Obama should have played golf with Boehner 18 months ago, and every month since. Then he [and here comes the psychosis again]...should have...found a way to win this argument!

Rose: How? How could he have "won the argument"?

Halperin: I don't know.... It's strange that on the central premise of the dispute, a great public speaker had public opinion on his side and couldn't make that animate the negotiations.

And this is where Halperin genuinely creeps me out.

Paul Krugman succinctly and clearly described the key elements of the Debt Hostage Crisis here:

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

But Halperin's brain simply refuses to process that information. It just goes on strike. And because Halperin is not very bright -- an automaton, really, with a standard-issue, linear, doctrinaire Centrist liar CPU and without so much as an ounce of nuance or subtly -- he just goes full HAL 9000 when confronted with facts that directly contradict the lies he is hired to tell.

It is impossible for a robot like Halperin to accept or even acknowledge that his pals in the GOP took the global economy hostage. Or that taking the global economy hostage is, y'know, a bad thing.

Because to accept or even acknowledge that his pals in the GOP had done what they did -- or that it wasn't, in the end, really Obama who was the failure because it was all just politics and as Wizard-in-Chief he should have been able to magically talk them out of it -- would completely annihilate Halperin's degenerate world view at a single stroke.

So instead we get Halperin, staring blankly at nothing, smirk firmly affixed to the front of his skull, giving the talk-show equivalent of this response

to questions he dare not even think about honestly.

But Halperin didn't call President Obama a "dick" even once, which means we can all look forward to the full restoration of his Elite Villager Status, along with all the perks and privileges appertaining thereto.

UPDATE -- And like clockwork...

Mark Halperin to return to MSNBC after suspension
By Lisa de Moraes

After one month in the dog house, political analyst Mark Halperin will return to MSNBC Wednesday morning, returning to the scene of his crime — “Morning Joe.”
...

Beyond insulting my intelligence, the absurd pearl-clutching peek-a-boo theater our media overlords enacted to tug on Mark Halperin's corporate leash using the pretext of a mildly naughty word does not really offend me.

The existence of Mark Halperin offends me on too many levels to count.

C3-BOBO On Charlie Rose Tonight

Oh boy!

So how did it go?

Imagine two hookers who have each mistaken the other for a wealthy John...

Sigh.

Perhaps later I'll get a few minutes to slant drill a little deeper into this incestuous media midden pile

but for now let's just say it wasn't exactly the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

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)