Political/Media Intervals I Have Known

I Am The Liberal Media

Shut Up and Go Away

Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this" moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.  

But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":

At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages.  For example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything, boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces 

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas. 

APR 28, 2003

... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are... 

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious B. Crumb caterwauling...

...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly backwards.  

It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.  Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right. 

And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage. They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

And there was never any  magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon dream palaces down.  None of them ever missed a meal.  Most of the got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. 

Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and grifters who spread them get progressively richer.  And they will backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again. 

They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...

...they rejected...

...only days before...

2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) February 28, 2026

No Half Measures

In Certain Corners of The New York Times...

...it's always 2005.

A sheltering bower, protected from the real world by the Sulzberger family's firm belief that the nation is crying out for the opinions of these two bootless relics.

Burn The Lifeboats

Ghosts Of The Before Time: June 2005 -- How Bush's Iraq Debacle...

... turned Both Siderism from a journalistic fetish into journalism's Trump-enabling State Religion.  And why Thomas Friedman is dead to me, now and forever.

From June 15, 2005:

What this Liberal Sees… 

...when he looks at Iraq.

Tom Friedman has well and truly surpassed himself.

Just when you think Captain Obvious could not possibly crawl any further up into his own puffy little butt, he manages to scramble up those last, few inches and burst through into an entirely new, “Being John Malkovich” kind of alternate Friedman-iverse, populated exclusively by LSD-scalded dolts stagger in tiny circle, jabbering incessantly about how amazing their hands look, and how amazing the air is, and have you ever noticed how amazing my shoes look as they go flippy-flop, flippy-flop ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.?

You meet these kinds of blown-out stoners wandering in the parks sometimes, or cadging transfers in the cool, dank stairwells of CTA stops. Pupils as big as manhole covers. Hair that’s become a free-range ecosystem for lice and roaches and ringworms.

What I usually do is give them some change and steer way the hell around them.

What I do not do is let them write for the New York Fucking Times.

Friedman has already been righteously and rightfully beaten down as the leading-edge of the execrable Apologist Wedge by Atrios, Gilliard, and god knows who all else, so I will keep this short. Ok, short-ish.

Here’s a tiny sip of the rancid stew:

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: June 15, 2005

Ever since Iraq's remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don't want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.

First, Captain Obvious has again renewed his wretched subscription to the despicable and now, really, outright treasonable world-view that

A) No one is talking about Iraq. Which is such an nakedly demented lie that one must wonder if Tommy-boy has, at last, just lost his mind. As I sat at Wrigley field last week, in a park packed to capacity with highly-focused and well-informed Cubs and BoSox fans, at no point did I ever feel compelled to lean over to my fiends and remark -- shouting over the noise – that it was sure a pity the no one wanted to talk about baseball.

Had I done so, my friends (being my friends) would have, have cut off my beer, gotten me out of the hot sun and into an ER immediately. We’ll immediate…after the ninth inning, but they would have been very concerned.

What they wouldn’t have done is give me a column in the New York Fucking Times.

B) The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!

What a lazy pint of watery poo he is, and if that were all he is, that would be bad enough, but with his second absurd “indictment -- "Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed.” – he definitively crosses the line into outright treachery.

So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate -- leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn't act right now we were fucked.

Mushroom-cloud fucked.

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.

But MOST of all, that the fire was nipping at our heels. It was so urgent, so imperative. that if we didn’t want to see our children perish, we had to jump right now.

So we did.

Convinced by Bush that it was the only option left to us -–and that he had planned carefully for the consequences -- we leaped out of window and into the sky.

We jumped, because we were told we had to.

And in jumping, we committed our troops, our nation and our good name to the brutal calculus of war; to factors beyond our control, and now we are plunging down and down and down into tragedy.

And as we fall we find that the building was not on fire at all.

That the people that pushed us into space had lied to us.

That the parachute of carefully planning that they were supposed to have prepared to save us from ruin had been packed with nothing but empty slogans and ideology-drunk fantasies.

Now we are falling, out of control.

And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right? Any pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic?

Sorry, Friedman, but no.

Now whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs we might have had have become irrelevant. Flapping our arms doesn’t matter. Prayer doesn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations are all that matter.

Once in the air, my nation became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

And if you had bothered to pull your head out of your ass long enough to actually look, you would see that these are what the faces of Liberals look like…

…as we are forced to watch the fall, and as we are forced to listen to preening rodents hector us for not paying the right kind of attention.

Here ends today's sojourn to the Before Time.

I Am The Liberal Media.

Professional Left Podcast Episode #805: No Fair Remembering The Friedman Unit

“"On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."” -- Bill Kristol, April 1, 2003

Links:  

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

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

Zombie Beltway Hack Proves He Still Has More Hack To Give

As I wrote back in 2020, if you are a Liberal blessed/cursed with the superpower of Memory, you may remember that Thomas Friedman began working as a beloved Sulzberger family house plant in the same year that Dynasty premiered on ABC, NASA launched the first space shuttle and the first DeLorean rolled off the assembly line.

Thomas L. Friedman became the paper’s foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. He joined the paper in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984, and then in Washington as the diplomatic correspondent in 1989, and later the White House correspondent and economic correspondent.

And during that long, long career, Thomas Friedman has racked up a record of being both more egregiously wrong about more big things than anyone I can think of, and more predictably wrong in exactly the same way over and over again than anyone else I can think of.

The occasion for my writing the November 2020 post was Friedman elbowing his way onto CNN to insist that the best case scenario would be for Biden to win and Republican to hold the senate so both will be forced to compromise. 

And of the earliest post I wrote on blog back in 2005 was about Friedman trying to "Both Sides" the Iraq War.  

And now, 17 years later, it is possible that Friedman has come within a whisker of equaling the staggering insipidity of his grotesque 2005 Bush Clusterfuck hot take with this.

My column: Biden-Cheney 2024? https://t.co/T3OaMtWbhC

— Thomas L. Friedman (@tomfriedman) January 12, 2022

But of course no matter what he says or does, as long as Friedman remains a beloved Sulzberger family house plant and continues to be protected by his fellow Beltway denizens, he will never be held accountable for any of the ridiculous shit he says.

Burn The Lifeboats

We'll All Remember Where We Were The Day Tom Friedman...

... finally ran out of imaginary cab drivers to "interview".

This is so perfect I almost can't decide if it's an actual Tom Friedman column or a piss take of a Tom Friedman columnhttps://t.co/emQTGd1us7 pic.twitter.com/u8X2Z8LmUz

— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) August 20, 2021

I was tempted to write this up in greater detail, but the Twitter ratio that sprang to life from Tom "Friedman Unit/Suck On This" Friedman breaking out a fresh nib for his New York Times pen to opine about this subject -- 

Three People I Would Interview About Afghanistan

President Johnson, what did you think of Joe Biden’s speech about quitting Afghanistan?

Johnson: I listened to it, and I have to say...

--  came so close to being a global SOC7 divide-by-zero error that it damn near broke the interwebs.

 

Update: Thanks to Alert Reader kurt63 for passing this along!

Someone posted this recently... pic.twitter.com/6VKN2xGNst

— kurt63 (@kurt6315) August 20, 2021

Burn The Lifeboats

Thomas Friedman Is Forever

If you are Liberal blessed/cursed with the superpower of Memory, you may remember that Thomas Friedman began working as a beloved Sulzberger family house plant in the same year that Dynasty premiered on ABC, NASA launched the first space shuttle and the first DeLorean rolled off the assembly line.

Thomas L. Friedman became the paper’s foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. He joined the paper in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984, and then in Washington as the diplomatic correspondent in 1989, and later the White House correspondent and economic correspondent.

And during that long, long career, Thomas Friedman has racked up a record of being both more egregiously wrong about more big things than anyone I can think of, and more predictably wrong in exactly the same way over and over again than anyone else I can think of.

One of the earliest post I wrote on blog back in 2005 was about Friedman trying to "Both Sides" the Iraq War.  And seven years later Friedman was still so very much at the very top of the Being Horribly Wrong About Everything Game that Andy Cobb was moved to make this very fine video:

But of course no matter what he says or does, as long as Friedman remains a beloved Sulzberger family house plant and continues to be protected by his fellow Beltway denizens, he will never be held accountable for any of the ridiculous shit he says.

Ridiculous shit like this:

Tom Friedman is on CNN right now saying the best case scenario is Biden winning and Republicans holding the senate so both will be forced to compromise.

LOL.

— Nicholas Miller (@Nick_L_Miller) November 3, 2020

The Tip Jar Is Open.

Tom Friedman is Both Lazy and Stupid.

If today's dreadful exercise by Tom Friedman in drunk revisionist history, magical thinking, and radical Both Siderist idiocy seems vaguely familiar to you --

What America Needs Next: A Biden National Unity Cabinet
We need a political system that mirrors the best in us.

-- it should.

Because it is virtually identical to the drunk revisionist, magical thinking, radically idiotic "OMFG Democrats Should Do National Unity" column that Tom Friedman wrote less than a month and a half ago, just before Michael Bloomberg's campaign came a cropper, as the kids say.

Dems, You Can Defeat Trump in a Landslide
You can promise voters something our narrow-minded president won’t.

If this election turns out to be just between a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath, we will be in a terrible, terrible place as a country. How do we prevent that?

That’s all I am thinking about right now. My short answer is that the Democrats have to do something extraordinary — forge a national unity ticket the likes of which they have never forged before. And that’s true even if Democrats nominate someone other than Bernie Sanders...

The rush of events have forced Friedman to make some minor modifications -- for example, swapping Biden to the top of the ticket, and demoting Bloomberg to Imaginary Treasury Secretary -- but it's basically (February 25, 2020) --

What would this super ticket look like? Well, I suggest Sanders — and Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be his most viable long-term challenger — lay it out this way...

“I am asking Mitt Romney to be my commerce secretary. He is the best person to promote American business and technology abroad — and it is vital that the public understands that my government will be representing all Americans, including Republicans.

-- the same fucking tripe (April 4, 2020) --

In the last Democratic debate, Joe Biden declared that he would nominate a woman as his vice-presidential running mate. That felt right at the time. But times have changed. Biden needs to go much, much further: At the Democratic convention he needs to name not just his vice president, but his entire cabinet. And it needs to be a totally different kind of cabinet — a national unity cabinet — from Democrats on the Bernie Sanders left to Republicans on the Mitt Romney right. Why?...

-- pushing the same toxic lie.

That out there, somewhere, there exists some completely different Republican Party that is not the Republican Party which is currently destroying everything it touches.   From Friedman today:

Such a national unity government might pay another dividend: fracture the Trump/ McConnell/evangelical/Limbaugh/Fox/G.O.P. — a warped coalition dedicated to nothing but its own power and cutting taxes on the rich. Our country needs a healthy conservative party. Trump’s G.O.P. is not healthy.

Except. There. Is.  No.  Such.  Party.  That "Trump/ McConnell/evangelical/Limbaugh/Fox/G.O.P." coalition?  That is the fucking Republican Party you buffoon.  A party of bigots and imbeciles which has been going very publicly insane for the past 40 years and which is rotten from top to bottom and side to side.

And yet, in the face of mountains of unimpeachable evidence to the contrary, from his Ivory Tower of privilege and political infantilism, Tom Friedman still insists that, for the good of the country,  it is the responsibility of the Democratic Party and only the Democratic Party to share power with a political cult which has openly declared war on everything the Democratic Party believes in, and has shown over and over again that the minute it gets its filthy paws on any political power whatsoever, it will unhesitatingly use that power to wreck the country rather than let Democrats govern as Democrats.

For you longtime readers, you will recognize this as a slight variation on Tom Friedman's long-time, brainsick fetish for solving all national problems by waving a wand and creating a Magical Centrist Third Party ("The Obligatory Tom Friedman Third Party Column"), but at least once upon a time he used to be a bit more careful about spacing those asinine columns further apart instead running virtually the same column, in the same paper, twice in less than a month and a half.

So in addition to being one of the most indestructibly stupid pundits in the business, we can now say with equal confidence that Mr. Friedman is also very lazy. 

Fortunately for him, he nominally works for the Sulzberger family, who have a long and storied history of not caring at all about such things.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

What Is Dead Can Never Die: Inexplicably Still-Employed Pundit Edition

With Tom Friedman and David Brooks slugging it out to see who can dominate "Stupidest Take By The Most Cartoonishly Terrible New York Times Pundit" contest, it sure feels like the high cotton days of Dubya Administration --

-- all over again.

Both men have had long, long careers which could be fairly summed up as a series of horrendously bad political takes interspersed with maudlin hand-wringing, but as beloved Sulzberger family house-pets, neither man ever has to worry about being market-corrected into obscurity and unemployment.

I Want Just Enough Socialism To Make The Sulzberger Family Weep Tears of Blood

One of the More Startling Uglinesses the Trump Administration Has Revealed...

...is the The New York Times is still paying The Mustache of Understanding actual money to poop words out onto its op-ed page.

Dems, You Can Defeat Trump in a Landslide
You can promise voters something our narrow-minded president won’t.

Wow!  That's great news Tom.  How exactly will Democrats accomplish this impossible thing?

What would this super ticket look like? Well, I suggest Sanders — and Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be his most viable long-term challenger — lay it out this way:

“I want people to know that if I am the Democratic nominee these will be my cabinet choices — my team of rivals. I want Amy Klobuchar as my vice president. Her decency, experience and moderation will be greatly appreciated across America and particularly in the Midwest. I want Mike Bloomberg (or Bernie Sanders) as my secretary of the Treasury. Our plans for addressing income inequality are actually not that far apart, and if we can blend them together it will be great for the country and reassure markets. I want Joe Biden as my secretary of state. No one in our party knows the world better or has more credibility with our allies than Joe. I will ask Elizabeth Warren to serve as health and human services secretary. No one could bring more energy and intellect to the task of expanding health care for more Americans than Senator Warren...

It goes on like that.  And on.  And on.  And on.  And just when you think this very bad acid flashback has peaked and you're coming in for a landing...

I am asking Mitt Romney to be my commerce secretary. He is the best person to promote American business and technology abroad — and it is vital that the public understands that my government will be representing all Americans, including Republicans.

On one beat or another, Tom Friedman has been drawing a paycheck from the Sulzberger family for 28 years.

28 years.

And for the last decade on that teat, he has returned over and over again to his creepy fetish for a Sensible Center Frankenparty stitched together out of his favorite bits of various humans who have momentarily captured his attention.  This is from a Columbia Journalism Review's article from 2011:

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.

...

At this point, there is no reason to attribute anything other that the worst possible motives to the Sulzberger family for keeping hacks like Ffriedman on the payroll decades after they've rocketed past their sell-by day.

I Want Just Enough Socialism To Make Charlie Sykes Weep Tears of Blood

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

In The Beginning...

"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- William S. Burroughs, "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" with a big h/t to Neo Tuxedo for this quote.

For the record, I am perfectly aware that the roots of our long and tortured political history go back to Beringa, Eric the Red and Strom Thurmond quitting the Democratic Party in 1948 to form the segregationist States' Rights Democratic Party also known as the "Dixiecrats" (note:  The Dixiecrats were later dissolved and then gradually reconstituted into a much larger, more powerful and better-funded segregationist party called "The Republicans".)

But because this post will not be one billion words long, it will not cover anything like a territory that vast.  (I just told you that to trick you into reading this far! Insert Evil Laugh here!) So pedants and "whatabouters" take it elsewhere, preferably to Blogger or Wordpress where you can start your own blog and publish your own sweeping and comprehensive history of American politics.  Which I will gladly read and carp about :-)

Instead what you'll get for the price of admission is a simplified overview of  "How We Got Here" spanning roughly one human generation:

In population biology and demography, the generation time is the average time between two consecutive generations in the lineages of a population. In human populations, the generation time typically ranges from 22 to 32 years.

Let us begin.

Wayback Wednesday: Globalization

Back in the late 1990s while Tom Friedman was profiting hugely from a globalization boner he got while  (no kidding) --

...eating a sushi box lunch on a Japanese bullet train after visiting a Lexus factory and reading an article about conflict in the Middle East.

-- and David Brooks was braying about how the productivity of the American worker had turned the American economy into an indestructible prosperity machine capable of indefinitely sustaining any level of tax cutting folly --

Yes, There Is a New Economy

Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable

MAR 19, 2001

...even if today's productivity improvements are only on the scale of, say, the improvements our economy saw after World War II, we may be in for a long and sunny ride. There is a rough historical pattern here. A new technology is invented. It takes a long time before people figure out how to use it. The electric motor was invented in the 1880s, but it didn't transform factories until the 1920s, economist Paul David has noted. Once the technology is fully deployed, however, there are decades of positive results. Daniel Sichel of the Federal Reserve points to previous technology-driven surges that lasted 10 and 25 years. That suggests we may still be near the beginning of this particular period of bounty.

If we are, an occasional period of slower growth or even a recession may occur, but the U.S. economy is fundamentally strong, and both laymen and legislators have good reasons to believe it will remain strong for many years. Industrial productivity is surging. Americans are not only the hardest working people on earth (the average American works about 10 weeks a year more than the average European) but also the most productive workers -- by far. If you measure value added per hour worked, Americans do about 20 percent better than Germans and the French, and 40 percent better than the Japanese.

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

-- one dirty hippie named Richard Sennett (about whom I have written once or twice) committed an unmitigated act of actual journalism by venturing to the Magic Mountain in Davos where the lords and ladies of capitalism had gathered and reported back on what they had in store for the rest of us.

His account from twenty years ago reads like it could have been ripped from pages of yesterday's New York Times. Here are his conclusions:

The dizzy life of Davos man

Every year, on a magic Alpine mountain, the monarchs of capitalism assemble their courtiers and meet to plot all our futures. Is the world safe in their hands? Richard Sennett thinks not

Richard Sennett Saturday 10 October 1998

...

Yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm. "We" is also a dangerous pronoun to them. They dwell comfortably in entrepreneurial disorder, but fear organised confrontation. They of course fear the resurgence of unions, but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who, in their jargon, are "left behind." They know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give, it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old English sense of the word, as pathways along which people can travel; durable and sustained paths of action are foreign territories.

It therefore seemed to me, as I wandered in and out of the conference halls, weaved through the tangle of limousines and police on the mountainous village streets, that this regime might at least lose its current hold over the imaginations and sentiments of those down below. I have learned from my family's bitter radical past; if change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programmes follow from those inner needs, I simply don't know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.

Once again, the dirty hippies were sounding the alarm bell in the night about dangerous forces that were being unleashed for the benefit a tiny, privileged minority at the expense of the rest of us.

Once again, none of the Very Serious People wanted to hear the roar of the avalanche until it was at their door.

As for Friedman and Brooks, I wonder whatever happened to those guys?

Laughed out of the business, one would assume.