…right now the Dems are too scared of alienating Joe Lieberman to do anything of the sort.

Right now? How about ever. Something they must put in the cocktail weenies in DC makes democrats cowardly in the face of batshit insanity.

Maybe we should start sending them weenie care packages so they don’t have to eat the local stuff.

I also think that the ‘Stache isn’t giving himself enough credit: Tom Friedman was plenty stupid before 9/11.

Can we not just tell Friedman that the US will get right onto it in, oh, six months or so…?

I agree that many of the policy ideas that ought to be our bread and butter right now–notions like sustainable development or healthcare for all–will continue to be percieved as beyond-the-pale-radical even if a democrat is elected. How sad that the political landscape evolves in ways that allow the center to shift it’s allegience between democratic and republican, but can never really permit us to expand our conception of what is possible.

It doesn’t give me much hope for us when it comes to confronting the real dangers we face.

9/11 has made us stupid.
Speak for yourself! I can’t for the life of me understand why these people are such bloody cowards! Maybe it’s because I live on the left coast, and 9/11 happened on the right one, but still: It’s been YEARS! Seriously, get a grip! Macho posturing and invading and/or bombing everyone in sight is a COWARDLY response, not a MANLY one (and I use the term MANLY advisedly, as the perps in this case seem to be mostly male). When we can go back to honoring our constitution and treating our citizens and those of the rest of the world with the respect they deserve, we can finally call ourselves grownups and regain the respect our current idiotic government has so totally squandered.

Tom Friedman was plenty stupid before 9/11

Indeed. It was Before that he wrote that bit about McDonald’s relying on McDonnell-Douglas, and that “the best of worlds” (I believe the phrase was) would be an Iraq with an iron-fisted dictator who wasn’t Saddam.

Maybe it’s because I live on the left coast, and 9/11 happened on the right one, but still: It’s been YEARS!

I don’t think its really your geographical location. I’m in Chicago, and I feel the same way. It’s a mindstate.

or who knows- maybe they’re just as enthralled with the idea of Pax Americana as the neocons are

This is, and always has been the key. Those who have bought the Balkans (Democrat) war= good; Iraq (Republican) war= bad DLC line is going to be disappointed for a long, long time. The Senate authorization vote was 98-2. They all wanted war. The Dems are just pissed that Bush screwed it up.

No, Tom. 9/11 made YOU and yours stupid. And you kept it up for 6 years. Get bent.

Tangentially related:

I’m wary of the “shut down Guantanamo” people. Shutting down Guantanamo does not, as I understand it, mean “let’s release those who have done nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time”; it doesn’t mean “let’s get these guys some lawyers and conduct actual trials”; it means “let’s take these guys from a place where we know they’re being held and send them to someplace nobody knows about.”

Am I being unduly cynical? Is there, in fact, such a thing as “unduly cynical?”

Am I being unduly cynical?

Sadly, No!

I’m with you, Doc: nobody’s shown the slightest hint of concern for any of the inmates. Nobody in politics, at least. Bunch of total cowards, afraid of losing their cushy gubmint seat if they do something courageous.

See, 9/11 made us more stupid.

Wait!! Stop saying that!!! Plenty of us didn’t get more stupid! In fact, we were screaming at you to stop being stupid!

Yes, not only that, but 9/11 made all of us more stupid.

No! No! Just you, and people like you!

And finally, 9/11 made us all more stupid.

You know, a while back when Dean Broder wrote his first critical column regarding Bush and the war, some blog linked to it and equated it with “losing Walter Cronkite.” Then Atrios linked to that and (succinct as ever) said “No it isn’t, because nobody listens to Broder, he just reflects his clique’s opinions back at them.” He was right, and Friedman’s great sea change of opinion falls in the same category.

Jake- you’re sure right, and that’s the point I was trying to make. We’re too far gone down the road to creepy imperialism (“We condemn every attack on the glory of our military,” says Diane Feinstein) to stop it without some hard pushback and what are and what are not acceptable ideas.

Having been involved with so many in the “anti-jihadi blogosphere”, I know all too well the level of reactionary rhetoric that is still being taken ever further off of the cliffs of insanity. Civil discourse can still be restored, I do believe this. But restoring this is the first step towards the rehabilitation of our collective sanity. Major thanks to this site for helping me in the process or realizing this. And yes, I did just reference “The Princess Bride” again (kicks self).

Jake, I hope you’re wrong. Many are simply reacting and reacting too much, IMHO. But sometimes the messages get through to the more even-keeled folks out there. And the ones not making money off of the anti-Islam movement. Sad, but true.

How depressing is it to insist that your politician pay attention to polls?

if a Democrat were elected president and had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, I don’t think they’d pursue any significant policy change from what Bush is doing

Unfortunately, I think you’re absolutely right.

And finally, 9/11 made us all more stupid.

Seriously – you guys need to read Susan Faludi’s latest book — even from her particular focus on sexual politics, we did indeed go insane and stupid after 9/11.

Once the U.S. bombs Iran, we will be thrown into some nasty chaos and all of this will be the least of our worries. Will Friedman support that, too? Probably for the first couple of Friedman units.

tom friedman needs to recognize that he is an agenda-setter within his column, using actual words that he puts in the paper. this is his power. if he genuinely believes that this kind of change is needed, he needs to say: “people who like me had column space or tv space or bandwidth and readership influence the democratic party. we used our influence perniciously. for that we should be ashamed. we acted scared when others [a list could be provided, but i’ve got some suggestions should he need them-ed.] kept their heads. further, we need to ask ourselves why those voices who kept cool are still to this day kept out of the public discourse. as a way to make amends, i will be handing my column over to scott ritter, atrios, mohamed al-baradei, brent scowcroft, wes clark, eli pariser and many others for a year while i spend every day lobbying my friends in DC to change course.”

that would take me from total ‘stache hatred back to neutral.

Hey, that’s great! Tom F realizes what we’ve all known since 2002.

When does he apologize. And perhaps remove himself from the public discourse for having been horribly, disastrously, wrong, lo, these many years.

Seppuku might be the noblest course, Tom.

What a gig. You go fucking nuts for years and your editors just let you keep typing.

Most of our “stupidity” is in service of executive power and unlikely to change. Spying without warrant, running secret prisons and gitmo, invading nations without declaring war — these are things the executive should not be able to do and in so doing them asserts and expands it’s power.

The next President will benefit from those expansions of power and power corrupts.

Thomas Friedman from Charlie Rose show, I think in 2002:

” I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.

…
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
…

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”

–New York Times Middle East “expert” Thomas L. Friedman, May 30, 2003, via Atrios. And then posted on Iraq Today blog, where one commenter said that he hopes this clip get shown at the Hague. And they all go to prison.

And since the US Congress is going to do nothing to right this wrong, the Hague is likely where they will end up.

He seems to be making several snap judgements in this piece. I think he should wait about six months and see where we’re at then. Things might be better.

Fish: Bingo !

From this European perspective there is no differnce whatsoever between the two parties. The Republicans are just more blatant in their hypocrisy.

Re Friedman, how does that parable go again?

“There will be more rejoicing over one Moustache of Authority who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent…”

One Republidem down. Many, many thousands more to go…

I just can’t bear this — Friedman’s centrist “9/11 made us stupid”, the whole liberalish “let’s impeach Bush, it’s all his fault for TRICKING US about the WMD” or, on the right, “Iraq was actually a great idea but SOMEBODY NOT ME fucked up the execution of the plan” — somehow no one is responsible for the past 6 years, or if anyone is it’s only bush, cheney, rumsfeld, rove who by their magik evol powers of evol magikness managed all the bad stuff amongst the 4 of themselves while the whole entire rest of the country was busy making lanyards.

No matter how many Americans buy into this storyline, the rest of the world never will.

Attention language police: somebody on NPR said “sticky thicket”. That is all.

[…] the Moustache of Authority himself, millionaire economic columnist and pundit Tom Friedman, has finally spoken out against Guantanamo and the US’ implementation of the War on Terror. I get the impression […]

*SIGH*

Yeah. Friedman’s a cheap, dishonest shill, a tool to be used by the most craven village insiders, just like Broder. What’s worse is he’s been a willing tool, volunteering eagerly to support the worst kind of policy nightmares.

But he’s a writer. He’s not a policy maker, and he’s not an elected official. He didn’t build Gitmo, he didn’t invade and occupy Iraq, and he didn’t repeal Habeas.

It just seems to me that the “balance of vitriol” is unevenly distributed between the criminals responsible for the “plays on the field” and the cheerleaders and sportswriters (if I may extend the analogy) who excitedly polish the policy’s image.

I know. A bunch of you are going to explain to me why I’m wrong and Friedman IS responsible for death and horror on an unimaginable scale. I can hear HTML and diffbrad now. Just doesn’t make sense to me…

mikey

Two days after 9/11 Friedman had an op-ed piece in the New York Times saying we had to go to war “against all the super-empowered angry men and women out there.” In effect, he was saying we had to suppress all troublemakers everywhere. Of course, a lot of people were writing deranged gibberish in those days, but unlike most of them Friedman won a Pulitzer.

One of the many inexplicable Pulitzers that’s been handed out in the last decade or two.

I was a college junior in early 2003, still fairly sheltered and naive, and I clearly remember a conversation with a conservative friend. My argument was:

1) El-Baradei, Blix, and lots of other people who are in a position to know say that Iraq doesn’t have any significant weapons stockpiles. The President’s argument is full of holes, and even our own intelligence services can’t come to a solid conclusion.

2) Even if I grant the hypothesis that Iraq has managed to successfully carry out a weapons research program, all putting our troops in-country is going to do is provoke a crazy dictator who has a stockpile biological and chemical weapons. Does that sound like good tactics to you?

3) Even if I grant that he has WMDs, and that for some reason he won’t immediately deploy them against our troops, we’re putting the invasion and subsequent reconstruction of a whole country in the hands of an empty demagogue, a man whose military service consisted entirely of detachment to help with a Senate campaign, and later on couldn’t properly organize the staff of a baseball team.

I was nineteen, and even then I was smart enough not to follow Bush and his sycophants down the rabbit hole. Not all of us got stupid, Friedman. Here’s an idea: throw all the weight of your incestuous influence on the Beltway-insider community behind ending the war and restoring the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Make a difference, instead of supporting the status quo and bending with the prevailing winds; help those of us who didn’t have an crippling 9/11-induced mental short-circuit make damn sure that our foreign policy won’t continue to be guided by a pack of pitiful man-children playing soldiers in someone else’s sandbox.

Fuck. You. Friedman.

Stoopid, lyin’ shithead.

Friedman sounds like another Bush rat fleeing the ship in hopes that the next president (probably a Dem) will show him some sweet favor in exchange for his craven sycophantry. He just wants to be on Hillary’s leash when the incitments beging to flow.

Looks like they printed this exactly a Friedman Unit too early.

In six months, it’ll be April 1st.

I know. A bunch of you are going to explain to me why I’m wrong and Friedman IS responsible for death and horror on an unimaginable scale. I can hear HTML and diffbrad now

“Responpible” is not the right word but the media does have a responsibility to serve as a watchdog — the government is not going to watch over itself.

The government will behave badly and make mistakes, the media is supposed to be a primary force of correction.

Friedman might not be actually responsible, but some measure of proximate causation lies on the shoulders of those who willfully and knowingly helped sell Bush Co.’s war to the public. While he was just a tool of the regime, he was an embarassingly eager one.

I know. A bunch of you are going to explain to me why I’m wrong and Friedman IS responsible for death and horror on an unimaginable scale. I can hear HTML and diffbrad now. Just doesn’t make sense to me…

Seems to me that you’re the ideal Noam Chomsky reader.

Anyway, in Rwanda state radio announcers were instrumental in the spread of genocide without being instrumental to the shaping of policy. Those people are criminals in my book. Friedman’s been less explicit about what to do about the vermin opposing US interests, so I’d say that he’s less of a criminal.

“Responpible” is not the right word

I agree whole-heartedly.

I was nineteen, and even then I was smart enough not to follow Bush and his sycophants down the rabbit hole.

I have a few students like you, Robert M. Y’all give me hope for the future.

/optimism

Cause, you know, if there’s one thing Cubans don’t have, it’s health-care!
Friedman is as stupid as ever. And he never even comes to grips with the problem of invading Iraq.

9/11 made the foolish more so; it did nothing to anyone willing to take a deep breath (with a respirator, if in Lower Manhattan), remain calm, and deliberate our next move. Many, if not most, Americans were in this mode. It took the White House a year of blatant, outright lying, combined with the most obvious and putrid fear-mongering, to whip fools like Friedman into war psychosis. It was his job to question EVERYTHING our government and our country proposed doing, post-9/11, and instead he blindly followed a belligerent fool down the worst possible course.

Suck on it, Tom; we were not all as stupid as you now claim to be, and you need to DO a hell of a lot more than simply to admit the obvious. (I’m not going to thank you for stating the obvious; either: that was always part of your job description all along.)

9/11 made us stupid?

I hope to hell he had a mouse in his pocket when he wrote that.

Fuck you, Friedman.

Anyway, in Rwanda state radio announcers were instrumental in the spread of genocide without being instrumental to the shaping of policy. Those people are criminals in my book. Friedman’s been less explicit about what to do about the vermin opposing US interests, so I’d say that he’s less of a criminal.

Y’know, this is a load of crap. And totally unfair.

The american people did not rise up and hack a million iraqis to death with machetes.

The american government decided all on it’s own to send the american military on an eight month buildup in order to invade and occupy Iraq. They didn’t do it because friedman told them to. They would have done it if friedman told them NOT to.

The savagery in Rwanda was nothing like the calculated, brutal war crimes of the bush/cheney cabal, and frankly, Bubba, you’re better than that…

mikey

As I say, Friedman is less of a criminal, so feel free to use my comment as an example of Godwinization, in which the extreme example kills the thread. My bad.

If I remember my polling data the American people – with a hearteningly large amount of dissenters – were on-board with the invasion of Iraq – a war crime – and it’s worth examining how their opinions were moved to support such things. People like Tom Friedman are the machinery that moves the masses when the government wants a kooky policy to go forward. In this case the masses were moved to support what you pointed out elsewhere was the worst crime prosecuted at Nuremburg: the waging of aggressive war.

I’ll Godwin further: if Joseph Goebbels had simply been the William Randolph Hearst of Germany – sticking to propaganda duties only – rather than a government minister would he have been complicit in the crimes or would he just have been a writer?

Scratch that: see this film which is a better analog, although Riefenstahl is more talented than American propagandists of more recent vintage. This is really a good movie and…what was she responsible for?

You’re right. The Bush panic is a long way from over.

But our reaction to 9/11 has knocked America completely out of balance

“Our” reaction? “Our”? Ooooh no, leave me out of it Mr Suck on This.

wow to the friedman article.

i dont think you’re right about neocon narratives and their success, i think that stuff is going to wear out soon

Legalize, I think you’re right: I think this is just another rat leaving the sinking ship.

And mikey, while I love just about everything you write, I have to say that I diverge from your viewpoint here, at least a tad. Incitement to commit crimes against humanity is a bad thing, although of course it doesn’t come close to planning crimes against humanity.

It’s not as though Friedman was a good man who was turned around by 9/11. It’s not as though he urged moderation at first (as far as I know). It’s not as though he even thought that Iraq had any responsibility for 9/11. He simply thought the US should lash out at someone, anyone, and Iraq was as good as anywhere else.

I guess I’m just so bitterly disappointed that there were so few sensible pundits. I suspect they would have been vilified and/or sacked, but I can’t recall too many voices speaking out against precipitate action. And such action might just have brought enough sense to enough people that the war didn’t happen: I know it’s not likely, but it’s possible.

Instead, there was an unholy baying for blood, and now, when everything has gone thoroughly pear-shaped, they manage a sheepish “We was misled”. There’s no real mea culpa, no admission that they believed and howled because they wanted to believe and wanted to howl.

I’m not saying that he should be in the dock. I’m saying that I’d like for him and all the others like him to stop, and think, and realise what a dreadful tragedy they’ve helped to unleash on the world.

On a side-ish note, I find it interesting that he says this:

Before 9/11, the world thought America’s slogan was: “Where anything is possible for anybody.” But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”

In fact, long before 9/11 substantial porttions of the world saw America as the country that says “Give me your resources, and let me dictate your leaders”. It’s good that he recognises that the war on Iraq has been a complete clusterfuck in so many ways, but it would be even better if he could understand why, and why so much of the world already hated America.

I guess the short version of this rather lengthy diatribe would be this: propaganda does work, and the mainstream media has some effect on public opinion, and therefore some responsibility to think carefully before urging unimaginable horror on others.

But then, I’m a DFH who thinks that war never solves anything, and that war only breeds war. So what would I know?