Tom Friedman Redux Redux Redux

The geopolitical imbecile is at it again. Two years ago I wrote that if the U.S. seemed to be “winning,” he would change his mind once again. Has anyone ever less needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blows? Now, today (a day that would live in infamy if there were more than three people in the world who care what Tom Friedman thinks), he preposterously tells us that “there’s only one position to have on the surge anymore: hope that it works.”

Actually, I just realized while writing this that I (and perhaps all of us who read The Times this morning), owe Jon Stewart a hearty toast of congratulations for fooling the whole world into thinking that Tom Friedman wrote that column, when he, Stewart, is clearly its real author. I mean, no one, no matter how stupid, satirizes himself, does he? “The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions...” Tom, the surge isn’t supposed to “work,” it’s supposed to “win” the War. I mean, George Bush has said about six thousand times that this is a war that cannot be lost, and anyone who disagrees is more or less an unpatriotic American. Here is a President who has never told the truth about one single policy initiative, domestic or foreign, he has ever proposed, and all of a sudden Tom Friedman thinks that he’s offering a serious proposal? It’s not a proposal Tom, and it’s not open for debate, by Democrats or anyone else. It has exactly the same status as the plutonium from Niger, the threat of WMD’s, the love of Middle East “democracy,” and the rest of that sorry stew of Presidential lies. The surge “working” simply would mean more massacres of civilians by more troops of the American occupation, followed by maybe a five-minute lull after the “withdrawal” of American troops–if anyone is brain-dead enough to believe in that–before the shitstorm we created and prolong would start all over again. But don’t worry, Tom, that won’t be allowed to happen; there’ll always be good reason not to “withdraw.” Everything in scare quotes, I fear, because nothing means what it seems to say when uttered in Washington.

Yes there is only one position “to have on the surge,” though as he asserts it’s utterly fruitless: stop the surge. Withdraw. Stop killing Iraqis. Every one we kill is one who might not have been killed by another Iraqi; maybe so, but maybe not. Above all, stop pretending that the rapist has to hang around the house to help his poor victim get back on her feet, that that’s the “honorable” thing to do instead of just going off to jail and paying her all the compensation she asks for. Or in this case being prosecuted for war crimes.

I apologize to all readers who feel that in that last paragraph I should have wanted to stop the putting of American GI’s into harm’s way, too. Not my issue. That’s what you do in the Army, or Marine Corps, you kill and get killed. That’s what you’re there for. I feel sorry for Gold Star mothers, but the moral (as distinct from political) purpose of stopping this war is not to help out Americans, but just to stop them from killing other people.

The madness! The madness!

The Madness! The Madness!

I promised only “occasional” posting, thought my raging about torture would do for a while, but the rot of mediaspeak is so endemic, so epidemic, that its expressions, when one has the misfortune of encountering them, just can’t be allowed to pass unnoticed. So, yesterday, on Time-Warner’s New York City Channel 1, the only even half-way decent source of local and state news in New York, a reporter described Nancy Pelosi as “having 5 children,” being “from San Francisco,” attending “a prayer session with the Black Caucus,” and then concluded: “Pelosi is known for her Far-Left politics.”

What can we say about a society in which the biggest lie of the late 20th Century, what I’ve called “the lie about liberalism,” has become the common sense of some sincere fourth-rate reporter who probably thinks she’s really being “objective” and “descriptive.” Al Sharpton is “Far Left”–sort of. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are “Far Left.” I’m “Far Left.” (Full disclosure). Nancy Pelosi is an ordinary, moderately liberal Democrat, taking over leadership of a House that has been in the hands of actual thieves, gangsters, and American-style totalitarians. This seems like a revolutionary transition only because the degeneration of the polity has gone so incredibly far. Will any reporter in the mainstream media say this? Of course not. How does one speak to mainstream American reporters today, who are almost without exception (there are a few exceptions, not many) the talentless purveyors of endless official lies, without saying to them“You are worthless nothings; the equivalent of a band of terrorists dumping anthrax into our reservoirs, or worse; you dump lie after poisonous lie into the common realm of public speech and call it “journalism”?

If all television network news were abolished, immediately, without exception–sort of like exiting from Iraq–then the realm of public speech would be an infinitely better place for all. I will have more to say on that later. If you can’t wait, please see my book,
Primetime Politics.

P.S. At Dorothy’s initiative, we called up Channel 1 and I spoke, without screaming!, to someone named “Jessica,” who promised to “pass it on.” Pass what on, I wonder? The depth of their ignorance, their slumbrous complicity in mass deception? Still, we should all do that all the time, for what it’s worth. They do.