Trying To Earn "A" List Cred

I had an epiphany of sorts on Friday, and I must share it with you.

While waiting in our doctor’s office, I happened upon that day’s issue of The New York Times. I skimmed over the first section and soon arrived on the Op-Ed page. I read Paul Krugman’s column on why he envisions a stormy 2007 for the economy (though I respect Krugman, I should point out something he no doubt knows also; this economy has been awful as long as Bush has been president, so it’s all just a matter of “varying degrees of bad” as far as I’m concerned) and then read an interesting article by Robert N. Proctor, professor of the history of science at Stanford University, on Polonium, the substance that poisoned and killed former K.G.B. agent and Vladimir Putin critic Alexander V. Litvinenko; Proctor alleges that, even in very small traces, it poses a potential threat to cigarette smokers (just another reason to give up that stinking habit…one of these days I’ll post on the whole thing with Putin and the poisoning and how he seems to have journalists killed who write bad things about him).

And after I finished those fine columns, I happened upon the latest from Tom Friedman (I had a long wait, as it turned out).

I have to admit that I’d never really read an entire column from Tom Friedman before; I don’t read the Times as often as I’d like to because I refuse to pay for their online content, and when I do read their op-eds, I only do so with their columnists who are members of the reality-based community.

But I must admit that reading Tom Friedman is truly an experience. Now I know why my “A” list lefty “betters” pile on this guy so much (again, I’d link to the column, but their content is “behind the wall”). I was struck by the unmatched arrogance and pomposity as Friedman breathtakingly restated the obvious as if he’d been the first to realize it, and the depth of his error and self-delusion was something I do not expect to forget anytime soon.

The title of last Friday’s column is “The Energy Wall,” and as nearly as I can understand, he suggests that the U.S. should construct sort of a metaphorical “wall” between ourselves and our energy dependence in the way that Israel has constructed an actual wall between itself and the Palestinians.

These paragraphs appear early in the column:

I believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the big “clash of civilizations” now under way between the Muslim world and the West what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II. It’s Off Broadway to Broadway.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, was the theater where Great European powers tested out many weapons and tactics that were later deployed on a larger scale in World War II. Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the small theater in where many weapons and tactics get tested out first and then go global. So if you study the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Off Broadway, you can learn a lot about how the larger war now playing out on Broadway, in Iraq and Afghanistan, might proceed.

I must admit that it took me awhile to process this, mainly because I was so utterly shocked and repulsed that some human being would actually compare real-life war filled with death, carnage, ruin of people, families, armies, civilizations, etc. along with all manner of awful side effects of regional violence, creation of refugees and hardening of nationalist and ethnic sentiment, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence (and saying nothing of potential environmental catastrophe) to a Broadway production. I’m not going to try and analyze Friedman’s comparison with the Spanish Civil War, since I consider his argument to be so monstrous.

“Honey, I think the musical number after the Lebanese cluster bomb explosion comes at the end of Act Three. I’ll go to the lobby to get a program and find out.”

Ultimately, Friedman gets to the argument where we should build a “virtual wall” to “end our oil addiction,” and I believe this explains his primary motivation…

I do not want my girls to live a world (sic) where the difference between a good day and bad day is whether Moktada al-Sadr lets Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, meet with the U.S. President or whether certain Arab regimes alter what their textbooks say about non-Muslims. I wish them all well, but I don’t want them impacting my life and I don’t want to be roiling theirs, and the only reason we are so intertwined now is O-I-L.

This paragraph inspires a few observations. First, it is admirable that Friedman is advocating for his kids, but perhaps, if he’d really wanted to do that, he would have chosen to oppose the illegal Iraq war from the beginning instead of becoming its most visible pundit cheerleader. Second, his desire to “wish well” to someone like al-Sadr defies belief; one of the goals of this Shia cleric is to incite violence against the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), and as long as he continues to be successful in this aim, it is harder for us to pull our troops out of Iraq. Third, Friedman’s overall attitude portrayed here is one who is apparently bored with the war and the fact that a nice, clean, quick resolution in our favor has not been achieved. Fourth, it amazes me, now that our escapade in Iraq has totally spiraled out of control (with our service people stuck in the middle of this mess) to see those in the media who cried for war more strenuously than anyone else so quickly and shamelessly “turning over a new leaf” to the point where they are actually recycling the talking points of those who correctly opposed the war from the very beginning (including your humble narrator, though I actually wish I’d been wrong if it meant saving more lives…hence Friedman’s whole “O-I-L” sentence).

There is much more that I could say about this column, but time doesn’t permit me that luxury at the moment.

When I finished reading Friedman’s column, I was angry, frustrated, and confused. And I actually pity those who attach some importance to the delusional meanderings of this idiot.

Update: By the way, I forgot to add a couple of items related to Friedman. The first is this link to a post by Glenn Greenwald, and the second is a response to Friedman from Lou Dobbs, since Friedman called him (as noted in this New Yorker story on Dobbs) a “blithering idiot,” which, as far as I’m concerned, earns point for Lou Dobbs.

"His name calling would bother me more if he were anything more than a tool of international corporatism and a card-carrying member of his own Flat Earth Society."

You go, Lou (he manages to piss off people on both sides, which to me indicates that he’s onto something).

Update: Uh, Lou, it sounds like you and your people have to work on that whole "journalism/reporting/analysis of data/interviewing/corroboration of stories/maintaining chain of custody" thing based on this, you know?