The World is Qat

Given the outlandish analogizing the mustachioed marvel is capable of when he's stone-cold sober, just imagine the absurdities that must issue from this man's mouth when he's on hallucinogens!

His latest column, from Yemen.

So, this blog has been on a fairly long hiatus, and in the meantime, much of note has transpired in Friedman Land. For example, he wrote this, which is silly:

Our economy is still very fragile, yet you would never know that by the way the political class is acting. We’re like a patient that just got out of intensive care and is sitting up in bed for the first time when, suddenly, all the doctors and nurses at bedside start bickering. One of them throws a stethoscope across the room; someone else threatens to unplug all the monitors unless the hospital bills are paid by noon; and all the while the patient is thinking: “Are you people crazy? I am just starting to recover. Do you realize how easily I could relapse? Aren’t there any adults here?”

Yes, we're just like that! Because it's a situation that happens so often that we can all immediately relate to and understand it. Great analogy, Tom!

And he also wrote this, which is wrong:

For decades, this was considered the most dangerous place on earth, with Taiwan and China pointing missiles at each other on hair triggers. Well, over the past two years, China and Taiwan have reached a quiet rapprochement — on their own.

Tom, those missiles are still there! What's more, they're actually increasing in number, as this recent report from Brookings makes clear.

And then there's this, from the same column:

Taiwan has no oil, no natural resources. It’s a barren rock with 23 million people who, through hard work, have amassed the fourth-largest foreign currency reserves in the world. They got rich digging inside themselves, unlocking their entrepreneurs, not digging for oil. They took responsibility. They got rich by asking: “How do I improve myself?” Not by declaring: “It’s all somebody else’s fault. Give me a handout.”

... which is slightly misleading, given that 1) although it isn't sitting on a giant pool of oil, Taiwan is a lush tropical island with a vibrant agricultural industry and can hardly be described as a "barren rock," and 2) the KMT actually did benefit from some major handouts, by declaring, "The Communists want to invade. Give me billions of dollars in economic and military aid and favorable access to U.S. markets."

And folks, I can't emphasize this enough — this is the stuff he comes up with when he's not on Yemeni hallucinogens ...

The new Cold War ... from Team America (really, he calls it that)

From Glen Greenwald, we learn more of TF's latest war:

So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we've finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War (those who Tom Friedman, in March of 2003, dismissed as "knee-jerk liberals and pacifists") may try to point out that it's a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and could not possibly threaten us, but those are just small details. Iran is our new implacable foe in Tom Friedman's glorious, transcendent struggle -- which, in 2003, on NPR, he called "the beginning of World War III . . . the third great totalitarian challenge in the last, you know, 60 years," and which he today defines this way (featuring an amazingly disingenuous use of parenthesis):

Autocracy's newest fan

Good news! Three months after this fine blog fell by the wayside, the mustachioed marvel has managed to write something dumb enough to shock it back into existence. The offending paragraph, from his latest column, "Our One-Party Democracy":

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Yes, you read that correctly. Thomas Friedman -- the neo-liberal, free-market crusader who not so long ago could be found championing a disastrous invasion designed to spread liberty and democracy -- has morphed into a cheerleader for the CCP, an authoritarian party presiding over a brutally repressive political system and an economy that features no small measure of state intervention.

For starters, praising the Chinese Communist Party for its farsightedness on environmental matters is patently absurd. Granted, 2007 was a long time ago, but you'd think that Friedman might still remember "Choking on Growth," a major series his own newspaper ran that year chronicling the tremendous damage China's economic development policies have done to the country's air and water, and the dire consequences this environmental degradation has for public health. Sure, the one-party system makes it relatively easy for the central government to mobilize resources and pour a few billion dollars into electric car research or its renewable energy industry, but the other side of the coin is that China's top-down, development-oriented political system is so riddled with corruption and dysfunction that the government has a hard time enforcing even the most basic environmental regulations at the local level.

More important, of course, is the fact that the "drawbacks" of one-party autocracy that Friedman makes passing reference to include things like, oh, I don't know, the near total absence of freedoms of expression, assembly, petition, religion and so on. If China's leaders are really the "reasonably enlightened group of people" Friedman claims, then I suppose it's a bit curious that they've chosen to reject virtually every political value the Enlightenment stood for, and to preside over a tightly-controlled media and education system that attempts to keep the population in a permanent state of dis-enlightenment as to the history and functioning of their own society. And that's not even to mention the regime's management of its ethnic minorities, an area in which it continues to operate largely on a model adopted from Stalinist Russia.

So, to recap: Authoritarian rulers like Saddam Hussein, who jail dissidents and deny basic freedoms to their people? Targets for regime change. Authoritarian rulers like Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, who jail dissidents, deny basic freedoms to their people ... and build solar panel factories? Targets for Friedman's affections.

Friedman Returns!

After a hiatus of more than a month (not book-leave, one must hope), Friedman has been up to his usual hijinks lately, dropping two columns within the last week about the Middle East.

Yesterday's column, "After Cairo, It's Clinton Time," is grating for two reasons, the first somewhat trivial, the second somewhat not.

Devoted Friedman followers might recall that in 2003, the mustachioed marvel appeared on Charlie Rose to deliver his in-your-face message to America's enemies in Iraq: "Suck. On. This." Well, six years later, Friedman apparently has still not gotten it into his head that the trash-talking is best left for the basketball court (or, in Friedman equivalent, the putting green or tennis court). Reviewing the bloody civil conflict that broke out in the vacuum created by the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, Friedman writes:

Liberated from Saddam's iron fist, each Iraqi community tested its strength against the others, saying in effect: "Show me what you got, baby."

I don't know how many Times editors signed off on that "baby," but if there was ever a single word that was more badly in need of being cut, I can't think of it.

The more troubling element of the column comes in the sixth paragraph, when Friedman writes:

I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women.

A most interesting interpretation, there. (And a very convenient one, for a prominent cheerleader of the Iraq invasion.)

Yup, that's right folks -- the war in Iraq isn't one that we started, based on false intelligence and crackpot visions of transforming the country into a beacon of democracy and progressivism. Instead, it's more like it was already going on, and we just kind of jumped in on the side of the good guys. And what about the Iraq war pulling resources away from the mission in Afghanistan? Nope, folks -- all the same war, can't think about it like that.

Tom, Tom, Tom -- it's six years later, the near-universal consensus among pretty much every human being on the planet is that the invasion was a gigantic mistake, and a terrible way to go about reforming the Arab world ... maybe it's about time you dropped the charade and just admitted it?

Friedman Comes Out Against Torture, Logical Consistency

Take a look at today's column. If anyone can find a coherent position on torture, or the war on terror, or Iraq, or anything at all, for that matter, please let me know, because I sure as hell can't.

Friedman's columns are often vapid, and cliched, and grating, and self-serving, but I'll at least give him this — they're usually pretty clear: We need a carbon tax. We should invest more in science. We should grant more visas to highly educated immigrants. We should invade Iraq and turn it into a beacon of progressivism and democracy. Yada yada yada.

This column, by contrast, is a logical mess. As I understand it, Friedman's position is as follows: Torture is wrong. Obama was right to ban it. Bush Administration officials crossed the line, and members of the military murdered detainees. However, al Qaeda is really, really evil, and terrorists want to kill lots of people, and don't love their children, and they were maybe planning to use weapons of mass destruction. So the rules are different, and we shouldn't prosecute Bush Administration officials. Also, it would be politically divisive, and apparently bipartisanship now ranks above the rule of law and morality on the list of things we should be concerned about upholding.

Oh, and if you thought that defeating al Qaeda in Iraq would make America safer, you were wrong. Because victory in Iraq is actually going to increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack on American soil. Why? Because it's like a Hail Mary pass. And you can't argue with a sports metaphor.

Everybody! Over here! Look at me!

Remember that system of freewheeling global capitalism Thomas Friedman spent the better part of his career championing? Well, it recently drove the world economy off a cliff. So what's the solution? Did you guess fundamental reform of global finance? Good work — but that's only half the answer. What's the other half? Well, it's none other than the same set of environmental policies Friedman has been peddling in his books, columns, lectures and neighborhood grocery store (probably) for the last five or six years.

Yes, in a clever sleight of hand in his most recent column, Friedman manages to recast the financial meltdown as a desperate plea from Mother Nature to reduce carbon emissions. Don't get me wrong — I'm a firm supporter of reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment. But in the true Friedman spirit of colorful if tortured analogies, isn't this a bit like KFC trying to convince us that the economic crisis is a clear indication that we all need to be eating a lot more fried chicken, or Billy Blanks trying to convince us that the only road to economic recovery is for everyone to start doing Tae Bo?

Anti-mustache propaganda

Some people do not appreciate TF's penetrating insights. Their loss. But I will say that the mustache will prevail. He always prevails.

Hat-tip to SC.