Greenwald Moves On

[Lauren Johnson]

Matt Taibbi made his reputation in his vicious, profanity laced attacks on Thomas Friedman. After he signed on with the Rolling Stone, they made him cut out the potty keyboard. I can't find his first few. They seem to have "vanished." But his essay Flathead is still a classic. Here is a snippet:

I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese supply. Who knew what it meant but one had to assume the worst.


"It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing.


It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called The World Is Flat. It didn't matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.


So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:


I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.


Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one....

And this blog post, may be the best one minus the profanity. No Kidding. The Most Incoherent Tom Friedman Column Ever.

I realize this is not a statement anyone can make lightly, but: this morning's column by Thomas Friedman, "Syria is Iraq," is the single most incoherent thing he has ever written. It's… well, breathtaking is the only word. Others, like Glenn Greenwald, have already pointed out the column's most obvious contradictions. But for those who missed it, here are two passages that were written, not as a joke, by the same human being in the same opinion column. Start with passage #1:

And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can't go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes a war of all against all unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America.

Got that? Here's the second passage:

Because of both U.S. incompetence and the nature of Iraq, this U.S. intervention triggered a civil war in which all the parties in Iraq Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds tested the new balance of power, inflicting enormous casualties on each other and leading, tragically, to ethnic cleansing that rearranged the country into more homogeneous blocks of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

This pair of passages can be summed up in a Friedman-syllogism:
1. Syria will not become Switzerland unless it has the kind of help America gave to Iraq.

2. When America helped Iraq, it triggered a terrifying four-sided civil war that left the country reeling in blood-soaked, genocidal chaos and hopelessly partitioned along ethnic and religious lines very much like Switzerland, where a diverse collection of ethnic groups speaking different languages live peacefully under democratic rule.

3. Therefore, when your wife needs help giving birth, she should hire a midwife who stands outside the door and carries an automatic weapon.

This column today is so crazy I have to think Friedman is kidding. The line about how everyone on the ground in Iraq trusts America is especially awesome. Of course! True, you can't even open a Humvee door there to dump a pebble out of your shoe without getting your face shot off, but still, they trust us!

And yet the best thing of all is the rhetorical flourish at the end a rare triple-figurative dismount, which he sticks with Nadia Comăneci-esque confidence:

Without an external midwife or a Syrian Mandela, the fires of conflict could burn for a long time.

God bless this man. There's never been another like him!

Editor's note: Thanks to Justin Elliott at TwitLonger, who notes that this is at least the ninth time that Friedman has written a column calling for an Arab Mandela -- and at least the third time he has used the winning Arab-Mandela/midwife imagery combination.

A midwife? The US is a fucking midwife? A midwife that everybody trusts? :: ::headexplode::