This is so sick, I’m not really comfortable joking about it. From Vanity Fair’s “Thomas Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions”:
In 2001, Friedman advised the American citizenry to “keep rootin’ for Putin,” hailing the K.G.B. veteran as “Russia’s first Deng Xiaoping” and a strong force for reform. Three years later, Friedman announced in his most awkward prose that “I have a ‘Tilt Theory of History’,” and called Russia “a huge nation” (this part checks out) “that was tilted in the wrong direction and is now tilted in the right direction” with regards to free speech, the rule of law, and the like. In 2007, Friedman finally noticed that Russia cannot even properly be termed a democracy and promptly wrote a column to this effect.
From a New Yorker article, a few years ago:
Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin, a career K.G.B. officer, was, in effect, anointed as President by Boris Yeltsin, thirteen journalists have been murdered in Russia. Nearly all the deaths took place in strange circumstances, and none of them have been successfully investigated or prosecuted. In July, 2003, the investigative reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin, a well-known colleague of Politkovskaya’s at Novaya Gazeta, died of what doctors described as an “allergic reaction.’’ Shchekochikhin, who became famous in the Gorbachev era with his reports on the rise of a new mafia, had been investigating allegations of tax evasion against people with links to the F.S.B., the post-Soviet K.G.B. Nobody ever explained what Shchekochikhin was allergic to, and his family is convinced that he was poisoned. On July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, the founding editor of the Russian edition of Forbes—who had made powerful enemies by investigating corruption among Russian business tycoons—was shot dead as he left his Moscow office.
The attacks have not been limited to journalists. In September of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, a candidate for President of Ukraine who helped lead the Orange Revolution, and who was vigorously opposed by Putin, barely survived a poisoning. Doctors determined that he had been given the deadly chemical dioxin, which left his face disfigured and his health severely impaired. Since then, two members of the Duma, the Russian parliament, have been assassinated, and last September Andrei Kozlov, the deputy chief of Russia’s central bank, was shot outside a Moscow stadium following a company soccer match. Kozlov had initiated a highly visible effort to rid the country of banks that were little more than fronts for organized crime.
Read the New Yorker article about some of the brave journalists who were gunned down and tell me you don’t feel like vomiting about the fact that that America’s most influential foreign policy columnist wanted us to keep rootin’ for Putin.
Update: This Matt Welch piece on Friedman is top notch, and very well-researched.
JasonF
Obviously, Shchekochikhin was allergic to poison. Problem solved!
Zifnab
We did the same thing with the mafia in the US. You had guys like
Herbert(history fail) J. Edgar Hoover denying its existence while mob-friendly journalists hailed bosses as philanthropists and populist leaders. Then everyone ran off and blamed this social disturbance or that race riot on evil communists.It’s standard head-in-the-sand foreign policy. And the fact that its coming from Thomas "The Earth is Flat" Friedman surprises me not at all.
Comrade Kevin
@JasonF: Actually, I think he died because the government had an allergic reaction to him.
The Other Steve
Is Putin behind these assassinations, or is he simply ignoring them?
Which is worse?
colin k
Of course there’s a tilt, the world is flat.
The amount of seriousness and respectability still conferred upon Thomas Friedman is about as thorough an indictment of Establishment/Versailles media and their CW as possible.
KCinDC
Friedman obviously looked into Putin’s soul. Are you saying he’s as bad at soul reading as Bush?
Ned R.
He should have stuck with the rhymes.
"If you’re wailin’, it must be Palin."
mistermix
I’m surprised that VF could limit themselves to 5, and that you only found one that makes you want to vomit.
canuckistani
"We’re hot for Pol Pot"
Das Internetkommissariat
@The Other Steve:
Putin and his posse are behind this.
Russia has been taken over by a group of FSB operatives who see themselves as saviours of the Rusian Nation. These journalists are enemies of the state, hence they have to be killed.
The Russian government is the ULTIMATE neocon government. That’s probably the reason why Friedman was rooting for them.
DougJ
I do think this was the worst of the group.
Jay B.
The Vanity Fair article went easy on Friedman. It didn’t even point out his predictable Friedman Unit columns which were wrong over and over and over again. Or his theory, long since discredited, that countries with McDonald’s in them will never go to war with one another. Or the ‘the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention:’ "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other… " which was proven wrong well before Friedman brought it up in the World is Flat (see this from a 2005 Hindu Times review for a laugh.)
You could literally pull something out of any one of his columns cut from pure bullshit. His "taxi drivers", his "understanding" of what Muslims understand ("violence", basically), his topographical sense (fucking up the difference between a level playing field and a flat earth), his atrocious anti-ear for metaphor.
DougJ
My impression is that it is a combination of the two. Sometimes one, sometimes the other.
Comrade Stuck
I was for Putin’s initial acts of shutting down the Oligarchs who got rich overnight by scooping up former Soviet State industries. I thought the Oligarchs using their instant wealth to manipulate politics was a threat to a new Russian Democracy. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop with that, and used it to justify shutting down other imagined threats like free speech, right of assembly and real opposition parties. The actual stuff democracies are made of.
It isn’t that hard to understand though, given Russia’s autocratic history of governance. It is the only thing that many generations of Russian citizens have known in that volatile country. It is why Putin remains popular as long as he keeps food on their tables and moves toward restoring the power of the glorious motherland. It is the main thing most of their people want, democracy or not.
jenniebee
Yet another product of the Foreign Policy intellect that brought you such gems as "Suck. On. This." and the Invisible Fist of the Marketplace.
I’ve sometimes thought it would be amusing to rewrite Friedman as a 19th century Brit. He could tour the coal mines in Newcastle and marvel at the brilliant adaptivity of the miners’ bodies to the confines of the mines – look, their backs bend so readily! And that’s where I realized that the world is short.
El Cid
Just keep in mind that the huge nation of Russia has nothing on killing journalists on Colombia, our close military ally, whose state intelligence agency was just exposed to have been electronically monitoring everyone from judges to prosecutors to journalists to the political opposition with equipment the U.S. provided for drug / military interdiction purposes.
So, yeah, let’s keep focusing on that creepy Russian threat while our close ally Colombia has its state intelligence agency collaborate with right wing death squads, guerrillas, and crime syndicates using equipment we provide them.
maxbaer (not the original)
“I fear that his whole first term could be eaten by Citigroup, A.I.G., Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and the whole housing/subprime credit bubble we inflated these past 20 years.”
With both Friedman and Jim Cramer predicting doom and gloom, it’s a lock that happy days are here again.
jake 4 that 1
Screw Friedman and his unit. Bush’s "Pootang is my BFF!" crap did far more damage.
Svensker
Friedman is a seriously sick fuck. He’s a pompous ass with a very high opinion of himself when, indeed, his intellect is 3rd rate at best and his morals consist of "good for Tommy! yay! bad for Tommy! boo!".
When my son was a freshman in high school he found a major historical factual error in one of Friedman’s columns — and since it was the basis of the column, it was kind of important. My son’s social studies teacher was very impressed with my son’s find and reviewed the letter he sent to Friedman and the Times explaining the error. Never heard bupkis from Tommy, of course.
He’s a moron who likes the excitement of other people dying, and takes absolutely no responsibility for anything. Blech.
The Moar You Know
It’s a lot more than 13, and they don’t bother trying to make their deaths look like accidents anymore.
I have some family there. It’s not a place to get on the wrong side of the powers-that-be.
John Cole
Welch is at his absolute best with pieces like that. His book on McCain was rock solid, too.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
Comrade Stuck
@El Cid:
Hopefully, some of that horseshit will stop with dems holding the money strings. Especially since a lot of that state power abuse involves bashing the union movement in Columbia.
Columbia is a mess as a country, and likely the most right wingish to quasi fascist in our Hemisphere. It is certainly the most systemically violent, and if not for that little Coca plant we would have no excuse to be involved with them.
The Moar You Know
“allergic reaction.’’
Allergic to lead. Happens all the time. For some reason, there is a cluster of lead allergy deaths in Moscow. Journalists, freethinkers, dissidents, small party politicians, and rival crime gang members seem particularly prone to lead allergy.
Sometimes the reaction to lead exposure is so violent the victim’s head explodes.
Wile E. Quixote
I wonder if we could take a page out of the Russian book and start killing pundits in this country? Wouldn’t it be fun if death squads started targeting Friedman, Brooks, Dowd, Scherer, Krauthammer, Halperin, Drudge and the others of their ilk?
DougJ
No, it would be horrifying and barbaric.
jenniebee
@TenguPhule:
Dude, you have seen The Bloggess post on, uh, a related matter, haven’t you?
Heh. Indeed.
El Cid
@Comrade Stuck: I don’t think the change of parties will matter so much. The Plan Colombia under Clinton let the gov’t there run its own security state strategy. The Democrats as a Party mouth frequent words about worrying about union organizers etc., but they’re just as willing to let the government justify about anything as an anti-guerrillas security strategy.
It was a giant, cynical gambit from the mid-1990s on — the gambit was that the conservative forces would build up a huge right wing paramilitary force to massacre guerrillas, collaborators, and the opposition, and then when it was done they could just dial them back.
But it’s not quite working out that way, and the President is none too happy with the nation’s own Supreme Court independently investigating all the collusion going on between the conservative allies and the right wing death squads — the modern paramilitaries did, as it happens, get their re-launch on the current President’s family ranch and under his (Uribe’s) governorship of Antioquia.
This intelligence agency scandal now follows a number of others, including that of 2005 when the then-director of the secret intelligence agency was arrested for collaborating with the right wing narco-paramilitary death squads. And he was the current President’s re-election campaign manager, Uribe’s Karl Rove as it were, so if you want to believe Uribe’s excuses that he knew nothing of these connections, well, you go ahead, ’cause I’m not having any of that bullsh*t.
No, it won’t be U.S. pressure or policy changes which helps Colombia address the mafia state it created to battle the guerrillas, saddled as it is now with the government’s former secret paramilitary allies running the nation’s drugs trafficking.
It will change when the Colombians figure out a way to force their government to move beyond the mafia state strategy.
Comrade Stuck
@El Cid:
Uribe is a Franco wannabe turd. I believe you. I do!
The Moar You Know
@Wile E. Quixote: Much as I loathe every person you mentioned, absolutely not. Hell, even though I wish they’d get a clue and figure out that their little Villager schtick is not helpful at this point in history, where we really need everyone on board with fixing some very real problems, I’ll still defend their absolute right to print whatever stupid bullshit comes foaming to the top of the septic tanks that they call minds.
Death squads are not funny. Like I said, I have relatives there. Can you imagine passing by a dead body in the street and not calling the cops, not asking how it got there, not asking why the fuck there’s a dead dude in front of your door? You don’t dare ask those questions there. You don’t say jack shit about it. You mind your own business, someone will clean it up sooner or later.
No fucking thanks.
El Cid
Okay, since I’ve sounded off bitterly on the Colombian state power situation, let’s lighten it up: they’re very excited about the Iron Maiden / Anthrax concert this Saturday afternoon.
El Cid
To provide some perspective on the giganto-scandal of the Colombian intelligence agency’s criminal wiretapping.
When the news story broke on this last Saturday (thanks to the investigative journalism of Semana magazine), the Attorney General’s office took over the offices of the intelligence agency.
Okay, now their AG has announced that they have encountered — and only from those rooms that the intelligence agency has allowed the AG investigators to enter — 183,000,000 recordings jointly from the intelligence agencies and the national police. And they have no idea yet how many may be the result of illegal wiretapping.
But this is our close ally, and, um, Hugo Chavez said something bad about someone, so, um, that needs to be front page news on what a tyrant he is.
jrg
"Yep, that’s right, millions of magical software gnomes, who will work for $5.00 a day."
I know a lot about the cab drivers in Bangalore, so I could tell he was not lying to me. We stopped by a high-fashion department store, to get a Prada bag for my wife. After that, we went to Starbucks. On the way back to the hotel (to pick up my golf bags) the cab driver answered his cell phone.
That’s when it hit me. The world is flat. People have cell phones now, so all governments and industries are free and benevolent, labor is pennies a day, and everyone is happy.
The driver hung up and looked in the rear-view mirror. I looked back at him. Tee time was in 8 minutes… "Software gnomes, you say?"
The Moar You Know
@El Cid: So they’re willing to cop to recording 183 million conversations, but a bunch more are off limits? Awesome. They taped every conversation in the country, sounds like.
Can’t wait to see 40 years from now (I should be around still, albeit not for much longer than that) how many American conversations made it to recording medium from 2001-2008.
Wile E. Quixote
OK, so nobody likes my death squad musings. How about this, we send the villagers to Russia and trade them for Russian journalists? The villagers I mentioned, and the others, can kiss ass to those in power which is what they’re all about and which will serve them well in Russia, at least until a new strongman comes along and purges the lot of them, and the Russian journalists can come over here and do some real journalism, which we’re desperately in need of, where they don’t have to be worried about being killed by Putin’s thugs. We could call it "Muckrakers for Bootlickers".
Krista
Alexander Litvinenko’s is the case that sticks out the most in my mind. His widow was pretty firmly convinced that Moscow was behind him having been poisoned with polonium-210. Evidently his wife and kid are still radioactive.
The Moar You Know
@Wile E. Quixote: Damn. Round two of the idea, you nailed it. The gasbags you cite will be perfectly safe – it’s not like they’ve ever challenged the establishment in any way whatsoever – and the Russian guys will do some real reporting.
Win freakin’ win.
Fwiffo
Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with Polonium-210. If you’re going to pick a crazy poison, that’s gotta be at the top of the list. If it’s found, you’re advertising to everyone exactly who you are, what happens when people fuck with you, and the fact that you’re untouchable.
Also, there was the dioxin poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko. Crazy fucked up shit.
El Cid
@The Moar You Know: It’s kind of weird. The AG is p***ed in part because this agency (DAS) was tapping his prosecutors. So he’s been communicating pretty well with the press. So, when he took it over, he gave a press conference on the work, all very sober, prosecutorial stuff, and then said, well, we’ve been allowed into X number of rooms and so far we’re seeking permission to enter Y number of rooms.
The extent of surveillance / recording is really unknown. As usual, the President claims to be a mere victim of this scandal, determined to root out the criminal syndicate at the heart of his intelligence agency; it was just a weird coincidence that the very day (some months ago) that President Uribe publicly accused the Supreme Court of Colombia of being politically biased against him for their investigations into paramilitary-government links, and possibly tainted by sympathies with guerrilla elements, the DAS began tapping the phones of the judges of the Supreme Court.
Needless to say, you never ought to p*** off judges too badly, and least of all the nation’s Supreme Court.
Those judges are p***ed, seriously, and they’re not going to let this sh*t go quietly. The Chief Justice said he was complaining to the Organization of American States and the UN that the state was dangerously interfering with the basic function of an independent judiciary — basically publicly accusing his own government of having abandoned the democratic model.
Note: I forgot: Part of what triggered the article in Semana two Saturdays ago was that their sources were reporting a HUGE operation within this agency (DAS) to begin erasing and destroying hard disks and other media and printed records, just vast quantities of information, and in a hurry, with no explanation.
The Moar You Know
@Krista: Litvinenko’s case is pretty egregious. The wife and kid will be radioactive for the rest of their lives (polonium has a half-life of about 80 years as I recall, and there was a lot of it just lying around Russia, used as "hot piles" in remote lighthouses, etc) and so will the assassin. The assassin should have been easy enough to find, but…never was.
Cris
Death squads may not be funny, but that post was fucking funny.
Seebach
Make sure to also read Matt Taibbi’s takedowns of Friedman. They’re less scholarly and more snarky, but I enjoy them.
The Populist
The fact that he tried to be cute and rhyme rootin’ with putin makes me want to laugh at him and dismiss anything he says outright.
Between idiot Friedman and idiot Bush this jerk Putin has too many secret lovers. Pooty-poot? Yep…tell me again why Bush is not dumb? Who the fuck nicknames somebody POOTY-POOT!?!?!?!
Dave C
Thomas Friedman, you have been found guilty of being a wanton blow-hard and a useless, immoral prognosticator. Your sentence: a pie in the face every minute….for eternity.
p mac
I agree with the previous poster. Matt Taibbi, master of snark, has Friedman dialed in.
JenJen
Matt Welch, Warblog. From the earlier thread, I always think of that blog as one of the first really well-written blogs to pop up. I’d not read the piece on Friedman, which was just great. Thanks for the link.
Comrade Baron Elmo
Friedman is as annoying as a pernicious gnat, his so-called "ideas" shallow as a cheap plaster birdbath… but it wasn’t until I copped a view of the "Suck. On. This." portion of his Charlie Rose interview that I came to hate his guts. Not to be missed.
You have to see it to truly comprehend what an babbling shitbag Friedman really is. This guy cheered on the Iraq war by relentlessly pimping the bringing-freedom-to-the-oppressed-Iraqis meme… then, the war safely underway, Tom let his mask slip to admit the real reason for his full-throated support: because Muslim ass needed to be kicked, and Iraq was the most convenient location to put the boot in.
Sure, people got killed, maimed, orphaned, widowed, driven from their homes and tortured… but at least America got to feel good about itself again! I don’t think even Bill effin’ Kristol ever sank that goddamn low.
Friedman’s punishment: a thorough ass-kicking from a committee of crippled Iraq vets. Seriously. I want that fucker to look like a rotten eggplant with a mustache by the time they’re finished with him.
Hyperion
@Dave C:
…is to see much of your wife’s money go down the financial collapse toilet. so sad.