Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

We are aware of all internet traditions.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

He really is that stupid.

In my day, never was longer.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

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147Comments

  4. 4.

    16shellsfromathirtyaughtsix

    I’m starting to wonder if this is all some elaborate ploy to see how far he can go before they shitcan him.

  5. 5.

    robertdsc

    I should send Friedman a link to 4chan. Maybe then he’ll keep the jerking around to himself.

  6. 6.

    Lev

    I can’t believe I’m in a world where Tom Friedman is a respected policy voice. It’s like only the lefty blogosphere realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

  7. 7.

    CJ

    But the bigger objective was to help Iraqis midwife a democratic model that could inspire reform across the Arab-Muslim world and give the youth there a chance at a better future.

    This, combined with the photo portrait, make me want to kick children in the mouth.

  8. 8.

    jrg

    “The Industrial Revolution to me is just like a story I know called “The Puppy Who Lost His Way.” The world was changing, and the puppy was getting… bigger.”

    But seriously:

    What matters in Obama’s war in Afghanistan is whether the Afghan people are allied with their own government and each other.

    We cannot achieve this in our own country. How are we going to do it in Afghanistan?

  9. 9.

    fucen tarmal

    dude that is the kind of thing you close a message with, if you are fucking with someone in particular. like you are agitating some one. this is why crazy people think there are hidden messages from the government in the newspaper.

    wtf.

  11. 11.

    Ron Beasley

    If there is anyone I dislike more than Dick Cheney it’s probably Friedman. Cheney is not intellectually dishonest _ he may lie but you know where he stands. Cheney is wrong about everything but he’s very intelligent. Friedman on the other hand is wrong about everything and a pontificating moron. Nuff said!

  12. 12.

    Joey Giraud

    The only people I know who respect TF are the mushy moderate liberals. True right-wingers think he’s a liberal.

    Hard to belive. Personally, I think TF is what they used to call a “hidden persuader.”

  14. 14.

    handy

    “Last throes” Cheney often has issues with the truth, too. Don’t sell short his capacity for dishonesty, intellectual or otherwise.

  15. 15.

    petorado

    I see Tommy took another cab ride. Who else but a foreign cabbie would’ve thought of that clever “friends don’t let friends drive drunk with baby democracy in the back seat” analogy.

    In tomorrow’s Tommy column: why Obama needs to multitask on two wars like a cabbie driving and talking on his cell phone. Genius!

  19. 19.

    mai naem

    I bet Friedman’s a chic-ken hawk. They need to get rid of the age limit off service in the armed forces and send Friedman,Brooks,Perle, Kristol,Krauthammer,Kaus,Peretz,Lieberman,Fleischer, Senor, Rove,Cheney, Shrub,Giuliani,Clinton,Palin, McConnell, Boehner(he won’t need a tanning bed anymore),Romney,Hitchens and every damn rah rah warmonger. Let them lose their lives for their war.

  20. 20.

    PeakVT

    But, in truth, it was really a rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of U.S. power.

    Whiskey tango foxtrot, over.

  22. 22.

    Mark S.

    It was sold as being about W.M.D. But, in truth, it was really a rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of U.S. power.

    Best trillion dollars we ever spent. And it’s a little troubling that our two experiments in democracy building have resulted in two suspect elections in the last six months. But for Friedman, that just means we should stay there for another decade or two.

  28. 28.

    balconesfault

    @Mark S.: But for Friedman, that just means we should stay there for another decade or two.

    How many Friedman units is that? My head already hurts too much to figure it out.

  29. 29.

    Nutella

    Moved from the end of the OTHER Friedman thread:

    Check out this interesting series of articles from another scion of the ruling class, with this very nice line:

    I laugh whenever I read one of Thomas Friedman’s “Gosh Golly, Globalism!” theses

  31. 31.

    burnspbesq

    Behold the power of lessthanslashigreaterthan.

    Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

  33. 33.

    burnspbesq

    @slag:

    Dammit, it was fixed for a second. Who re-broke it? I feel like Jack Bauer – no matter how many people I torture, the terrists are still one step ahead.

  35. 35.

    PeakVT

    Unfortunately, adding in an extra [/i] doesn’t work.

    But how about an [/em] tag?

    ETA: Nope. It just looks fixed when the edit script causes Firefox to re-render the section.

  39. 39.

    TenguPhule

    As I have said before, friends don’t let friends drive drunk

    Surely Friedman’s friends can make an exception for him.

    Failing that, make him drink till he stops breathing.

  40. 40.

    slag

    @PeakVT: That’s the thing. RonBeasley’s em tag is closed. Eventually.

    Span and div closing don’t work either. We are going to be in so much trouble when dad gets home!

  42. 42.

    TenguPhule

    I can’t believe I’m in a world where Tom Friedman is a respected policy voice.

    I try to comfort myself with the thought that in some alternate universe, Friedman was strangled to death with Malkin’s entrails and peace descended at last.

  44. 44.

    PeakVT

    @slag: The open tag in Beasley’s post is [em style=””]. Is the style part illegal or does it need to be closed explicitly?

  48. 48.

    slag

    @PeakVT: Interesting. Not seeing the style tag you’re seeing in Firefox for Mac. Just the standard openemclosed. This is the tag that appears to be offending: “span onclick=’yus< ". openclose brackets on either end, of course, but that doesn't matter. Nor, apparently, does the single closing em tag in the next paragraph.

    OK. Awesome. Now I broke the internets all over again.

  50. 50.

    mai naem

    I would like to clip some metal banana clips to Friedman’s moustache and then hang him outside the NYTimes building using some chinese made string tied onto the clips. And ofcourse I would have him hanging for only 6 months.

  51. 51.

    slag

    @slag: Did I do it? Did I? No. Probably not.

    Hmm…OK. Maybe I did. Can a comment stuck in moderation really be that powerful? A disturbing thought.

  53. 53.

    Yutsano

    I guess we should be grateful that it’s just this thread that’s all whacked and not the entire blog. That would be quite the tragic happenstance.

  55. 55.

    Comrade Mary

    Well, the unclosed em tag in comment 11 has one more interesting effect: all places in the code from that point forward that used straight quotes now have the ASCII code for curly quotes. The span tag following that comment has the em tag closing right inside.

    I don’t think this is fixable from our end.

    Also: why does WordPress hate America?

  56. 56.

    Comrade Mary

    Grr: one more time.

    Well, the unclosed em tag in comment 11 has one more interesting effect: all places in the code from that point forward that used straight quotes now have the ASCII code for curly quotes. The span tag following that comment has cleverly tried to fix things by placing the em tag closing right inside, and all hell has broken loose.

    I don’t think this is fixable from our end.

    Also: why does WordPress hate America?

  57. 57.

    soonergrunt

    @slag: If you mean that the italics have gone away, no. It’s just you, and you HAVE* gone insane after all.

    *I would’ve used italics there instead of caps, but well, yeah.

  58. 58.

    asiangrrlMN

    I love the italics, people. So flowery and genteel-like. Much better than fucking Tom Friedman. I skimmed the article, but I could not stomach reading the whole fucking thing. Bastard.

  59. 59.

    Steeplejack

    Friedman:

    But the bigger objective was to help Iraqis midwife a democratic model [. . .].

    Hate to be a pedant, but it should be “midwive a democratic model.”

    Yes, I know that in the greater scheme of the Mustache’s incoherence this is a small nit to pick, but if he’s going to go for the pseudo-elegant tropes he should at least get them right.

    And, damn it, I take it back that I “hate to be a pedant.” What I really hate is douchebags getting paid big bucks to write incoherent drivel and not even being able to construct it correctly. It’s like listening to someone play a Stradivarius that’s out of tune. And in Friedman’s case it’s like playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” on a Stradivarius. Ugh.

    &#150 Steep + Oh fuck it I’m going to bed.

    P.S. Who the fuck italicized the whole thread?! Let me see if I can nip that for you . . .

    ETA: My fix no fixee. Thank you, Ron Beasley at #11. FY and FYWP.

    [Further] ETA: Hey, I think I did fix it! Yee-haw.

    [Even further] ETA: But then when I hit page refresh my fix gets unfixed. FYWP! Fuck everybody! Steep out.

  61. 61.

    slag

    @soonergrunt: OK. This is freaky. It’s working fine for me in both Firefox and Safari. Maybe try a shift refresh or a control reload just for kicks? Am I the only one who can see my comment in moderation when viewing page source?

  65. 65.

    Steeplejack

    @asiangrrlMN:

    This italic bullshit is really getting to me. Just wanted to say before I leave that I commented earlier today on the other thread just before going to work and didn’t see your question until I came back tonight. Short answer: I didn’t go to work until 4:00 p.m. Mañana.

  66. 66.

    Wile E. Quixote

    You know, the more I read Friedman the more he sounds like BoB. One of these days he’s going to write a column about how the Obama administration’s middle eastern policy is like stumbling around a darkened warehouse while being chased by a lesbian driving a forklift and how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is like a fight between a toothless lesbian and a shirtless Asian woman at a Chinese restaurant and the truth will finally be revealed.

  67. 67.

    Doug Kahn

    Ngo Dinh Diem. We can’t abandon the South Vietnamese to the communist infiltrators who etc. and so on and so forth.

    Are we there yet?

  68. 68.

    Steeplejack


    ETA: Tried some invisible HTML-fu that didn’t work. FYWP. No, seriously, WordPress, you really suck.

  70. 70.

    hamletta

    Must be nice to be married to a shopping center heiress. Frees you up to think.

    Apparently it doesn’t free you up to reflect, because then you’d remember that Iraq was a functional society until we fucked their shit up.

    And all that thinkin’ doesn’t make you empathetic. Sure, we freed the Iraqi people from An Evil Dictator, but tell that to the (now) single mothers turning tricks in Damascus.

    The World Is Not Flat Like a Risk Board, Thomas Friedman, and you will answer to God for your evil stupidity.

  75. 75.

    NYT

    Friedman is a case study in revisionism . Here he is today:

    Unlike Afghanistan, the war in Iraq was, at its core, always driven more by idealism than realism. It was sold as being about W.M.D. But, in truth, it was really a rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of U.S. power. The immediate target was to topple Saddam’s genocidal dictatorship. But the bigger objective was to help Iraqis midwife a democratic model that could inspire reform across the Arab-Muslim world and give the youth there a chance at a better future.

    But in an interview with Maxine McKew he gave in 2002, he cites WMD as the reason the US should go to war, with cheap oil as his secondary reason. When asked about democracy he says :

    TOM FRIEDMAN: I don’t think anybody really knows what the long-term impact would be on regime change in Iraq.
    The best case scenario you get an Iraqi Thomas Jefferson in there and Iraq is transformed into a democracy. Obviously that would have a huge impact on the region.
    Each one of these states – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, around Iraq – they have their own internal dynamics and they don’t fall like dominos.

    Oh yeah and here is his opinion of Karzai then:
    Imagine if Karzai, God forbid, had been shot and worse. We would have lost the lynchpin really of our whole effort to democratise Afghanistan right now.
    Something I’m uncomfortable with – this man Karzai was a wonderful guy I’ve met and interviewed – is protected by American diplomatic security.

  76. 76.

    asiangrrlMN

    @hamletta: Yeah, no shit. I really think I need to get on the batshitcrazy gravy train. I need to make me some Friedman’s wife kind of money. I could make millions as a reformed liberal! Oh, excuse me, lie-beral!

    @Thoroughly Pizzled: How did you do that? I like it!

  77. 77.

    furioso ateo

    Frankly, this low-key approach made a lot of sense to me because I never thought Afghanistan was that important.

    He has the blood of 100k+ Iraqis and 4k+ Americans on his moustache. All because he thought the war in Afghanistan was boring.

    For real, I ever run into him in public, he’s getting a punch in the mouth.

  78. 78.

    soonergrunt

    @slag: Well, in the image you provided, the italics are not present from post 50 onwards.
    I don’t know as that proves anything about your sanity though.

    In all seriousness, I see all of the posts after mid way through #11 as italicised in the bodies, but not in the user name fields. Did the guy break the style sheet?

  79. 79.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: Home, noshing on rugelach from the Jewish deli in AZ (not to brag but mine are bettah!) doing a round of laundry late night and waiting until one of our illustrious hosts fixes the thread. I think we’re gonna be stuck slanted for the rest of the night though.

    @furioso ateo: A punch in the mouth? I think you’re being too mild. I have zero doubt you’d demonstrate with alarming alacrity just what our all-volunteer force is capable of.

  80. 80.

    hamletta

    @Wile E. Quixote: You forgot the cab driver!

    Friedman always attributes his most brilliant, yet populist and folksy(!) (see below), ideas to random cab drivers.

    (below) Populist and Folksy as defined by one T. Friedman, of course. He’s less sloppy than Brooks—cabbies in Tehran don’t know from Applebee’s, much less its abundant salad bars—but he’s full of at least as much shit, if not more.

  81. 81.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: Yeah, I hear you. I have to get my last load of laundry, but I haz a kitteh grooming on my lap. My eyes are starting to hurt.

    @furioso ateo: I will give you a rusty pitchfork, free of charge, if you promise you will fork Friedman with it.

  83. 83.

    slag

    @soonergrunt: I don’t think it was RonBeasley’s fault. But if you copy the offending span tag at the end of that #11 comment and paste it into your own comment with the extra openbracket before the em tag, you may be able to fix the problem for you. Your comment will end up in moderation, however.

    And you’ll notice that the italics turned off halfway through comment 48 for me. Comrade Mary’s italics were self-inflicted.

  84. 84.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: I also meant to tell you: while waiting bored in the airport in Seattle, I saw a tourism ad for Taiwan. I of course immediately thought of you and smiled, especially when they showed some of the cultural dancers. I had never really seen a traditional Taiwanese outfit before, it looks similar to Japanese casual wear from the Tokugawa era. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising considering how close Taiwan and southern Japan are. Anyway I was eating brown rice with chopsticks at the time so it seemed appropriate.

    EDIT: We is fixeth! Woot!

  85. 85.

    MikeJ

    Yea! A grup showed up to fix it!

    We should have chanted, “Friendly angel come to me…”

  86. 86.

    Doug Kahn

    My comment is awaiting moderation. Why? Am I moderate? I went to Communist Martyr’s High School.

  88. 88.

    slag

    Bravo! Now I hope all my moderated comments get deleted before they break something new.

    “span onclick=’yus< " Frak!

  91. 91.

    Anne Laurie

    Y’all stop “fixting” for a few comments, okay? I think I’ve hand-adjusted everything back to WP-normal, if you refresh yr screens.

  92. 92.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: I think someone is messing with us. The italics show up then go poof. Rawr.

    I will say it did make me want to visit Taiwan now. I suppose I could fly to Sydney then Taipei and make a big ass trip out of it. Although I want to sneak in New Zealand in there as well.

  93. 93.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: You should. I think you would really dig Taiwan. Just make it a month-long trip before starting your new job!

    @Anne Laurie: Thanks, Anne Laurie. You’re an angel. And, I didn’t try to fix anything!

    @slag: Just be glad it was her and not Cole. He gets really pissed when we break the blog.

  95. 95.

    hamletta

    @Yutsano: I have a great recipe for rugelach.

    It’s a great dough that’s easy for pastry-challenged people like me, and you can stuff it with anything you take a liking to.

  97. 97.

    Yutsano

    @hamletta: I freely admit the recipe I have is not originally mine but belongs to Ina Garten. It does, however, make very easy and very FANTASTIC rugelach. I’m not above seeing another recipe and trying it out just to compare.

  99. 99.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Fun with Tom and Matt:

    For anyone who might not know what this post is referring to, here’s one of the best samples:

    Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May: “The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.” First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

    Friedman’s inept use of language is only half the fun, it’s the use Taibbi puts it to that’s the other half, like handing a great jazz musician a fragment of a melody and letting him take it from there.

  101. 101.

    drainflake77

    new around here – are there any lovely parting gifts for being comment # 100?

  104. 104.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @drainflake77: Why, yes, it’s usually a new house, a yacht, and a lifetime supply of cat food.

    It looks your comment was actually 101 though, rats, too bad!

  105. 105.

    freelancer

    @Yutsano:

    Yeah I left today. Now I’m safely back in the confines of the Missouri Valley, and though its roughly the same temp today, it’s WAY muggier.

    Sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet up, but I had family down there I didn’t even have a chance to call, we were that busy.

    Awesome trip. Just awesome. Exactly what I needed.

  108. 108.

    Yutsano

    @freelancer: It’s all good. I didn’t have a huge amount of unaccounted for time as it was myself, although the wedding was fantastic. I agree the weather was beyond perfect (if you do relocate down there don’t expect that all year) so it was great sitting in the sun right before I left. Glad you enjoyed yourself, and like you said, we’ll always have Paris.

    @asiangrrlMN: I could handle a month off, although being the good American I am I’d have to spend only one week in each place then move on. Plus that seems to fit my attention span well anyway. It’s either that or just not come back period.

  110. 110.

    fucen tarmal

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    i’m sorry but taibbi must not get around the internet much if he doesn’t know how you can be in three holes at once.

    not that i disagree with the overall rantrum, i’m just saying.

  113. 113.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: If I were gone for that length of time I would for certain invest in a laptop with a good wireless card. Of course unless I need one for a new job (which BTW there was some progress on that front today but I’ll come back to that later) I really don’t need one right now. Oh and no offense to burnpbesq but no iPad for me plz.

  114. 114.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @fucen tarmal: Oh I think Taibbi agrees that you can be in all kinds of trouble at once, just as Friedman says, he’s making fun of the other, concrete side of the metaphor. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

    It never does, with Friedman.

    Another wonderful section from that piece gets into it more broadly:

    Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

  115. 115.

    Mark S.

    OT (does anyone remember what this thread was originally about) – but concerning Palin’s speaking contract:

    Palin “requires that any questions she gets from the audience be pre-screened. In fact, even questions from a moderator are to be pre-screened, according to the document.” Additionally, “Any guests at private receptions must be pre-screened.”

    That’s pretty lame for a speech at a university. Real free exchange of ideas.

  117. 117.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: I just want her 15 minutes to end like yesterday and for her looks to finally start fading so the idiot teabaggers who have no real idea why they’re following her can move on to the next conservative shiny object. This is the direct consequence of what happens when men think with the wrong head, starting with Grandpa McCain. Good ol’ Walnuts couldn’t stop staring at her ass the whole damn race. Oh and he’s only one point ahead of that nutbag Hayworth so the Dems better be paying attention and field a good candidate because AZ might just turn into a pick-up state if JD wins the primary. BTW saw three different campaign commercials for Grandpa, no substance to them whatsoever and Cindy was nowhere to be seen in any of them.

  118. 118.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: No kidding. You know, I would even put up with her shit on FOX and such if she just promised never ever ever to run for office again. Damn Grampy McCain for foisting her upon America. And, I never saw the attraction. She has dead eyes to me. Give me Tina Fey any day over half-term governor quitter Palin.

    @bago: I can Roto-Rooter up to five holes at one time. Just ask me how. For three low low installments of $29.99 each, you, too can find multiple-hole satisfaction.

    @auntieeminaz: Yeah, no such thing. If it’s over thirty, it’s too hot.

  120. 120.

    bago

    @fucen tarmal

    In order to work three shovel-ready holes at once you’ll have to stop by asiangrrl’s rusty toolshed.

  122. 122.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN:

    Yeah, no such thing. If it’s over thirty, it’s too hot.

    Heh. My friend the Communist lived in East Germany for several years before the wall fell (he defected, I’m still trying to get him to write a book about that experience) and he said he had never been so cold in his life. As soon as he could sell his house in California and move to the desert of Phoenix he was packed up and gone. I call him a lizard just because of that. You’d like where my ex was from for the cold. Can’t beat Whitehorse, Yukon Territory for chilly temps for sure. Although when summer breaks out up there the meadows and forests are indescribably beautiful. Eight months of snow though. Eight months. I’m just sayin’.

    @bago: Ew. Just. Ew.

  126. 126.

    Mark S.

    I wish I didn’t click that either.

    Soooo, in the effort to think about anything else, who does everyone like for the NBA playoffs?

  128. 128.

    Yutsano

    @Mark S.: Well after the massive ass raping attempt the owner of the former Seattle Supersonics pulled, my low interest in the NBA turned into pretty much zero. So I’ll call no dog in this hunt and stick with that story. But hey yakyu is in full swing again and the Mariners aren’t sucking too horribly, so there’s always that.

    @asiangrrlMN: This is fitting my mood a bit more. I ma go Iko Iko just because right before bed, but for now gonna lose myself in a Canadian songstress:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60bNzi9dA9U

    @MikeJ: And did a damn good job too. Who knew John Fogarty could be covered so well?

  131. 131.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: I lurv Sarah McLachlan. Sigh.

    And, I would be happier about baseball if Ratface Pawlenty hadn’t robbed the Hennepin Taxpayers in order to provide a welfare stadium for the Twins.

  133. 133.

    ExtremismInTheDefenseOfLiberty

    Since this is an open thread, and to rescue it from the endless doldrums of wee hour Mass For Shut-ins:

    Don’t know if this has been pimped on these pages already, but ….

    I hope many BJers got to see the Frontline documentary on the story behind the HCR process and passage of the bill.

    A stunning and exhausting story, see it if you can.

  135. 135.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: Since I wasn’t naive enough to think that HCR wasn’t going to pass in a form that would make a large number of folks happy, little this documentary will have i it will surprise me. However I will give it a watch when I have the opportunity, which is not now because I’m tired. Night y’all.

  136. 136.

    Mark S.

    FYWP!

    ETA: Does this blog not like Amazon links? I seriously tried like five times to post a comment, and they all disappeared. I hope they don’t all suddenly show up so I can look like an idiot for posting the same thing five times.

  137. 137.

    ExtremismInTheDefenseOfLiberty

    @Mark S.:

    This thing eats posts every day, and it’s not always possible to figure out why.

    Yesterday it was because it didn’t like a URL that I put into my Website field on top of the post editor. Took it out, problem went away.

    You never know, the thing is a truly broken piece of software.

  139. 139.

    ExtremismInTheDefenseOfLiberty

    @Mark S.:

    Heh. Mclaren probably runs the piece by a content editor before he submits it.

    Anyway, I got in the habit a long time ago of making a quick save to Notepad for any post that took any work to write, before I submit it. It sounds clunky but if you post often here it is well worth the trouble.

  140. 140.

    bago

    That was supposed to be an apology for using that phrase. After re-reading the first post it sounded kind of dirty so I checked. Oops.

    However, anyone who clicks an urbandictionary link to “Rusty Toolshed” knows what they’re getting into.

  141. 141.

    Batocchio

    Holy fuck. What is wrong with these people? I know that Friedman, McArdle, Brooks and the rest are vain twits and ridiculously delusional about their own insight/intellect. Still, Friedman thought that line was good. He thought it would play with his crowd. And, FSM help us, he may be right. But he really didn’t realize how many other people would mock it?

    His views on Iraq in the same op-ed are really despicable, revisionist and similarly paternalistic, if expressed in less painful prose. The moustache’s stock in trade is avuncular imperialism.

  143. 143.

    Mark S.

    @Batocchio:

    avuncular imperialism

    I like that term.

    It would be one thing if Friedman were a systems analyst living in Buffalo and he thought this way, but this is a guy who regularly jet sets around the world and should know that the rest of the world doesn’t see America as a completely benevolent superpower that only uses its vast military for good. But Friedman’s only contact with the plebes is probably his cab rides, so he probably has no idea how non-millionaires in other countries think.

  144. 144.

    Svensker

    @Steeplejack:

    What I really hate is douchebags getting paid big bucks to write incoherent drivel and not even being able to construct it correctly. It’s like listening to someone play a Stradivarius that’s out of tune. And in Friedman’s case it’s like playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” on a Stradivarius. Ugh

    Hit the nail on the head.

    Also, too, anyone who uses the word “jihadist” should be parachuted in to the high mountains of Afghanistan with their only supplies a knife (strapped to a thigh for sleekness) and a few granola bars. If that person makes it out alive, I’d guess they wouldn’t use that word again.

  146. 146.

    Spork

    Hilarious. I pegged it as Friedman right at “friends don’t let friends drive drunk”. And to think that there was a time when his reporting was insightful (I’m talking a long time ago, well before he found himself on the NY Times op-ed page).

  147. 147.

    liberty60

    @Yutsano:

    I just want her 15 minutes to end like yesterday and for her looks to finally start fading so the idiot teabaggers who have no real idea why they’re following her can move on to the next conservative shiny object.

    These are people who still revere Phyllis Schlafly, for God’s sake. Sorry to say, but in 40 years we will still be cursed with the gratin’ speechifyin’ of the Wasilla Grifter.

    Oh, and off-topic (since Friedman has pretty much been kicked to a bloody pulp)-
    Glenzilla has a great tweet about the Village idiocy of “anonymous sources”:

    I wonder if Marc Kaufman met his secret WH source in a garage in order to learn about Obama’s “bold and daring vision” http://is.gd/bskZM

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