Tom Friedman says what needs to be said: "This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again." Whatever else you want to say about Friedman, that's exactly right. Jim Henley's also correct to say (as, indeed, I myself said on the Sam Seder show earlier but I can't prove it) that one shouldn't let one's sense of bloggy knowingness blind one to the fact that Friedman is an enormously influential picture, and him coming around to this view makes an enormous difference.
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Friedman's Confession
01 Oct 2007 08:21 am
Comments (27)
hat Friedman is an enormously influential picture, and him coming around to this view makes an enormous difference.
Funny thing, Ron Jeremy's character in Smeers was named Enorm Peterson.
It would be more accurate if Friedman would say that 9/11 made him _stupider_, since it wasn't like the lexis and the olive tree garbage was all that smart to start with.
Anyway, I think Friedman's relevance to being quoted and espoused is in direct relation to the degree he's hawking right wing and business class talking points.
What did he say, exactly?
Last July, Microsoft, fed up with American restrictions on importing brain talent, opened its newest software development center in Vancouver.
Is he hawking some other viewpoint? So what about Iraq, Iran, &etc and this whole stupidity thing?
It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. [...] I’d love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can’t keep chasing that rainbow this way.
I am totally thinking he is expousing bidness talking points here. I don't see him exactly going backwards, so much as simply pointing out that bidness is not happy about the security situation. And if bidness isn't happy, Friedman isn't happy.
max
['Close reading suggests he apologizes for everything and repents of nothing.']
It would be more accurate if Friedman would say that 9/11 made him _stupider_, since it wasn't like the lexis and the olive tree garbage was all that smart to start with.
Both comments above are right, but (a) I enjoyed the above much more, and (b) I didn't mean that Friedman was departing from his bidness message, just that he would learn that the amount he was quoted and featured in prominent media would vary with how well his talking points were going in the right. My guess.
Right on, Matt (not the famous one). He's in the jam he's in because he was stupid to begin. Moreover, I wouldn't expect this foxhole conversion to last, as Friedman is that guy in everyone's high school who was always looking to please the principal, the trusty who had the keys to the AV room.
"We were stupid and we should do better" is an OK message, but it's a long way from "I was wrong and and this is what I have learned that will stop me from repeating my mistake".
Remind me when Tom Friedman has used that vaunted 'influence' for something other than business interests and/or hypernationalist insanity? Why should we be excited that he's starting to 'agree' (for a very loose definition of agree) with us?
I am sure that Friedman, and a few others, had a big impact on the thinking of some liberals at the time. Sure, it would have been better if the entire left had been united and said, "Hey, this is stupid, let's not do it."
But the war was going to happen regardless of what liberals thought. We'd still be in approximately the same situation as we're in today anyway.
It's the "us stupid" and "our reaction" that really piss me off. And excuse me while I don't hold my breath that Tommy has come "around to this view". Had he not tried to couch his own incompetence in "everyone's universal response" he might be a tad more convincing with his mea culpa.
Friedman should look around. 9/11 made some people (him, for instance) stupid. It made some people (the people Friedman's played enabler for) rich and powerful.
GFY, Tom. DIT.
Right on, folks. I've been waiting for years for Friedman's "mea culpa" column. What a disappointment. A fragment of a sentence can't make up for thousands of lost lives, many billions of dollars wasted, and a half-century of international goodwill destroyed.
MY, my man, in the future, please please please do not let the top tier of Bush Enablers off so easy. They deserve life-time exiles in the gulag of Discredited Pundits.
Here's Jules Crittendon's take on Friedman's column "Tom Friedman and the Nation of Stupid".
An excerpt:
"Friedman’s 9/12 argument, ironically, is a variant of George Bush’s biggest post-9/11 mistake, when he told a nation looking for leadership to ”Go shopping!” instead of “Enlist!”..."
Whatever. As I recall, sometime in the 1970s the Vatican actually issued a bull declaring that Galileo had been right. Eppur, si muove.
"... and it's time to get it right again."
Which Friedman's idiotic "9/12 mindset/ mentality" exactly fails to do. That column was utter shit. Take a blinding obvious point that you resolutely have remained oblivious to, state the obvious as a revelation, and then write utter drivel about it that resembles nothing so much as the previous crap you wrote. He shuld li it himself to about 2 columns a year, or maybe do a Bruni and start doing restaurant reviews, because his columns are an embarassment.
Friedman - I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
What a pootch!
I support dismantling Gitmo only as long as the Islamoids held there are placed in big, Blue ACLU cities like NYC, San Francisco - and free on bond posted by wealthy ACLU donors and only likely to kill liberal Americans..
Free US military health care for "poor Cuban communists?" Yeah, with 50 million Americans without health insurance, that sure makes a pile of sense...
Friedman’s 9/12 argument, ironically, is a variant of George Bush’s biggest post-9/11 mistake, when he told a nation looking for leadership to ”Go shopping!” instead of “Enlist!”.
Hard to say, as there have been so many catastrophic mistakes by Bush.
Even Republicans would debate which was his greatest mistake if they, like the rest of the country, weren't so sick of him...
1. "Go shopping!"
2. "Lets spend more money than LBJ!"
3. "Remember, Islam is the Religion of Peace."
4. People are pouring over the Border only to do the work Americans refuse to do.
5. Natan Sharansky has given me a vision of a future, democratic Iraq I am committed to, no matter what the cost.
6. I agree that Bremer and Rummy's decision to fire the entire Iraqi Army and let Shiites completely remove all Sunnis from their jobs under the rubric of de-Ba'athification are great ideas. The Sunnis will grumble a bit, but soon accept the new realities.
7. We don't need communications with any nation or Muslims...not with our high tech military..
8. "I'll just turn a blind eye to Republican's corruption and hypocrisy. It's not like voters will ever go back to the Democrats."
9. "And don't challenge me on anything. 9/11 happened and I am the new American Churchill promising tax cuts for the wealthy and you lesser Americans can just eat shit if you don't like it."
"Free US military health care for "poor Cuban communists?" Yeah, with 50 million Americans without health insurance, that sure makes a pile of sense..."
Crittenden's take on this:
"I do like Friedman’s idea for building a free hospital at Guantanamo for poor Cubans … that’s pretty much all of them, I think … only I’d like to see it built next to the prison, not in place of it. The lines of people streaming into that place would be a pretty good joke on Michael Moore and Fidel. Getting past the Cuban army might be a problem for them, though, and the exit would have to be on the dock with boat service to Miami, or you’d never get them out of the place."
Matthew, completely off topic, but a nit. I heard you on the Seder show yesterday. This is merely a nit on your presentation. You have to talk a wee bit slower.
Your content was fine, but we were listening to it on an Internet streaming feed (no Air America Radio in the Boston MA area!) coming from another room, and it was difficult to understand.
Why are people citing Crittendon, a man who's only half as smart as another man who's demonstrably stupid?
Reading Crittenden and Pajamas Media makes you stupid.
Ok, I know the first commenter hit on it, but "picture"? Really? I have no idea what you were going for, though suspect it may have some relationship to "2.1 We picture facts to ourselves."
Islamoids
What fresh bigotry is this?
I support dismantling Gitmo only as long as the Islamoids held there are placed in big, Blue ACLU cities like NYC....
Yeah, 'cause what would New Yorkers know about terrorist threats?
Friedman says:
It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers.We didn't have new enemies on 9/11. Al Qaeda had attacked the African embassies and the USS Cole before then. When President Clinton fired cruise missiles at Al Qaeda camps, he was derided for "wagging the dog."
President Clinton, Richard Clarke, Sandy Berger, and other senior Clinton Administration officials all warned the incoming Bush Administration about Al Qaeda, and the Bush people blew it off.
The bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission issues its final report in January 2001, and warned that "the combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack." The Bush people blew it off. ("We believe FEMA is competent to coordinate this effort.")
chris ford, i want to thank you for proving what an asswipe you are: you actually want terrorists to kill americans as long as they are "liberals."
breathtaking.
I support dismantling Gitmo only as long as the Islamoids held there are placed in big, Blue ACLU cities like NYC, San Francisco - and free on bond posted by wealthy ACLU donors and only likely to kill liberal Americans...
Well, why on Earth then are we having this war on terrorism when it obviously interferes with the Republican - Al Qa'ida natural alliance?
The Republicans have traditionally flocked to support and embrace fascists worldwide, so given that they call gangsters like Al Qa'ida "Islamofascists" when they aim to attack elite gay civil liberties loving hybrid driving latte sippin' cities like New York or Washington or Los Angeles (the attack which Bill Clinton actually prevented), why don't they just admit that Al Qa'ida and right wing nutcase Americans really share the same agenda, but not the same religion, and maybe then they could work out a proper Talibangelical alliance.
After all, it's not like terrorists attacked right wing rural counties in nowhere Montana or elsewhere Mississippi. (Oklahoma city doesn't count because obviously Timothy McVeigh was secretly being controlled by Saddam Hussein.)
Thank goodness that the people of the cities where terrorists actually hit are so much more mature than the Australopithecine bed wetters on the right.
I'm something of a Friedman apologist, and think From Beruit to Jerusalem is a great book. But he definitely has two modes as an op-ed writer; election mode, and influence mode. He's just switched back to election mode. He's now talking to the electorate, and not to the executive branch. When writers became too aware of their influence, they become condescending and irritating; they stop telling you what they think and start saying what his target audience is ready to listen to. I bet we could find a similar column from 2003 when he gave up trying to influence Bush and started campaigning. Then he switched back.
If Friedman starts promoting people who were smart when he was stupid, I'll believe he's changed his mind. Otherwise, he's just blowing with the wind again.
Comments closed October 15, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
What does that mean, "Friedman is an enormously influential picture"?
Anyway, I think Friedman's relevance to being quoted and espoused is in direct relation to the degree he's hawking right wing and business class talking points.
Once he deviates from that script, then suddenly he'll be surprised to learn that he wasn't actually valued for his brilliance so much as for his utility.
Posted by El_Cid | October 1, 2007 8:36 AM