10 Years Later

Hundreds of thousands are dead because of the evil fucking people who dreamt up and sold the American people on the Iraq war.

But let's also not forget how many of our elites willingly cheered it on for the absolute dumbest of reasons:

Coherent Writing FAIL

I'd be the first to admit that I'm not a great writer, but at least this is just a stupid blog, not a column in the New York Fucking Times:(Via Ezra Klein)

Over the next couple of years, two very big countries, America and China, will give birth to something very important. They’re each going to give birth to close to $1 trillion worth of economic stimulus — in the form of tax cuts, infrastructure, highways, mass transit and new energy systems. But a lot is riding on these two babies. If China and America each give birth to a pig — a big, energy-devouring, climate-spoiling stimulus hog — our kids are done for. It will be the burden of their lifetimes. If they each give birth to a gazelle — a lean, energy-efficient and innovation-friendly stimulus — it will be the opportunity of their lifetimes.

I've read this paragraph at least 10 times, I still have no clue what Thomas Friedman is attempting to say. Why is the stimulus a baby? Why beat the the baby metaphor into the ground when when it didn't really make sense to begin with? Why are China and America giving birth to livestock offspring? Why did one of our country's most reputable newspapers pay him a lot of money to write this?

It reminds me of the great Thomas Friedman take down a few years back, by one of my personal favorite writers, Matt Tiabbi:

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.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

That seems about right for the man whose greatest contribution to our national discourse was explaining how we needed to go into Iraq in order to tell the middle east to "suck on this".

Suck. On. This.

5 Years ago today, one of the nations "premier" foreign policy analysts said this: (via Atrios)

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
...
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
...

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

For the record, Thomas Friedman still has a job as a prominent columnist at the New York Times, was named #16 of the top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine and has gotten 2 multi-millon dollar book deals since 2003. Gotta love how the cream rises to the top, huh.