The Moustache of Enlightenment . . .
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KTK
“Driftglass”, at The News Blog, lets Tom Friedman have it like nobody’s business:
Every now and then as I run barefoot over the burning shores of the NYT, I catch a glint of Tom Friedman talking about, say, energy policy. Like a shiny nickel washed up along a great swath of poo, catching the light just so.
And I nod and I say “Good on you” and then scamper away, because man, the reek at high tide’d knock a dung beetle out of Fred Phelps’ mouth. And for, oh, about a minute I indulge the notion that one of the most highly paid, highly regarded, highly quoted, best selling, A-listed op-ed columnists for America’s paper of record is not a vulgar and irredeemable idiot.
That maybe he doesn’t deserve to be cast into ignoble oblivion. Reduced to writing, say, lunch menu specials at IHOP (“A cab driver in Bangalore assured me that these pecan waffles in a peach compote are genuinely Vishnulicious!”)
Priceless. And too true.
The inspiration? Friedman surveys the ghastly wreckage of the Bush Administration and concludes that “Democrats need to be careful, though, that they don’t let their rage with the hypocrisy of Mr. Bush make them totally crazy . . .”. Yes - the country’s biggest problem right now is that the Democrats might go too far and do something ill-considered.
Which leads Driftglass on to the real point, and s/he’s just as good on Bush as s/he is on Friedman (I especially like the way Driftglass loses control of the keyboard when s/he gets worked up, and just lets the typos fly) :
For thirty years the GOP has plainly tattooed “Welcome All Loonies” on its ass in forty-foot-high Day-Glo letters, bent over and grabbed its ankles and beckoned the scum of the nation to take a jolly electoral rump-tango with the Party of Lincoln. It has openly, sluttishly enticed the Dobsons, the Gingrichs and the Coulters into it’s “Big Tent”, while driving out the Goldwaters, the Deans and the Phillipses.
It has not just practiced a hyperMcCarthesque politics of rend and rule, it is fucking proud of it. . . .
And so now [we] live in a nation where a portrait of Karl Rove ripping the Constitution in half and then taking a dump on, rampant on field of Klansmen [is] practically the GOP Family Crest…and yet here we find Captain Obvious actually putting pen to paper to express how Shocked!Shocked! he is to discover that the GOP actually means what it says. . . .
Dear Democrats; Bush has walled up our soldiers in the Valley of Death and will fucking well keep them there until we’re all broke and they’re all dead or damaged for life. They need to be rescue[d] from Bush’s Iraqi Fiasco as surely as New Orleans residents needed to be rescued from Bush’s Katrina Catastrophe.
On this point the landslides of 2006 made the will of the American people unambiguously clear[].
Your most vital civic duty is to save our military from their involuntary participation in an Iraq Civil War that is killing them for no damned good reason, and from the cowardly Republican sociopaths here at home that are holding them hostage to George Bush’s ego.
There’s more. Go read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Atrios piles on, after completely different yet equally absurd provocations:
I’m not quite sure when I realized that little Tommy was a buffoon. I did force my students to read one of his books (among others of course) and by the end I think we’d all decided he was a buffoon.
I think that if there’s one contribution to humanity that liberal blogs have made it’s the fact that they have greatly increased the number of people who understand that he is a buffoon.
I especially like the way Driftglass loses control of the keyboard when s/he gets worked up, and just lets the typos fly
What, no love for our own Kevin? He invented that blogging style!
Comment 5/29/2007
By the way, your Atrios links don’t seem to work properly.
Comment 5/29/2007