The Mustache of Conciliation and Compromise

Via.

Old Tom Friedman bothsidesing the Democrats internally ("Do Democrats Have the Courage of Liz Cheney?"):

I have only one question for them: Are you ready to risk a lot less than Liz Cheney did to do what is necessary right now — from your side — to save our democracy?

Because, when one party in our two-party system completely goes rogue, it falls on the other party to act. Democrats have to do three things at the same time: advance their agenda, protect the integrity of our elections and prevent this unprincipled Trump-cult version of the G.O.P. from ever gaining national power again.

It is a tall order and a wholly unfair burden in many ways. But if Cheney is ready to risk everything to stop Trump, then Democrats — both moderates and progressives — must rise to this moment and forge the majorities needed in the Senate and House to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill (now scheduled for a Thursday vote in the House), a voting rights bill and as much of the Build Back Better legislation as moderate and progressives can agree on.

I guess Rep. Gottheimer (leading the tiny rump in the House who say they won't vote for the human-insfrastructure bill unless they get to vote for the structural-infrastructure bill first, but refuse to say whether they will vote for the former if they get their way on the latter) might think he's already doing the same kind of thing as Cheney when she voted to impeach Big Donald—fearlessly bucking his party.

Mustache of Radical Love

When Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, gets depressed (I think of it as getting back on his meds) he can get insightful: today, on the subject of the bizarre war between the Department of Homeland Security and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon ("Trump's Wag-the-Dog War"), though he's still pretty crazy:

Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to “wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home. Be afraid — he just might get his wish.

Trump's told us all about how he hates endless foreign wars, but he's not opposed to domestic ones.

Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”

These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

Really/Not really, Tom

Just for the hell of it, and because it was actually pretty good, and possibly a very fine example of literary detective work, and because I didn't explain the Friedman parody concept very well in the previous post, re-running my September 2013 tribute to the blogger Really Tom Friedman:

From Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl, via the dead blog Pynchonoid.

Finally [in September 2013, when this was written] got a copy of the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Bleeding Edge, purportedly about the 9/11 attacks (I won't be reading any reviews all the way through at least until I'm done with the book), and opened it up to the first page to find to my amazed delight that it starts almost exactly where I would have been on that fictional day, on the day that comes every [jump]

Hey la hey la my Friedman's back

Opinion

Trump Offs Iran’s Most Pathetic  Statesman- Terrorist

Suleimani thought he was an empire builder, but turned out to be a grave digger instead, and it was his own grave, har har.

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 3, 2020

“Suck on this,” said Abubakr, passing me a Wadi al Taym nightshade reefer in the cold hills outside Beirut, but I had a deadline to meet, maybe the deadline I'd been waiting a lifetime for, to comment on, to illuminate, to swoon over the process that will lead one day to the renaming of Azadi Square in Tehran as Donald Square, as God is my witness.

Pie

I don't know what this is but it has a Facebook page.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Crustorum, has put out a Pi Day column almost a month early ("Is America Becoming a Four-Party State?") on

the most important fault line in today’s Democratic Party — the line between what I’d call “redivide-the-pie Democrats” and “grow-the-pie Democrats.”

and its bothsider Doppelgänger the Republicans are likewise

divided between a “limited-government-grow-the-pie” right — but one that wants to just let capitalism rip — and a “hoard-the-pie, pull-up-the-drawbridge” Trump-led far right [and t]he limited-government-grow-the-pie faction is itself split between the Never Trumpers — who’ve refused to prostitute themselves to Trump’s serial lying, cozying up to Russia and other madness — and those who’ve hitched a ride on Trump’s wagon to get their tax cuts, conservative judges and deregulation.

Personally, I'd say if your pie is growing you should in general discard it immediately.

Adults in the Room

Via Tenor.

Old Tom Friedman was wondering yesterday ("General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He''ll Drag You Down") what old General Mattis should do next, now that he's won the Survivor game in the White House island, last of the so-called adults in the room, the generals and generaloids who are supposed to be managing our rambunctious young president, what with McMaster having failed to "build up much of a relationship with Trump," Tillerson having burned his bridges with the "fucking moron" epithet, and Pompeo and Kelly having sacrificed their moral authority with their public lying in support of the president's lying:

Well, Secretary Mattis, here’s some free advice to the last man standing: Don’t just stand there. If you just stand there, you’ll be next. Because Trump and Sanders will be looking to enlist your old uniform next in their defense — that is, if Trump doesn’t throw you under the bus first to escape responsibility for the bungled operation in Niger.

Secretary Mattis, we don’t need any more diagnosis of the problem. We need action. And I am not talking about a coup. I mean you need to lead McMaster, Tillerson and Kelly (Pompeo is a lost cause) in telling Trump that if he does not change his ways you will all quit, en masse.

I hate to tell ya, Tom, but I think something like that has already been done, with the "suicide pact" among Mattis, Tillerson, and treasury secretary Mnuchin that Buzzfeed reported a couple of weeks ago:

Third person indefinite plural imperative counterfactual

Judith with the head of Holofernes, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1530, via DailyArtDaily.

Classic Friedman open ("Where Did 'We the People' Go?"):

A few days ago I was at a conference in Montreal, and a Canadian gentleman, trying to grasp what’s happening to America, asked me a simple question: “What do you fear most these days?”

I paused for a second, like a spectator waiting to see what would come out of my own mouth.

Like, thanks for asking, Canadian gentleman! Nobody knows what's under the mustache, not even the mustache himself!

Don't panic, Tom!

Breakfast in Korea. To the surprise of one Vice reporter, it's what's for dinner!

Seems like a long time since he's hit one out of the Friedmanian lunacy park like this:

Solving the Korea Crisis by Teaching a Horse to Sing

And the exotic (not that exotic) dateline:

SEOUL, South Korea — Some stories have to be experienced to fully grasp — the Korea crisis is one of them. I arrived in Seoul on the evening of May 28. As I was dressing for breakfast the next morning, I was jarred by a news alert ringing on my phone: North Korea had just fired a short-range ballistic missile that had landed in the sea off its east coast.

Grammar salad in the first clause ("stories" is the subject of passive "be experienced" but not the active "grasp" that follows it, and when you're trying to parse it you start wondering if stories have to be experienced like Jimi Hendrix—"Has this story ever been experienced, well I have"—and you're in a state of collapse before you get to the first dash), and the implication, because we do know what he means, that he doesn't expect us to understand the story he's about to tell.

Tales of The Normalizing: The many moods of Thomas L. Friedman

Image by Apolonis at DeviantArt.

Cynicism (last week, "Why is Trump Fighting ISIS in Syria?", when he was arguing that the Assad regime ought to be left to destroy ISIS on its own, as if Assad hadn't been cheerfully supporting ISIS all along with his purchase of their petroleum products) :

I don’t get it. President Trump is offering to defeat ISIS in Syria for free — and then pivot to strengthening the moderate anti-Assad rebels. Why? When was the last time Trump did anything for free? When was the last real estate deal Trump did where he volunteered to clean up a toxic waste dump — for free — before he negotiated with the owner on the price of the golf course next door?

Tom, Tom, when will you learn? He does things for free all the time, when he's doing it with other people's money. That was the whole principle of the Trump Foundation, enabling him to give to charity without going to his own bank account.


Optimism (yesterday, "Coal Museum Sees the Future; Trump Doesn't", recommending that Trump should emulate the The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum in Benham, owned by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, and go for solar power because it's more practical):

Since Trump seems to be pivoting from some of his campaign nonsense, one can only hope he will do the same on these issues. If Trump is looking for a blueprint, he could not do better than to read a smart new book, “Climate of Hope,” by a most unlikely duo: former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I can just see the president: "For fuck's sake I ask you to bring me a blueprint, you bring me a blueprint! Not a fucking book!"

Some of what Tom's smoking

It's always even worse when you feel a certain amount of sympathy with what Friedman wants to communicate, and yearning for a world where his fantasies would have a chance of coming true.

Moustache Fleuri, via.

Shorter Tom Friedman, "President Trump. Will You Save the Jews?", New York Times, February 15 2016:

Dear Mr. President, I implore you, by all that's sacred, you must stop Prime Minister Netanyahu from allowing any more illegal Jewish settlements from being built in the Palestinian West Bank where even President Rivlin is saying that Israel's behavior is making a legal cacophony and causing Israel to be seen as an apartheid state, which of course it isn't, seen as an apartheid state I tell you, and destroying forever the chance of a two-state solution. The projected land grab is an act of moral turpitude that will undermine the moral foundations of the state! It is about right versus wrong! It could tear apart every Jewish synagogue, charitable organization, campus club, and Jewry around the world, the way Woodmont Golf Club was almost torn apart when President Obama wanted to join and the board thought he was too pro-Palestinian because of the administration's failure to veto the UN Security Council resolution condemning the settlements only fortunately the decent members prevailed! Please consider your legacy and do the right thing!

Conjectural Donald J. Trump, in response:

Annals of derp: Profito ergo es

Image by Joe Russell, 2013.

Thomas L. Friedman, "From Hands to Heads to Hearts", January 4 2017:

Once scientific methods became enshrined, we used science and reason to navigate our way forward, he added, so much so that “the French philosopher René Descartes crystallized this age of reason in one phrase: ‘I think, therefore I am.’” Descartes’s point, said [organizational culture thinkfluencer Dov] Seidman, “was that it was our ability to ‘think’ that most distinguished humans from all other animals on earth.”

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that René Descartes's point in the cogito ergo sum line was that it was our ability to "think" that most distinguished humans from other animals?

Answer: In principle, yes. But

• first of all, it's not a phrase but two clauses, or a sentence;
• second of all, while Descartes did hold that non-human animals should be regarded as complex machines whose actions could be explained without any reference to thinking, he thought that most human behavior could be explained in the same way; 
• third of all, he thought what was most different was the humans' immaterial soul, which animals lacked, and that this was demonstrated not by the evidence of human thought but by the human possession and use of language; and 
• fourth of all, that wasn't the point of the cogito, which had nothing whatever to do with explaining the difference between humans and animals, but was rather about the question of whether we can be certain or not that anything in the universe really exists: the first thing Descartes thought he could be sure of was that he really did exist—the fact that he was thinking at the time proved it, because there had to be a thing there doing the thinking, and that thing was him.

Also, that did not crystallize the Age of Reason, though it certainly did illustrate it, and I doubt that Descartes would have put "think" in scare quotes. What's that about, anyway?

Seidman says we now need to distinguish ourselves from complex machines, which he apparently believes are capable of thinking (and we now understand many animals really are capable of thinking in various degrees), by the fact that the machines don't have a heart, by which he means that aspect of humanity that experiences emotions like love, compassion, and hope, which is in fact pretty much the same thing as Descartes's immaterial soul, which he described as the seat of the "passions" in his late writings. To a remarkable extent, in this way, Seidman, and Friedman, are stuck philosophically in the 17th century.

No wonder one of the fastest-growing U.S. franchises today is Paint Nite, which runs paint-while-drinking classes for adults. Bloomberg Businessweek explained in a 2015 story that Paint Nite “throws after-work parties for patrons who are largely lawyers, teachers and tech workers eager for a creative hobby.” The artist-teachers who work five nights a week can make $50,000 a year connecting people to their hearts.

There's an argument Descartes wouldn't have thought of—"I can earn $50K part-time helping you experience passions, with the help of some alcohol, therefore your passions are philosophically important." I profit, therefore thou art.

Dog paddling in the Rubicon

Image via tenor.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Cabalisticus, is so adorable sometimes. He really is the reasonable, kind-hearted liberal Zionist he'd like everybody else to be, as when he generously characterizes the Israeli prime minister:

Netanyahu is a leader who is forever dog paddling in the middle of the Rubicon, never ready to cross it. He is unwilling to make any big, hard decision to advance or preserve a two-state solution if that decision in any way risks his leadership of Israel’s right-wing coalition or forces him to confront the Jewish settlers, who relentlessly push Israel deeper and deeper into the West Bank.

Oh, please, Tom. Netanyahu is forever sending you selfies where he's posing on a diving board on the opposite bank and you're thinking, "Well, he must have jumped in by now." He hasn't. He never will. He has no interest in your two-state solution, and he never has had. He used to make these vague gestures toward it, to gratify his American patrons, but now he hardly bothers, because he knows the money will never stop flowing no matter what he does. He is stonewalling for the moment when the two-state solution will no longer be possible, some think that moment came quite a while ago, and the Americans will leave him alone, except for the cash.

Tom, this is not really helping

By Directioner via WeHeartIt.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Contrarianisticus, has a fun take:

Thank God for WikiLeaks.

After all these months of nailbiting over what kind of monstrous evil Hillary might be revealed by the transcripts of her secret meetings with the employees of the Goldman Sachs firms, now that WikiLeaks has published them it turns out she's nothing but a left-deviationist Friedmanite! Exactly what the mustache ordered!

I confess, I was starting to wonder about what the real Hillary Clinton — the one you never get to see behind closed doors — really stood for. 

Right, how come the Clinton we see behind closed doors is never the real one? Wait what?

Oh snap: Postscript

Image via Giphy.

Thomas P. Friedman ("Can the U.S. Win This Election?"), better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Mirabilis, hopes Congress goes Democratic in an overwhelming way, so Clinton will be able to push through some Republican policy:

we have to hope not only that Hillary Clinton wins the national election but also that Democrats retake at least the Senate, so she has some real leverage to forge trade-offs with a more sane G.O.P. to start fixing things: putting in place common-sense gun laws, like restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, requiring universal background checks and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun; borrowing money at near-zero interest rates to rebuild our infrastructure; replacing some income and corporate taxes with a revenue-neutral carbon tax to stimulate more clean-energy production; fixing Obamacare; and implementing sensible immigration reform and responsible tax and entitlement reforms.

The bigger Clinton’s margin of victory, the less dependent she’d be, I hope, on the left wing of her party, and the more likely she’d work with Republicans, as she vowed during the last debate, by “finding common ground, because you have to be able to get along with people to get things done in Washington.”

I'll stick with that old-fashioned kind of logic, thanks, where the consequent is kind of attached to the antecedent, and the better the Democrats do the more ability they'll have to implement the Democratic platform, and the less power the Republicans have the more things can get done in Washington without them.

Don't know where Tom is hoping to get those votes for a carbon tax, revenue-neutral or otherwise, other than the despised "left wing of her party"; for Republicans, it's the worst of all possible tax hikes and permanently off the table, and Clinton herself has not been very supportive. The Sanders forces were unable to get her to sign on for it and had to make do with a deliberately ambiguous declaration that

It's Not Whether You Win or Lose

or How You Play the Game, but Whether You Compromised with the Person Who Did Lose or Win, Mutatis Mutandis, So That It was a Nonwin-Nonwin Situation for Everybody, Because That's Sportsmanship

Thomas P. Friedman AUG. 31, 2016

CreditImage by Norskarv.com.

Americans realizing that the Vikings made it first.

Anyone who says it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins this election is even crazier than my cousin Thomas L. Friedman, who is convinced that it does matter, because Trump is not merely more ignorant than a chicken reared in isolation from her peers, but literally proud to be that way, and unable to control the impulses that arise from his total lack of information. Whereas Hillary is merely arguably criminal, not that you should expect me to do the arguing, my specialty being the broad magisterial sweep. In the same way Lester Young was arguably a dick, but had the chops to be the Prez, so does Hillary strike me as presidential material in spite of her well-known and devastatingly arguable ethical issues.

But I'm not even here to talk about the candidates at the moment, though I could conceivably blunder into doing this a couple-three paragraphs down, but about the voters, who are us, and who are possibly even worse than the candidates.

Just so you know

Via.

Dr. Krugman writes ("No Right Turn"):

we’re finally seeing some prominent Republicans not just refusing to endorse Mr. Trump, but actually declaring their support for Mrs. Clinton. So how should she respond?

The obvious answer, you might think, is that she should keep doing what she is doing — emphasizing how unfit her rival is for office, letting her allies point out her own qualifications and continuing to advocate a moderately center-left policy agenda that is largely a continuation of President Obama’s.

But at least some commentators are calling on her to do something very different — to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.

I don’t think there’s much prospect that Mrs. Clinton will actually do that. But if by any chance she and those around her are tempted to take this recommendation seriously: Don’t.

Some readers are a little baffled by that third paragraph: who are those commentators urging a right turn and a "grand coalition"?

John

 is a trusted commenter Hartford 34 minutes ago

This all seems something of a straw man. Krugman doesn't specify who these "some commentators" so it's hard to know who he has in mind. Rush Limbaugh? Bill O'Reilly? As far as one can tell Clinton has actually turned slightly left in her platform which in any case was very typical Democratic center left fayre. Basically what you're going to get is Obama's pragmatic and sensible approach with a slightly leftward tilt. She has no need to make to concessions to the right nor is she likely too as Trump's campaign goes into the ditch.

No, John, it's not Limbaugh or O'Reilly. It's the Universal Mustache, Thomas L. Friedman, whose Wednesday column made exactly that demand, asking Clinton to abandon the Democratic platform (most progressive ever, as they kept telling us at the convention, and it's true!) in favor of what he calls "pro-growth" policies:

There are a lot of center-right, business Republicans today feeling orphaned by Trump. They can’t vote for him — but a lot of them still claim they can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary, either. Clinton should be reaching out to them with a real pro-growth, start-up, deregulation, entrepreneurship agenda and give them a positive reason to vote for her.

Dr. K. isn't mentioning Friedman's name for the same reason he never mentions David Brooks's name when he needs to check some idiocy Brooks has perpetrated, because all three of them work for the New York Times and it's house policy that they never attack each other directly. But that's no reason for us not to notice it.

More on the Friedman column from me (if you haven't seen it already) at this address. Also see Bethesda 1971 at Kos.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Friedman's off his meds again

Image via makemovies.co,uk.

Shorter Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Centrotropicus, "How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out", New York Times, August 3 2016:

The country is in a furiously anti-elitist mood! And Trump could take advantage of it by unexpectedly turning sane, at any minute! Clinton's only hope is if she picks up on that center-right economic agenda! She must adopt it right away! I am not a crank!

Because nothing says "I'm not an elitist" like an economic program geared to the Chamber of Commerce and the Stanford graduating class, and the Democratic platform doesn't offer anything to entrepreneurs:

in all the testimonials at the Democratic convention about what Hillary Clinton has done for other people, I don’t recall anyone saying, “I started a business because of Hillary Clinton.” Or, “I hired someone because of Hillary Clinton.”

Remember all the people saying "I started a business because of Marco Rubio" and "I hired someone because of Ted Cruz"? I guess the Republican convention did have Ivanka, who started a business because of Donald J. Trump. And there are all the law firms that had to hire bigly to deal with him. And Christie.

There was just one group that was conspicuously absent: the people who drive our economy by inventing things or by borrowing money to start companies that actually employ people.

Other than the North Carolina tech entrepreneur Brooks Bell, the Entrepreneurs for Hillary group founded by Shelly Porges and others—

Make Florence Great Again!

And finally they decided to burn Savonarola in the public square instead. Anonymous painting, 1498, via Wikimedia Commons.

Shorter Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Vanitatum, "Another Age of Discovery", June 22 2016:

What with the internet, virtual reality, Donald Trump, Facebook, sequencing of the human genome and machines that can reason better than people, our current era seems like a completely new ballgame in human history, but isn't it all kind of familiar? I mean, I'm thinking of that High Renaissance, 1450 to 1550, when they got movable type, the heliocentric model of the planetary system, and a western route to India, stuff that is a lot like the Internet. And then where we have Trump, they had Girolamo Savonarola, who took over Florence from 1495 to 1498 even though he was completely uncool and not even that popular, so it's practically the same thing, and whose relatively short sermons and pamphlets were just like Twitter.

Inorite. I'm heading down to Mar-a-Lago with all my Armani suits, the 10,000-bottle wine cellar, and the collection of fancy old erotica to burn it all in the public square. Does Mar-a-Lago have a public square?

I love how Trump has raised himself from monastic obscurity to fame by denouncing the corruption of the clergy, like when he met with the conservative evangelical leaders just yesterday, promising to stuff the courts with anti-abortion judges and give everybody religious freedom to interfere with the freedom of people they disapprove of, and Huckabee thanked him in advance for the way he's going to "lead the nation out of the abyss". And the way he's convincing us all—nobility, rich merchants, prosperous artisans and guild members—that we have to dump all our fabulous Renaissance-style luxuries and clamp down on sodomy, adultery, drunkenness, and immodest dress (though Savonarola did promise to make Florence "more glorious, more powerful and richer than ever, extending its wings farther than anyone can imagine").

West of Eden: Fascism may be here.

Image via emaze.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Malinconicus, is in a saturnine humor as regards a former favorite country of his:

Israel has recently been under intense criticism on the world stage. Some of it, like the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” (B.D.S.) campaign, is a campus movement to destroy Israel masquerading as a political critique. But a lot of it is also driven by Israel’s desire to destroy itself — thanks to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s steady elimination of any possibility that Israel will separate itself from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

That somewhat comical formulation—"This is no time to be committing suicide, there are people out there trying to kill you!"—points at some kind of truth, but it's not something Tom really wants to hear.

The formula on BDS is a little like one of those Radio Yerevan jokes from the former Soviet Union:

Friedmanic Depression. II

Image via OceanDesign.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Sad-Eyed Mustache of the Lowlands, is still depressed, thanks to a rather cool-sounding book by an old collaborator of his, Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era, which

argues that the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy were an aberration — an era when America became so overwhelmingly more powerful than any rival that it got geopolitically drunk and decided that it didn’t just want to be a cop on the beat protecting our nation, but also a social worker, architect and carpenter doing nation-building abroad.

Well, do tell, Tom. You've certainly been wearing that thinking cap lately.

I'd like to just let him alone for once, or indeed single him out for praise, but there's one bit I can't let go, because it provides a remarkable example of the use of bad grammar as an obfuscatory device: