Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Oblivious Moderates
I like Thomas L. Friedman, I really do. He’s always just wrong enough to merit a stern rebuke, but never so delusional that I stop hoping that one day he’ll straighten out.
Friedman is one of those moderates who are willing to close their eyes to the worst excesses of conservative ideology while endorsing its more insidious aspects. I’m grateful that, at the very least, he avoids the brazen lies of Sean Hannity or the threats of Bill O’Reilly, whose “loose cannon” persona strayed into the realm of fascist flame throwing long ago. As an aside about O’Reilly, how about the “personal attack” he leveled at Jon Stewart recently? Stewart accused him of taking it easy on conservatives, an inaccurately mild criticism, and he his response was to thunder “You’re a pinhead!” at the host on his own show. The uncomfortable moment was quickly relieved by Stewart’s laughter, thankfully, as debates with Bill O’Reilly tend to get sidetracked by his volcanic temper.
Friedman, like most conservatives, is eager to point out the shortcomings of other nations (the Oil-for-Food Scandal, Iran’s president, Putin’s corruption) but he is very willing to give the U.S. a pass.
He asserts that the good old U.S. of A. “keeps the world stable and on a decent track.” He continues that other nations “like it because this global order is helpful to every country in the world.”
Wow. Someone should tell the citizens of Nicaragua that, citizens whose elected government and country were devastated by U.S.-funded contras. Someone should tell the families of the dead murdered by death squads in Central America, funded by the U.S., that this was really for their own good. Or the democratically elected governments of Guatemala, Chile, and Iran that were overthrown with the help of the CIA. Or the families of the millions of dead in Vietnam. Or the peoples of third-world countries around the world whose land has been devastated by uncontrolled U.S. and transnational companies mining for resources, forced into the country by loan requirements from U.S. financiers.
The author he cites, a Mr. Mandelbaum, cites the “proof” of this as the fact that “no military coalition has every formed to counter America’s global governing role.”
So despite the universal political protest that accompanied U.S. actions in Nicaragua, where the U.S. action was condemned but the World Court and the General Assembly, despite the protest of the majority of people in every nation on Earth outside of the U.S. regarding our invasion in Iraq, because no nations were willing to gather their forces and get whipped by the massive U.S. military juggernaut our governance is benign. Amazing.
This kind of analysis can only be predicated on an ignorance of world affairs so profound it must only be willful.
Friedman goes on to cite the growing demographic threat of the aging baby boomers, saying that the only way to counter this threat is to cut benefits on shrink the military. He assumes we will answer this problem by shrinking the military.
I do not share his optimism. We may very well cut benefits, but that remains to be seen.
Friendman’s worldview is important because it is one that has taken hold of our mainstream: we are the good guys, whose only mistakes are “inadvertent” in our noble quest to bring freedom and prosperity to the world. Not surprisingly, this worldview is embraced by every nation on Earth: “we” are the good guys, whose only mistakes are inadvertent in our noble quest etc etc.
Thinking it doesn’t make it so, and somebody has to be wrong, seeing as how frequently nations conflict on matters of foreign policy. But Friedman, as others in the MSM, would have you believe that we are always right, even when we conflict with the other nations of the world.
I have written about this before. Frequently, we as Americans must ask ourselves something when it comes to covert CIA actions or unilateral invasions: is the entire rest of the world right, or are we right?
But so long as every action of the U.S. government is cast in the most positive possible light by the U.S. media this question will neither be asked nor honestly answered. This solipsistic disease that infects our media is the same one that allowed this administration to get a free pass on the question of WMDs in Iraq, on the conduct of our military in the war, on the conduct of our companies abroad, and of the conduct of our CIA in the past and present. This disease will continue to enable these depredations, through the willing pens of the Thomas Friedmans of this nation.
Friedman reminds me of the Chicago Tribune’s resident moderate, Clarence Page. Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board who so recently penned that debased apologia for our invasion of Iraq. Though Page has, in the past, been occasionally critical of the administration, he considers himself a moderate. He writes an op-ed in the paper today titled “Why Condi’s Star is Rising,” in which describes the republican groundswell of support for her potential candidacy in 2008. He reserves judgment, but says he “eagerly” looks “forward to finding out what she believes in” if she decides to run.
Amazing. Page still doesn’t know enough about Condi to decide if she might be a good presidential candidate. The woman who brought us “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” hasn’t revealed herself enough already.
Wake up and smell the smoking ruins, Page. Rice was pointgirl #1 in this administration’s push to lie this country into war. She was at ground zero as the National Security Advisor to doctor intelligence so clumsily that every news outlet in this country stumbled upon the remains of the ignored DIA assessments and the screamed warnings of intelligence agents. She has lied and covered up the worst of U.S. foreign policy, from extraordinary renditions and torture to the administration’s mishandled war on terror.
This is another disease that infects the moderates of this country: until they actually see the conservative in question being frog-marched into a federal penitentiary, they will give that person another opportunity to lie their ass off about their policies and positions.
Disgusting. Deeply, deeply…the only phrase that comes to mind is Page-like. Let’s wallow in a little more shit, shall we? He says “I like Condoleezza Rice. She’s gifted, expertly informed and a well-qualified manager.”
ROT IN HELL you demented excuse for an editor. She “expertly” managed our way right into the worst foreign policy disaster our nation has ever been dragged into. She, along with Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Feith, and others lied her ass off over and over again to justify this war. You need know nothing other than that.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:49 PM 
