The NYT’s Thomas Friedman is not known for being “shrill” — that’s Paul Krugman’s job — but reading his columns lately, one gets the sense that Friedman has just been worn down. He seemed to want to give the Bush gang the benefit of the doubt, so much so that when it came to the war in Iraq, he gave administration an almost never-ending series of six-month intervals to get Iraq right.
Then, over the summer, something changed. Friedman gave up, not only on the war, but holding back his antipathy for the president and his team. In August, he said U.S. forces need to be withdrawn from Iraq. A week later, after one of Dick Cheney’s more offensive anti-Dem slurs, Friedman called the Vice President a “fraud.”
Today, Friedman is almost Krugmanesque, telling readers, “George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid,” and adding that the Bush gang is “insulting our troops, and our intelligence.”
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well?
Friedman even came up with one of my favorite Karl Rove analogies of all time.
Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.
And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.
Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.
I have to say, I obviously agree with all of this wholeheartedly, but I’m nevertheless surprised to see Friedman be so direct and hard-hitting in his criticism. One gets the sense that Friedman was patient, even when he knew he was being lied to, and now he just can’t take it anymore. Welcome to club, Thomas.
Kevin Drum suggested way back in August that reporters should take a closer look at “why so many mild-mannered moderate liberals have become so radicalized during George Bush’s tenure.” Maybe we could ask the same question of mild-mannered moderate newspaper columnists?