HULK SMASH!!!
probably he got one done !
always unfair never balanced with an evil grin
An "emergency policy lobotomy?"
The second thing that comes to mind when hearing that word is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (the first, of course, is "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy," perhaps incorrectly attributed to Charles Bukowski. But I digress.)
Weren't lobotomies traditionally prescribed for patients who were overtly violent, or so disturbed they posed a danger to themselves or others?
Is that what Friedman is saying? The U.S. needs to be surgically sedated?
Well there's no link to the whole article yet, and I'm too lazy to login to the NYT to try to find it myself. But it seems Friedman is saying that somebody needs to muzzle the neocons.
That would only be temporarily however. Combine this with Bush saying he didn't want to see any more American deaths after March, and it looks like recent reporting about Bush showing signs of being vulnerable on foreign policy as well as the economy has Rove in a bit of a panic.
So he starts getting his faithful flacks to put out the word that for strategic reasons the neocons need to shut up and sit down until he can get those poll trends turned around and Dear Leader's reelect numbers healthy again.
I suspect Friedman's just the first, we'll see other columnists echoing this in coming days as it filters through the apparatus of the Wurlitzer. In the end there will be a bait and switch as always.
But what the hell do I know? I'm just an obscure religious leader.
What a f***ing moron.
There, I think I've about covered the Thomas Friedman question.
Here's the article
The "lobotomy" seems to be about getting the arrogant civilian team at the Pentagon out of the loop.
vous ętes bienvenu
Friedman....
Umm....
Dude, I think you're really cool, and have good points and all that gay stuff, but dude... get a clue!
Seriously, he's talking out of his ass. He says one thing one week, and says pretty much the opposite the next. He really needs to take a look at his prior columns, and form some sort of logical logic instead of going all over the place each column.
Mayhap he needs to shave his mustache. The Mustache made him do it!
Perhaps in his defense, the UN bombing and the Imam Ali bombing had an effect on his thinking. There's no crime in changing one's mind over good reasons. If so, without looking at the entire article, he'd better say so.
DDT did a job on me, now I'm a teenage lobotomy.....
I Love America! Where else could I get a high-paying job as a prominent commentator while saying any fucking thing that comes to my mind, completely and irreconcilably contradicting myself from one week to the next, and often making no fucking sense whatsoever?
For a while now Friedman's line has been that Bushco is screwing up a beautiful war. But he fluctuates between manic optimism (a couple of columns ago he was arguing that all the resistance in Iraq just shows how well everything is going) and this kind of gloom.
iIf you think we don't have enough troops in Iraq now — which we don't — wait and see if the factions there start going at each other. America would have to bring back the draft to deploy enough troops to separate the parties. In short, we are at a dangerous moment in Iraq. We cannot let sectarian violence explode. We cannot go on trying to do this on the cheap. And we cannot succeed without more Iraqi and allied input.
Someone tell Friedman to shut the hell up. i mean really.
It's twice not that Friedman has said we don't need more troops and just the let the Iraqis get involved.
Friedman is insane.
The NYT should let Friedman go the way of Mickey Kaus--Just let him start a blog that no one reads.
Yeah the NYT should give Friedman a blog just the Dallas newspaper has in his only secluded wall padded spot so we can forget about him. Put David Brooks on Friedman's days.
What a difference a day (when your administration's gross incompetence leads to a concentrated blast of sheer anarchy) makes!
You guys haven't learned the secret of being a successful pundit. You play both sides, and forget whichever of your opinions end up being wrong. If things work out without a UN mandate, Friedman can point to his earlier column and be considered a genius. If things don't work out, he'll point to his later column and refer to himself as a genius.
it's like the guy has Sybil living inside of him
http://www.astraeasweb.net/plura...al/
spiegel.html
I don't think we're doing this on the cheap. We're doing it on the dumb. As I mention in the 69% Want the UN thread, I think we're spending what money there is poorly and wastefully. This waste is lining the pockets of Halliburton executives. Great place for our tax dollars.
Friedman is from another planet. A 'policy lobotomy'? That isn't poetic, it's random and meaningless. What would that be, extracting the intelligent bits from the policy so it can continue on like a vegetable?
Yeah, great idea.
How does that expression go? I'd rather have a Friedman lobotomy than a bottle in front of me?
exactly which iraqi army is he referring to? the one we sent packing or lodged in bremer's ass?
The "policy lobotomy" is already in motion. Witnass today's NYT article "How to talk about Israel". This, mind you, is the "paper of record" of the United States, and this article at this time cannot be a fluke.
It's a quite interesting (and long --- about 4,500 words) article that really says nothing much about policy other than that we need to talk about Israel. Well, no shit!
But an article such as this does not simply appear in the NYT. Someone placed it there, and someone approved it being placed there at this time.
So what does this mean? It means that the administration knows full well that bad news from Iraq will for the near future at least trump good news from Iaq off of the front page. Which means that the administration must look elsewhere for foreign policy triumphs. Where better than Israel?
Of course, Israel is a problem. The local hardliners don't want to hear of any downtalking of their interests, and in the past have exacted certain revenge on those who have dared. Which is of course the point of this article: To make such talk tenable.
Bush just ended his vacation and is now back at the White House. Expect in the near term statements by his close-ups regarding a foreign policy shift (probably small) with regard to Israel. Bush himself will follow with a major address on this, and it will include elements that are not much to the liking of Israeli hardlines.
But this is one of the "Third rails of politics", you might suggest. Perhaps, but with Iraq going as it is, the only "third rail" this administration will be thinking about from now on is its own defeat in 2004.
The administration is about to ask the Israeli hardliners to take a step down the ladder, and they fully intend to show them where that rung is. Mark my words.
P.S. The Neocons are dead. Their obituary is being prepared right now by Karl Rove. Of course, per James Wilson, Karl is also dead. My guess is that Karl better finish the Neocon obituary real quick.
Friedman is just not worth bothering to talk about.
And those two statements are only 11 days apart.
Losing your short-term memory is so ... I forget. Poor, poor Tom.
This from the Man who declared World War Three on 9/12/01. He has been hysterically off-track since that date.
I could be wrong, but the "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" line was first uttered by Tom Waits, who was guesting (as himself) on an early episode of "Fernwood Tonight."
Poll: is Friedman's mustache more a Freddy Mercury mustache or a Lech Walesa mustache?
Also, there's a part everyone forgets, which makes it even funnier:
It originally went "I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy."
I suppose the free and pre- have gotten lost because people don't know exactly what a "pre-frontal lobotomy" is. Now we have an answer though: Just think "Tom Friedman!"
PS: I especially liked the tagline in the print version of Friedman's column: "Starting to Worry about IraQ"
STARTING TO FUCKING WORRY ABOUT IRAQ???!!!
Whew, I thought I was the only one who didn't get the lobotomy image. I even read the article twice - very painful - to see what I missed.
For a while now Friedman's line has been that Bushco is screwing up a beautiful war. But he fluctuates between manic optimism (a couple of columns ago he was arguing that all the resistance in Iraq just shows how well everything is going) and this kind of gloom.
i saw him reflect sadly (& hammilly)about how just & righteous TOM'S WAR was "....but this isnt TOM'S WAR, *sigh*"
(eyes roll skyward, lower lip pouts out beneath the mustache)
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a Friedman lobotomy...
don't think we're doing this on the cheap. We're doing it on the dumb. As I mention in the 69% Want the UN thread, I think we're spending what money there is poorly and wastefully. This waste is lining the pockets of Halliburton executives. Great place for our tax dollars.
Adam 4-2-4 (F & B Version 1.0) | 08.31.03 - 2:28 am | #
"Politics is the art of the possible." - Lyndon Johnson
Thats the trouble with this war and why none of the Democrats running for president would have done it. It is not politically possible for the US to do it right. Its not like Yugoslavia where it could be split apart and make separate countries of the different ethnic factions. We have to keep it together and thats why we put Saddam in there in the first place.
peter principle.
After we get the Iraqi Army to help us, maybe we can get Uday and Qusay to tell us where their father is!
I don´t think Friedman is insane. I think that after the August 20 column somebody important told him that what he was saying was no longer the official party line. So 11 days later Friedman showed his loyalty and, en passant, his adaptability.
This kind of thing happens all the time. One day Trotsky was the great leader who had reorganized the red army, the next he was an enemy of really existing socialism.
Friedman, the editors of the New Republic and all the other self styled liberal hawks who supported this war are living in a dream world. In their world, the war was wise and moral, it is just that it has been bungled. There was a window of opportunity in which we could have won the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people but poor planning and execution is letting this golden moment slip away.
Nonsense. This thing was lost before it started because it was based on a foundation of false premises. The most deadly of which was that we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi population. There never was a window of opportunity. It was pure bullshit.
After ten years of sanctions, and generations of manipulation and exploitating we were going to be seen as liberators? Get a clue Tommy boy.
This thing was lost before it began. There is nothing to do now but cut and run. And mark my words, as Karl Rove begins to do the calculations, this is exactly what they are going to do.
And ironically, this outcome is what Tommy boy and the New Republicans would have charted as the worst possible outcome. They will swear that if they had known that this is what Bush was going to do they never would have supported the war.
There was a lot of loose talk about how the run up to the war had made the United Nations irrelevant. Given Bush's humiliating pleas to that organization I think that was wishful thinking on the part of the neocons. However, there is one group who has been made irrelevant by this war. That is the liberal hawks exemplified by Tommy boy.
Friedman's column today was a little more sensible, but still weak. Compare the thin level of analysis and detail of Friedman's latest columns with that of Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Friedman should find the comparison embarassing. While I haven't agreed with everything Rubin has written about Iraq, it is at least rational and can form the basis for an analytical discussion of the issues. Friedman is just foundering, and this has less to do with his positions than the abysmal quality of his arguments in which metaphors are seen as an acceptable substitute for logic.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly...bin/
6643611.htm
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly...bin/
6656932.htm
"Yet the heart of today's Iraq problem is political, not military. Let me explain.
Sure, it would help to have more U.S. troops, if they were the right kind. More special forces and elite commando units, civil affairs and language specialists, more engineers - all are vitally needed. But there's a limited supply of such resources, with key units already being diverted from Afghanistan.
As for foreign troops, sheer numbers can't substitute for quality, either. Apart from the United States and Britain, the 29 other countries in the international coalition provide only 12,000 soldiers. Most have sent only a few hundred men and rely on the Americans for logistics and communications. They give a United Colors of Benetton look to coalition forces - but not much else.
Bulgarians, for example, are relieving U.S. Marines in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, to which they have dispatched a 455-man battalion with virtually no English speakers and only one Bulgarian-Arabic translator. The Bulgarians say they can't take on the many local civic-affairs tasks the Marines have been performing, like training a police force."
"The murder of such a prominent figure makes Iraqis feel that no one is safe from assassination. Especially since, last week, another bomb wounded Hakim's uncle, Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim, one of the four leading religious scholars in the Shiite religious establishment in Iraq.
Shiites are angry that U.S. forces did not prevent these bombings. Never mind that the Marines stayed away from the holy shrines for fear of offending. Hakim's aides are already bitterly complaining that they had asked, and were not allowed, to set up a special force to protect the shrines."
pbg, what an excellent question! I'll plump for a Walesa mustache.
It's heartwarming to see Adam 4-2-4 find this Friedman move nonsensical. Hi there Adam 4-2-4, this is where we live.
I suspected for long time that Friedman is insane. To wit, schisophrenic. Not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of professing beliefs in theories that contradict themselves. In other words, while he can spout entire intelligent paragraphs at occasion, he is an idiot.
How bad is T.F.? His analysis is much worse than that of Maureen Dowd, on the same page.
My personal 2c. Yesterday i was discussing with a friend this topic: how one can sucessfully install a fairly reliable puppet government in a country where the folks do not like you. E.g. like Stalin did in Poland in 1944-47 (one can view the regime installation as a process with a diffused completion date). What are the most important differenciating factors?
One factor is that Stalin was planning it at least since 1938. But USA could plan it for 13 years. The second is that Stalin, as a dictator, could make more coherent plans and preparations. But in USA there exists an apparatus that should be capable of the same.
Perhaps the single most important factor is that Russians could empathise with Polish culture and empower Polish underlings, something that you cannot do with people you believe "more primitive". Rumsfield and neo-cons have to much of colonialist mind frame to succeed.
Ah, there could be another reason: the curse of oil. The vision of huge lucrative contracts that lead Busheviks to diss everyone and trust no one.
Given his preeminent role as a foreign policy and Mid-East expert and the prominence of his perch on the NYTimes editorial page, Friedman, because of his strident and irresponsible war-mongering, has blood on his hands from the mess in Iraq. Every now and then, I think his conscience recognizes it, and today's column is a good example...
Every day this goes on is a further vindication for Robert Fisk's view of the region. It'll take some crow pie for the right to accept this, though.
I guess Friedman is in favor of human shields.
.
You guys just don't get it - Friedman was THERE, man! He was in the SHIT, man!
He visited the UN HQ 72 hours before the bomb went off. Who knows better? Some bloggers reading copious amount of reporting on the Internet? Or, a man who walks-up and shakes death's hand on a nearly daily basis? Tell me, who?
Have you ever been kicked in the head with an iron boot while sampling the warm spit of a dying man? Yeah, well me neither, but by gawd I bet Friedman has ... on multiple occassions.
And we here have the audacity to point out the minor contradictions of this brave man who puts it on the line every day in name of globalization and world peace.
I swear to Dobbs, I wish the NYT would give ME one-fucking-HALF of what it pays Friedman.
I can embarrass myself in print just as effectively, and for much less!
Replace Friedman with Chris Hedges. Not only is he a former Mid-east bureau chief like Friedman, he has also been involved in enough wars to actually THINK before he advocates this country taking part in any combat. Especially if it's a shitstorm like Eye-Rack.
Frontal lobotomies were often used to treat psychoses. TF is calling the Bushies schizophrenic. OF course, piotr berman had it right -- TF is just projecting.
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