Say what you will of Kipling. He was ten times more effective than his wan modern wanna-bes are.
Kipling:Friedman::Hitchcock:Verhoeven. Just savor these eight lines before reading today's NYT:
"Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child."
Then read the new Friedman column of today. I won't link to it. Pick up a soiled copy of NYT from some cafeteria table in order not to boost this creep's traffic.
Good ol' Friedman - he cannot mask his real agenda as well as the real neocon nut jobs. He tends to overemphasize his hidden message instead of nonchalantly slipping it among decoy sentences. In this way, a fake moderate like Friedman actually telegraphs the next White House line of attack better than true rightwingers.
So today he does the second column in a week where he literally uses the word "babysitting" in describing what the US forces do in Iraq. All neocons and their enablers have started infantalizing Iraqis. But nobody does it as crassly and ruthlessly as Friedman - the emperor of fake empathy.
Half devil and half child. The echo of Kipling reverberates across the past century. The brutal and gory occupation of Iraq is being magically transformed into a noble endeavour that these demonic, yet infantile Iraqis are now sabotaging. Bastards.
Saintly Friedman is shaking his head in sad resignation. Iraqis have let us down. They refused to embrace the occupation humbly and savor the privilege of being ruled by Heritage foundation interns. Who could possibly have predicted this?
Friedman has tried to understand these bewildering savages... but now they deserve Dick Cheney as an enforcer of peace. A little comic relief here, folks! Massacres can be a real downer if not leavened by a little gonzo humor. And Friedman can serve up gonzo massacre humor like nobody. That's his one edge over Kipling. If sending Cheney to Iraq does not pan out, let the ungrateful bastards rot in their shallow mass graves after being suffocated in plastic bags.
Cue in a brave little smile from Friedman. His heart will go on... he can bear the burden of helping to trigger this massive slaughter of what will soon be hundreds of thousands of people.
Not real people, of course - just creatures half demon, half child. No sense mollycoddling such.