Tom "Six Months" Friedman often gets a justifiably bad rap for having led some big cheers for the Bush administration and for his overly rosy view of the imminent future, but his column in last Friday's New York Times, "On the Eve of Madness," suggests he's finally spit out the Bush Administration's Kool-Aid. He expanded on it on Meet the Press on Sunday and again on Fresh Air last night, each time his message growing more and more passionate about the damage Bush has done to America.
What stuns me even more than his turnaround, though, is how little, as far as I can tell, the column and his follow up have been discussed in the liberal blogosphere. Friedman's a gigantic get. We should trumpet it.
The key graph in the column was this:
The world hates George Bush more than any U.S. president in my lifetime. He is radioactive - and so caught up in his own ideological bubble that he is incapable of imagining or forging alternative strategies.
On MTP, Friedman went even farther:
When we go from a country that, historically, has always exported hope to a country that always exports fear, what we do, and what this administration has done, is actually stolen something from people. Whether it's an African or a European or an Arab or Israeli, it's that idea of an optimistic America out there. People really need that idea, and the sort of dark nature of the Cheneys and the Bushes and the Rices, this, this sort of relentless pessimism about the world, this exporting of fear, not hope, has really left people feeling that the idea of America has been stolen from them. And I would argue that that is the animating force behind so much of the animus directed at George Bush.
And on FA, he said this, which is actually poetic in its delivery:
This administration has an enormous moral clarity, and it has no moral authority. It has no moral authority because it walked away from Kyoto, an issue that so many people around the world feel is important. It has no moral authority because it perpetrated Abu Ghraib and never really prosecuted anyone higher than the local grunts who did it. It has no moral authority because it came to Iraq in the name of democracy and produced a complete disaster in many ways. And because of that we can't do a lot of the big good work that needs to be done right now, and that is really bad because these people are going to be here for two-and-a-half more years and they are so radioactive they: Glow. In. The. Dark.
When Tom Friedman starts channeling Comic Book Guy, you know the world has changed.
Here are the links:
Friedman New York Times Editorial (new link to blog that has it; don't know why the first didn't work):
http://www.espacioblog.com/mydigest/post/2006/07/29/thomas-l-friedman-on-the-eve-of-madness
Meet the Press transcript:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
Fresh Air audio:
http://www.npr.org/...