The Head is Fat

Thank you Friedmanio! But our insight is up another asshole!

New York Times columnist and scourge of anthropomorphic mushrooms Thomas Friedman finally drops the BS about “extremists on both sides” and admits that “centrism” means nothing but the median of whichever two points are being discussed at any given moment (since there’s confusion, a quick primer: “median” is the equidistant point, “mean” is the inevitable tone of any piece that considers Friedman’s prescriptions, and “average” is the level of intelligence you must evince for Charlie Rose to consider you an intellectual giant). Furthermore, he’s convinced the time is ripe for a third party challenger, never mind that we’re having a hell of a time coming up with a second party challenger.

If that candidate is Rick Santorum, I think there is a good chance a Third Party will try to fill the space between the really “severely conservative” Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama.

Setting aside the notion that random capitalization lends authority to common nouns and their modifiers, Friedman’s found his man: David Walker, former comptroller general (I am assured this position affords some measure of prestige despite its surfeit of lowercase letters), who you will be shocked to learn is a white man in his early 60s who favors sensible suits and says “deficit” a lot. Tom, any details you’d care to toss out, maybe something incredibly telling to anyone who’s spent some time on the internet in the past few years, something that will expose your reasoning as puerile, your solution ill-conceived?

Walker — who came in second to Hillary Clinton in a reader poll that Politico conducted last October for favorite Third Party candidate

Ah yes, a poll of the kind of people who would take a Politico reader poll, i.e. 4chan board regulars without the civic literacy.

Disclosure: I’m actually a fan of Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It’s a harrowing memoir of his long road to recovery from an accident in which his Pakistani driver was so caught up in formulating a pithy quote that he lost control of the car and careened into a grove, whereupon Friedman was impaled through the head by a low-hanging branch.

There’s been a good deal of attention paid to traumatic brain injury around these parts lately, and I don’t mean to diminish TBI’s effects on its victims and their loved ones, but just because someone bravely fights their way back from the edge of death, that’s not necessarily a reason to give them primo real estate on the country’s most influential op-ed page. Heck, Tom, we’re just impressed that you can type.

dumb dumb dumb, dumb dumb DUMB

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/19/12 at 05:02 PM • Permalink

Categories: Politics • Election '12 • Editorials • Our Stupid Media •

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I recently read Belen Fernandez’ The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, and while I was content to consider Friedman simply an idiot and a fool, he really is a frightening figure, so intellectually bankrupt he actually causes cultural damage, and has so for over 30 years.

Comment by Dan Coyle on 02/20/12 at 11:50 AM

Walker’s view is simple: “We are not Greece, where the government grew too big, promised too much and waited too long to restructure, but we’re making many of the same mistakes.” Because of the size of the U.S. economy and the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency, we “have some time” to get our house in order, “but we are not immune from the laws of prudent finance.”

Anyone who does not credit the role of the Bush tax cuts combined with the unfunded waging of two wars for a decade in causing our deficit situation is really not worth paying attention to. On the other hand pining for a strong Third Party candidate to save us from the Republicans would just make Obama’s chances stronger, so carry on Tom.