Some Truly Stupid Thoughts

I watched "Meet The Press" yesterday morning and I had the honor to listen to the great Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and peripatetic columnist for The New York Times. I say it was an honor because I believe there are many people who believe it is an honor to listen to the man. Who am I, a mere mortal, to disagree with the immortals of the world's city?

Well, it surely was quite an honor to hear this:

Foreigners love to make fun of Americans. Our naivete, our crazy thought that every problem has a solution, that silly American notion, that silly American optimism. But you know what, Tim? Deep down, the world really envies that American optimism and naivete. And the world needs that American optimism and naivete.

And so 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.

It is a great honor -- no? -- to witness such a jet-lagged bit of foolishness on television touted as something erudite and incisive: it is an honor if you honor the absurd.

Need I even point out why Mr. Friedman is playing the fool here?

Let me put it plainly: George W. Bush and his administration have been berated every minute since his first inauguration for being naive and foolishly optimistic. Bush has not been too negative about the Middle East (for example), he's been too positive. Don't you see -- or so Friedman's allies and colleagues have repeatedly pronounced -- how foolish Bush has been thinking he can apply a solution to the great problem of the Middle East? Do you not know how "cowboyish", how "Texan", how grossly American Bush and Powell and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice have been, believing, as they do, in the power of democracy; of Arabian freedom; of a real resolution to Mid-East injustices and tyranny? Come now. Surely you know that Bush is naive to think that Iraq will ever be a success, even a successful democracy? How silly, how utterly fatuous is that little man, thinking he can bring peace to a region that is entrenched in conflicts thousands of years old. How foolish and naive, even arrogant, of Bush to fight for change within tribes ancient and recalcitrant. How foolish to think the Iraqis could ever govern themselves, or that they could ever handle "Western-style" democracy! How silly that Bush thinks he has an answer, ANY answer, to such problems. And how crude, how childishly crude, to think America -- unilaterally, without a consortium of ideologues from all walks of life -- could offer on its own some sort of solution! As if things were so simple!

You get the picture, and I know it makes you sick. And if you are not sick, then surely you don't get the picture. Thomas Friedman has been out of the country so often he does not know what the leftist critics of the Bush Administration have been saying since November 2000. Friedman thinks Bush and Cheney and Rice are bleak pessimists? Holy Bat Scat, Batman! Things are inverted in Gotham City! Talk about naïveté!

Just remember that I have quoted the lauded columnist of The New York Times. Have these people no "intellectual curiosity"; do they not seek outside opinions at all?

Indeed it is an honor to look at such people living in that tiny New York bubble, knowing that they are the true optimists exporting hope to the world. I wish them well.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.