Tell The Truth? You Might As Well Ask Them To Levitate.

Thomas Friedman, it’s too fucking late. And you are one to talk. You are the guy who said:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.

And you have the cojones to accuse the Bush administration of “gratuitous bullying.” Unbelievable. You’re complaining that “The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy.” No shit Sherlock. Perhaps you should decline the next time a Bushie offers you a Viagra and Jim Beam cocktail before you write such simpleminded and immature drivel. You and your half-witted friends have enabled this group of Neanderthals since 9/11 with silly screeds like that above. I hope it made you feel all manly and powerful at the time because it sure is causing a lot of trouble now.

It’s too late to be asking the questions that should have been asked by our chickenshit Senators, our lazyass presscorp, good hearted liberals who want to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and realistic centrists who believe that WMD in the hands of belligerent smalltime dictators is a big enough risk that the US should abrogate international law and adopt a very risky doctrine of preventive war. It’s too late to look beneath the emotion and the superficial logic of stopping Saddam and try to find out what these people are really trying to do. We’re going in and whatever we might have done to plan or delay or mitigate the neocon fecklessness of the operation is irrelevant now.

It’s too late to be asking whether the plan to invade Iraq, which has been on the drawing board since 1992, is the right plan at the right time and for the reasons stated.

It is too late to wonder whether this group of highly ideological and inflexible individuals are able to properly evaluate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in light of the real threat of terrorism on American shores and elsewhere.

It’s too late to be wondering whether this amateur hour of a foreign policy team is capable of handling so many crises’ at the same time, seeing as they “don’t even like to travel.” And the fact that they “spend so much time infighting over policy” is a direct result of not having a real President who guides policy, but one who is guided by whomever is in favor or has his ear at a given time.

It is too late to be wondering whether a party that would spend 100 million dollars to install a callow, empty suit like George W. Bush as President of the United States purely because he had “brand name recognition” is serious enough and smart enough to be leading this country into war. It certainly appears that the rest of the world is very, very nervous about the caliber of our leadership.

It’s too late to be asking the Bush team to “shape up, start dialing down the attitude, start selling this war on the truth, give us a budget that prepares the nation for war abroad not a party at home, and start doing everything possible to create a global context where we can confront Saddam without the world applauding him.”

You might as well be asking them to stop hating Bill Clinton. This is who they are. If you had bothered to read the pre-2000 writings of this foreign policy team or had torn your eyes from the comic book hagiography that grew up around Junior after 9/1, you would have realized that it was a big mistake to support this administration in anything but a laser-like focus on terrorism and the economy. Such things as huge changes in international law (like adoption of a doctrine of preventive war) should have been tabled until an administration with a competent leader and a democratic mandate from the people assumed power.

It’s a little too little, a little too late now, Tom, to be noticing that this administration doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. It’s been obvious from January 21st, 2001. You were just having too much fun playing cowboys and indians with Wyatt Earp and his boys to look any deeper than the sophomoric rhetoric they spewed for the cameras. Now that reality has struck you don’t want to play anymore. Too late. You’re one of his posse.