| Subject: Friedman |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 12/4/09, 12:51 |
| To: Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> |
Thomas Friedman
And always, of course, there are a
great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of
inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together.
- C.S.
Lewis, Mere Christianity
Crime, as the reader may recall,
spiraled out of control in the 1970s, increasing exponentially until
such time as the federal government ceased to function altogether.
Wealthy citizens moved into self-contained arcologies defended by
private mercenary armies, while the poor organized themselves into
communal military tribes, some seizing territory within the ruined
cities, some taking to the highways in order that they might launch
raids on the fortified hamlets into which rural Americans had organized
themselves in desperation.
On another occasion, the
proliferation of nuclear power plants throughout the United States
resulted in the accidental destruction of several major cities.
Likewise, the proliferation of evolutionary theory and the decline of
Biblical literalism resulted in the inevitable rise of a global
government, itself led by a New Age tyrant who demands to be worshiped
alongside some unspecified mother goddess.
The sexual revolution led to an epidemic of lesbianism and infanticide. Welfare reform led just as inevitably to mass starvation in the inner cities. The New Deal continued to snowball until 90 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed by the Works Progress Administration, digging trenches and putting on Eugene O'Neil plays. Megacorporations replaced most national governments in the late '90s. Everyone is now a crack addict.
Eight hundred thousand years from
now, the human race will be divided into two species - one shall live
on the surface, and the other beneath the ground.
The purpose of this book is to
convince the reader that our republic is in the midst of a crisis of
its own making; that this crisis is so fundamental as to have been
partly responsible for many of the failures that have brought our
republic into decline; that for all of its gravity, the crisis is
largely unknown to the citizenry; and that, barring an unprecedented
and concerted campaign of information, boycotts, and other methods by
which to bring pressure to bear on those most responsible, the crisis
will likely spell the end of our republic as a credible superpower.
***
Barbarian kings ranging from Philip II of Macedon to Vladimir Putin of Scythia took pains to convince foreign populations of their benevolence. Philip found himself opposed by the orator Demosthenes; Putin found himself welcomed to the throne by columnist Thomas Friedman.
Friedman had taken a trip to Russia in order that he might look at it very closely. A visitor to the Moscow of 2001, he determined, would notice that "sushi bars are opening all over (yes, from borscht to Big Macs to California-Kremlin rolls in one decade!)" and also that there is quite a bit more traffic these days. Russia had finally gotten itself a leader worth having in the transformative person of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. "He's not a tougher Mikhail Gorbachev, or a more sober Boris Yeltsin," Friedman explained then. "He is Russia's first Deng Xiaoping - Mao's pragmatic successor who first told the Chinese that 'to get rich is glorious' and put in place the modernizing reforms to do it." This was certainly good news for the cause of Russian governance, and of course very useful information for Friedman's American readers, who could now make a determination about how the U.S. ought to engage its old adversary. In case the determination they ought to have made was unclear, Friedman exhorts them as follows: "So keep rootin' for Putin - and hope that he makes it to the front of Russia's last line." Russia's last line, as the columnist established earlier on in the course of setting up a cute metaphor based on some joke that was supposedly making the rounds in that country, is money.
If one is not convinced that Putin
is what Friedman says he is, one can read the words that Putin would
himself write if Friedman were writing them for him, which is actually
what Friedman does here.
That is Mr. Putin's basic message to Russians: ''For a decade, we've tried every bad idea, from default to devaluation to shock therapy. Now there's only one idea left: passing real reform legislation so we can get real investment to build a real modern economy. Because in this world, without a real economic foundation, you're nothing. So we're going to focus now on the only line that matters -- the line for money.''
Having expressed the Russian president's views and intentions for him, Friedman explains the significance of the fictional monologue we have just read: "This is Putinism: From Das Kapital to DOScapital."
Thomas Friedman is among the most
respected and widely-read American pundits working today, which is to
say that he is among the most influential. His books crowd the
bestseller lists. His lectures are much sought out and attended by the
economic elite of every city on which he descends. If one goes home for
Thanksgiving and waits around long enough, one will hear him praised by
both elderly old Republicans and elderly old Democrats. If one meets
one's girlfriend's upper middle-class father in his den or study, and
if this room is composed largely of hardwood paneling or furniture or
some such, one will find a copy of either The World is Flat or The Lexus and the Olive Tree,
though usually not both of them. If you happen to be a young female
(hey, there) and come from an upper middle-class family check your
father's study.
Friedman's 2003 bestseller Longitudes and Attitudes - which is called that - begins, reasonably enough, with an introduction. The introduction is entitled, Introduction: A World Album. At this point, the reader will no doubt think to himself, A 'word album'? I've heard of a 'photo album,' but what is all of this about a 'word album'?"
The columnist is happy to explain;
the book is a composite of columns that he wrote mostly in 2001 and
2002. My hope is that this collection and diary will constitute a
'word album' for the September 11th experience, he writes. There are
many photo albums that people will collect to remind themselves, their
children, or their grandchildren what it was like to experience 9/11.
These columns and this diary are an attempt to capture and preserve in
words, rather than pictures, some of those same emotions."
This is the mentality of Friedman
and his readership - that it would be reasonable to compose a personal
photo album about September 11th and maybe keep it in a special drawer.
Eventually, one's grandchild finds the album while looking for some
plaything and, curious, begins flipping through the pages, asking what
it all means. One tells him the story of how we had to run for shelter
when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue
sky, perhaps with a romantic subplot thrown in. Afterwards, the child
ambles off down the hall; one wonders if he understood it, the
significance of it all. But then the child turns around, hesitates a
moment, and says, "You were all so brave." Then he goes outside,
possessed of new insights both simple and profound, into both his
country and his grandparent. A single tears rolls down one's eye as one
watches the child through the window, at play - or perhaps lost in
thought? The credits roll.
This columnist is destroying our country with his nonsense and must be stopped.
***
Contempt for the media is now
ubiquitous but largely misdirected. Conservatives in particular tend to
see the nation's news outlets as comprising some sort of monolithic
entity. If only this were so.
The news media is the product of a
million individuals, each subject to a million impulses. The cable TV
news producer in the pink scarf doesn't understand what's to be debated
on this morning's program and doesn't care; she's in the green room
talking to another girl from guest booking about the latter's old
boyfriend and the former's pink scarf. The freelancer on deadline need
not get the feature right if he can just get it done before his
girlfriend arrives with the bottle of vodka. The publisher lives in the
shadow of the father who bequeathed to him the most iconic paper in
America; he knows that many see the paper's recent failures as deriving
in part from his own; he knows what's said about him in the newsroom;
he will prove his worth and his dynamism, he thinks to himself, when he
gives William Kristol a column on the op-ed page. Perhaps that was too
specific.
Then there is the consumer. The woman who subscribes to The New York Times may
or may not read the op-ed page, which is to say that she may or may not
contribute to the paper's profitability - and thus its continued
existence - based on what appears in that section. If she does read it,
she is probably unaware that her favorite columnist has been
demonstrably wrong about the most important issues facing the country.
The columnist's errors have been pointed out by several bloggers, but
she has never heard of them, and at any rate does not bother with blogs
as she subscribes to The New York Times, which is a very
respected outlet and has been around for well over a century, whereas
these blogs seem to have come out of nowhere. The columnist, she knows,
has won several Pulitzers, has written a handful of bestselling books,
is forever traveling to some far-off place. She has formed her foreign
policy in large part from his writings as well as from the writings of
other, similarly respected journalists, and she votes accordingly.
When systems develop under a free
society, no one is minding the store. Things happen because they
happen, and things do not necessarily happen because they ought to, but
rather because they do. The journalist is promoted to columnist, the
consumer finds the columns to her liking, the columnist becomes more
prominent, the publisher wants columnists of prominence, the editor is
disinclined to cross the publisher, the columnist writes more books,
the consumer buys them, the columnist's prominence increases, and at
some point we have entered into a situation whereby it is to the
advantage of the publisher, the editor, and of course the columnist to
maintain the status quo. Whether the columnist deserves any prominence
whatsoever does not necessarily come up. Once a pundit is made, he is
rarely unmade.
***
I once lost my gig as a copywriter
and found myself compelled to work six-day weeks as a furniture mover
for a Pentecostal church. When companies relocated, they would donate
their discarded desks and chairs and whatnot to this church, the
employees of which would pick it all up and store it in a warehouse
until such time as individual pieces could be refurbished and sold off.
The church leaders considered the whole thing to be a charitable
enterprise insomuch as that they "gave jobs to people who need them."
Other, less spirit-filled employers presumably provide jobs only to
millionaires and débutantes.
Each morning I would find myself
sitting in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler with one of the ex-meth
addicts with whom I was employed. On one occasion, we were joined by
this doughy, bearded, bespectacled, middle-aged white fellow who was
technically employed by the church in maintaining its servers and
websites and such things but who was on this day recruited to assist us
in our grunt work, someone else having failed to show up that morning.
The fellow's longterm plan was to start his own internet-based
ministry. This, incidentally, is the longterm plan of about a sixth of
all middle-aged Pentecostals.
A song came on the radio and this
doughy fellow asked me who it was. I informed him that this was Led
Zeppelin, and a secret smile flitted across the fellow's bearded,
doughy face.
"Rock stars," he said, shaking his head but still smiling. "I call them Prophets of Baal, because they preach another way."
The doughy fellow was developing his own terminology in preparation for the ministry that he would someday found.
Thomas Friedman, like his doughy
counterpart, is forever calling things things. He introduces his
readers to the concept of 21st century trade thusly: "These
global markets are made up of millions of investors moving money around
the world with a click of a mouse. I call them the Electronic Herd, and
this herd gathers in key global financial centers such as Wall
Street, Hong Kong, London, and Frankfurt which I call the
Supermarkets. He elsewhere informs us that he is "a big
believer in the idea of the super-story, the notion that we all carry
around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at
the world, order events, and decide what is important and what is not."
Friedman is correct that it is
wholly necessary to conceptualize our data into understandable
frameworks in order that we might better understand it. But the
framework into which Friedman has forced the world is almost entirely
dependent on wordplay, on convenient structural similarities between
unrelated terminology, on rhymes and sayings.
In 2000, the columnist composed a "super-story" regarding Colin
Powell, whose nomination for secretary of state was expected to be
confirmed later in the week.
One way to think about Mr. Powell is this: He spent thirty-five years of his life with America Onduty, as a military officer. But for the past two years he's been associated with America Online, as a member of the AOL corporate board. So which perspective will Mr. Powell bring to his job as Secretary of State the perspective he gleaned with America Onduty during the cold war or the perspective he gleaned with America Online in the post-cold war?
No serious discussion of Powell's record or policies follows; no
new information is provided; it is never acknowledged that perhaps
Powell is capable of thinking of the world in both the terms of a
military officer and the terms of an information-age corporate advisory
board member even though Powell has clearly served as both of these
things. After all, Friedman has already coined the term America Onduty,
contrasted it with the term America Online, and provided some allegedly
clever distinction between the two mentalities represented thereby. We
are informed, for instance, that those who fall under the category of
'America Onduty' enjoy the film A Few Good Men and
see the world in terms of walls and nation states, because, you see, a
character in that very film delivered some line to that effect and it
seems to have made an impression on Friedman. Those associated with the
'America Online' mentality, by contrast, enjoy the film You've Got Mail because
such people as these understand that the world is now integrated, and
that the receiving of e-mail is a wonderful metaphor for the relatively
recent dynamic whereby things occurring elsewhere now effect us all
directly and with complete immediacy ("When a Russian financial crisis
occurs, we've got mail"). Wrapping up the column, Friedman restates the
question: "So which lens is Mr. Powell wearing the one he developed with America Onduty, or with America Online?"
Even such an insufferable framework as this would be of value
to the extent that it truly assists in helping Friedman and his
citizen-readers to understand such then-essential elements of the
republic as Colin Powell, to draw useful conclusions from this
understanding, and to make wiser and better-informed decisions in terms
of the manner in which they vote, contribute, advocate, purchase, and
otherwise interact with the various entities into which man's efforts
are organized. If the public understanding is increased by dividing
Powell's consciousness into that of America Online and some variant of
that brand name and then characterizing in turn each of these
mentalities by reference to concepts from popular films, then there's
really no problem here other than that the whole America Onduty thing
is fucking stupid, at least aesthetically.
Suppose, however, that such frameworks as these do not seem to grant Friedman any particular insight into a particular subject, and in fact seem to lead him and his admirers astray. This might indicate to us that such frameworks are not actually useful, and that those who compose such frameworks may perhaps not be worth listening to, and that to the extent that they contribute to the national understanding they have damaged it in so doing, and that to this same extent they are responsible for the astounding errors that have been made in our country's recent past. Suppose all of that!
Friedman's frameworks provides him with nothing. What he does is fine for writing a reader-friendly column in a pinch, but his cute semantic tricks do not translate into accuracy as much as we might hope that they would. He was not able to provide any useful predictions regarding Powell, for instance, although he certainly tried, announcing in another column that "it was impossible to imagine Mr. Bush ever challenging or overruling Mr. Powell on any issue." Moreover:
Mr. Powell is three things Mr. Bush is not - a war hero, worldly wise and beloved by African-Americans. That combination gives him a great deal of leverage. It means he can never be fired. It means Mr. Bush can never allow him to resign in protest over anything.
Of course, Powell did indeed leave the administration under
circumstances that we may ascertain to involve either firing,
resignation, or some typically Washingtonian combination thereof -
after having first been overruled by Bush on several decisions
involving the most significant question of that presidency. To
Friedman's credit, his failed prediction was based on the standard
media narrative of the time as well as common assumptions made solely
on appearances, which is to say that it was sourced.
Elsewhere in this column, Friedman notes that it "will be
interesting to see who emerges to balance Mr. Powell's perspective."
That person, who ended up not so much balancing Powell's perspective as
smothering it in its crib, was Cheney. The vice president was not
exactly a "war hero," "worldly wise," or "beloved by
African-Americans," which is to say that he was in many ways Powell's
opposite number - which is to say in turn that Friedman's assumptions
regarding what sort of person would have the greatest degree of
influence over Bush were not just wrong, but almost the exact opposite
of the case.
***
Thing of each thing as a system. Then ask what it is exactly that this system does.
As has been noted, Friedman in 2001 exhorted the U.S. citizenry to "keep rootin' for Putin," whom he hailed as a great reformer - correctly, as Putin did indeed seize control of the country's various state governments and otherwise "reformed" the flow of power in such a way as that it would soon flow mostly from himself. That particular column was written in December of that year.
In March of that same year, Friedman had written another column on Russia in which he summarized our post-Cold War espionage efforts by way of the following framework:
What is it that we and Russians are actually spying on each other about? This whole espionage affair seems straight out of Mad magazine's [sic] "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon. The Russians are spying on us to try to find out why we are spying on them. I mean, to be honest, is there anything about the Russians today you want to know?
Ha! Ha! I guess not!
We are here confronted with one of two possibilities: either Friedman
does not really mean what he appears to mean by this, or he does. If it
is the former, then he is wasting our time with nonsense. If it is the
latter, he is doing something even worse - he is telling everyone who
will listen that it is wholly absurd for the U.S. intelligence
community to be collecting information on Russia's government, its
societal trends, and its military. In fact, it is indeed the latter, as
the next paragraph makes clear:
Their navy is rusting in port. Their latest nuclear submarine is resting on the bottom of the ocean. We know they're selling weapons to Iran and Iraq, because they told us. And their current political system, unlike Communism, is not exactly exportable - unless you think corruption, chaos, and KGB rule amount to an ideology. Khruschev threatened to bury us. Putin threatens to corrupt us.
This person - this extraordinarily influential, respected, recognized,
widely-read person - had decided that there was simply no good reason
to continue spying on the Russians. Let us examine his reasoning a bit
more closely:
Their navy is rusting in port. Their latest nuclear submarine is resting on the bottom of the ocean.
The Russian navy was among the most formidable of its kind even at its
turn-of-the-century nadir, when it possessed perhaps two dozen
operational nuclear submarines. A nadir, by definition, is followed by
an improvement of circumstances, and of course the Russians are now
investing $200 billion in a total revamp of its naval forces, which by
2015 will have returned to world-class status - a situation worth
monitoring, perhaps.
We know they're selling weapons to Iran and Iraq, because they told us.
To know something is not to know everything. Friedman to the contrary,
there are other things worth knowing about a large nation with nuclear
weapons and a wholly unsteady history other than that it has sold
weaponry to two other nations.
And their current political system, unlike Communism, is not exactly exportable - unless you think corruption, chaos, and KGB rule amount to an ideology.
That we need not be concerned about the Russians exporting communism
ought not lead us to conclude that we need not be concerned about the
Russians, about whom every great power was rightfully concerned well
before the onset of the Soviet era. Here, at least, Friedman has hit
upon a reason why we perhaps need not be as concerned about the Russians these days. This is very admirable.
The especially attentive reader will perhaps have noticed something
peculiar about the excerpt above, in which Friedman contrasts the
Soviet era to our current one. "Khruschev threatened to bury us," he
wrote. "Putin threatens to corrupt us." A few months later, of course,
Friedman was hailing Putin as the impetus of positive reform for whom
we all ought to be "rootin'."
Along with the Russians, Friedman spent much of 2001 in contemplation of technology. The New York Times sent
him off to the Davos World Economic Forum in January of that year;
Friedman sent back a column entitled "Cyber-Serfdom," announcing
therein that the internet would soon be replaced by the "Evernet,"
itself the next step in the trend towards greater connectivity. But was
humanity walking the dog, or was the dog walking humanity?
2005 loomed large. By that year, Friedman explained, "we will see a
convergence of wireless technology, fiber optics, software
applications, and next-generation Internet switches, IP version 6, that
will permit anything with electricity to have a web address and run off
the Internet - from your bedroom lights to your toaster to your
pacemaker... People will boast, 'I have twenty-five Web
addresses in my house; how many do you have? My wired refrigerator
automatically reorders milk. How about yours?' This thing that didn't
end up coming anywhere close to happening was of great concern to our
protagonist. "I still can't program my VCR; how am I going to program
my toaster?" We are left wondering as to the future status of airline
peanuts.
Later that year, there occurred an unprecedented alinear attack on U.S. commercial and military assets. This shifted Friedman's lens back towards the Middle East, where he would begin sifting the sand in search of super-stories. Our protagonist knew the Middle East well, having won two Pulitzers in recognition of the reporting he did from that region throughout the '80s. Back then, the system had identified him as worthy of advancement, and today it would call upon him to inform the citizenry's decisions on a matter of extraordinary importance. The future of the United States and that of several other nations was now, to some small but measurable extent, in the hands of Thomas Friedman.
***
It was a month into the war in Afghanistan. "A month into the war in Afghanistan," Friedman wrote, "the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last."
Hand-wringing is something that old ladies do. They are always wringing
their little hands, worrying themselves over some matter that is
actually well under control. Friedman, confident that Colin Powell had
things in order over at the White House, was not so neurotic as to
concern himself with the potential length of a military intervention in
such a place as Afghanistan. "This is Afghanistan we're talking about,"
he explained. "Check the map. It's far away."
While others wrung their hands due to their misinformed takes on the
situation, Friedman expressed doubts based on his knowledge of ongoing
events - though not significant doubts, of which he had few.
"I have
no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for
winning a long war," he wrote. But one aspect of the war did bother
him. "I do worry, though, whether it has a public
relations strategy for sustaining a long war. Obviously the Powell
administration would win in Afghanistan, but would President Bush and
his top advisors be too busy winning wars and otherwise attending to
their duties to give any thought to influencing the opinion of voters?
Just in case, Friedman utilized subsequent columns in defending the
administration's aforementioned "military strategy for winning a long
war," countering hand-wringing with perspective:
Think of all the nonsense written in the press particularly the European and Arab media about the concern for 'civilian casualties' in Afghanistan. It turns out that many of those Afghan 'civilians' were praying for another dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not. Now that the Taliban are gone, Afghans can freely fight out, among themselves, the war of ideas for what sort of society they want.
As seen, Friedman in those days took to using the terms "civilian" and
"civilian casualties" in scare quotes, as if such terminology does not
really apply. As dead as these Afghans may be, they do not really mind
being killed or maimed - this, at least, is how it "turns out," as if
Friedman is suddenly privy to some new information that confirms all of
this. In the space of two sentences, then, the most respected columnist
in the country has attempted to imply the inaccuracy of demonstrably
accurate and crucial elements of the question under discussion and has
followed it up with a significant assertion regarding that question
based on some unspecified new information that plainly doesn't exist.
All of this is followed by an announcement that "the Taliban are gone."
The problem of civilian casualties has since
become one of the central
sticking points in the non-won war against the non-gone Taliban - a
source of discontent among the populace to such an extent as it is
voiced at the highest levels of government, a means by which the
Taliban is able to recruit new fighters, and a means by which the U.S.
can be depicted as being inattentive to the concerns of those civilian
populations that find themselves dwelling among America's new
battlegrounds.
***
In April of 2003, Friedman introduced a new framework by which the
American people might better understand the events of the past few
years:
Wars are always clarifying, and what this war clarified most was the degree to which there were actually three bubbles that burst at the beginning of the 21st century: a stock market bubble, a corporate ethics bubble and a terrorism bubble.
The stock market bubble we're all too familiar with. When it burst three years ago, millions of people all over the world were made more sober investors. The second bubble was the corporate governance bubble -- a buildup of ethical lapses by management that burst with Enron and Arthur Andersen, producing a revolution in boardroom practices.
Bubbles being bubbles, and these bubbles having burst, Friedman
determined that the problem represented by each bubble had thereby
become less of a problem. The pertinent lessons had been learned,
particularly by Friedman, who identified a common characteristic found
among the three troublesome bubbles:
Like the stock market and corporate bubbles, the terrorism bubble was the product of a kind of temporary insanity, in which basic norms were ignored and excessive behavior was justified by new theories.
Being temporary, the insanity was now presumably over. The bubbles had all burst.
A column in which three bubbles burst makes for a fine column indeed,
the number three being of special significance to the human mind:
thesis, antithesis, synthesis; Father, Son, Holy Spirit; the tripod;
primes. It takes three elements to establish a pattern, and thus it is
that in comedy, one tends to finds groupings of threes - one sees a
pattern being formed but the pattern is strangled at birth, and therein
lies the humor, in misdirection and absurdity.
Three bubbles it is, then. And they must be bubbles, and the bubbles must be of a singular nature - each must have expanded by way of, in this case, "a kind of temporary insanity." Each must have done so in a similar time frame. Having been bubbles, each must have been expanding previous to their popping. Having popped, each must now be on the steep decline. The resulting framework dictates that the Enron scandal will be followed by a period of renewed responsibility in terms of corporate governance, that the "dot com crash" will prompt investors across the globe to reign in their exuberance, and that the worst of the terrorist strikes are now over.
If we step outside the
framework and into the future of, we find that world's markets
continued to serve as a complex amalgamation of
investor confidence, concern, anxiety, and especially exuberance.that
the "revolution in boardroom practices" was not so revolutionary as to
prevent the nation's financial institutions from collapsing. By any
measure other than that of American media attention, terrorism
increased in the years ahead.
Information is most useful when it is most unadulterated. Even so, we
must integrate it into concepts - girls are cute, the Roman Empire fell
because Roman virtue fell first. These concepts are useful insomuch as
that they draw upon the necessary research into the subject and are then placed
into a given framework. And the framework is not in these cases
determined by way of funny little coincidences between certain words or
the desirability of working three bubbles into a column instead of four
and of describing everything by way of bubbles instead of perhaps by a
square and the color blue and maybe one bubble if we've just got to
have a fucking bubble in there somewhere. These frameworks serve their
purpose, which is to organize our information in such a way as to
enhance our use of it. Our use of it will indeed be enhanced to the
extent that we remember that not all girls are cute and that
the Germans might have someday overrun our Roman spiritual predecessors
even had they maintained their virtue forever.
Every framework is at a disadvantage by way of being created by mere
man. It is a product of circumstance, and that circumstance may entail
having been formed in order to serve as the central theme of some
700-word column. We cannot blame the framework for its flawed origins
because we are not theologians, unless you are.
Regardless of where the blame might lie, we have successfully
established that it is better to compose an accurate framework than an
inaccurate one. This will come up a lot.
There
was another bubble bubbling in those days, apparently. This bubble may
have been the terrorism bubble, or it may have been another bubble
altogether, but at any rate in 2003 Friedman appeared on television in
order to tell us all something about a bubble:
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.