| Subject: How about this? |
| From: Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> |
| Date: 3/7/10, 15:02 |
| To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
Something, something, something, need snappy first sentence.
A well-intentioned citizen who subscribes to a mainstream newspaper like 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 profitabilityand thus its continued existencebased on what appears in that section. If she does read it, she is probably unaware that her favorite columnist has been demonstrably wrong about many of the most important issues facing both the U.S. and the world at large. 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 and is most likely an idiot himself, 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, particularly after such point as he reaches a critical mass of notoriety. Once a pundit is made, he is rarely unmade.
I offer for your review the case of Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, best-selling author and longtime staple at the afore-mentioned New York Times. His body of work is fine for those who desire 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. Take for instance, this column from 2001, one of many he has written to address the ongoing situation in Russia, and 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 worsehe 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, he is indeed telling us 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 exportableunless you think corruption, chaos, and KGB rule amount to an ideology. Khruschev threatened to bury us. Putin threatens to corrupt us.
This personthis extraordinarily influential, respected, recognized, widely-read personhad decided that there was simply no good reason to continue spying on the Russians. Having made such an unusual assertion, Friedman next notes the following conundrum: "How you pull a country like Russia away from becoming an angry, failed state, acting out on the world stage, and make it a responsible member of the world community has no easy formula."
We have here two assertions, then. Allow me to organize them into a list:
1. We have no good reason to be covertly gathering intelligence on Russia.
2. Unless it is somehow "pull[ed] away" from doing so, Russia is set to become "an angry, failed state, acting out on the world stage."
Remember that these assertions are both made in the space of a single column.
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'."
In 2008, the large, adversarial, and nuclear-equipped nation upon which we apparently need not bother to spy launched a military incursion into Georgia. Friedman responded with a column entitled "What Did We Expect?" that begins thusly:
If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgias president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams.
The bronze medal winners, in this case, had advocated NATO expansion after the end of the Cold War, whereas Friedman and other leading foreign policy experts, Friedman explains, had opposed such a move on the grounds that it might antagonize the Russians without providing the West with any particularly crucial benefits.
The humiliation that NATO expansion bred in Russia was critical in fueling Putins rise after Boris Yeltsin moved on.
Let's make a little timeline here:
December 2001: Friedman hails Putin as a great reformer for whom we all ought to be "rootin'."
August 2008: Friedman mocks two presidential administrations for having accidentally "fueled" Putin's rise to power, accusing the foreign policy teams in question of "rank short-sightedness."
***
Vladimir Putin opposed all inquiries into the Ryazan "training exercise." Legislators belonging to his de facto political party, United Russia, each voted in favor of sealing all records pertaining to the incident for 75 years; two investigations proposed in the Duma were shot down by way of similar party-line votes. Two Duma members who had served on an independent committee that was created to look into the matter were likewise shot down by assassins in 2003. Ooooh, play on words!
After revealing that the basement of one of the bombed buildings had been rented by an FSB officer, and promising to reveal further information in court, lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested on charges of illegal firearm possession and revealing state secrets. Exiled tycoon and former Yeltsin administration official Boris Berezovsky held a press conference in London in 2002 during which he alleged that the bombings had been a false flag operation carried out to redirect public anger from Yeltsin and his inner circle towards Chechnya and to provide a justification for the re-taking of that territory.
In 2002, Putin finally managed to implement his intended reworking of the Federation Council in order to strip it of its independence; earlier opposition was squashed when he threatened to open criminal investigations directed at certain key members. The elections of 2003 and 2004 were deemed by number of international monitors to have been the most undemocratic in post-Soviet history; these and other NGOs also complained of harassment by the authorities as well as by unknown parties. The nation's television networks remained under Kremlin control, and independent journalists critical of Putin and his allies began receiving unusually high numbers of death threats and deaths. The war in Chechnya was pursued with brutal enthusiasm, leaving some 100,000 people dead.
In May of 2004, Thomas Friedman made the following awkwardly worded announcement: "I have a 'Tilt Theory of History.' " The particular tilt theory of history in which he was apparently in possession had provided him with a framework by which to assess the past, present, and future of Russia:
Is Vladimir Putin's Russia today a Jeffersonian democracy? Of course not. But it is a huge nation that was tilted in the wrong direction and is now tilted in the right direction. My definition of a country tilted in the right direction is a country where there is enough free market, enough rule of law, enough free press, speech and exchange of ideas that the true agent of change in historywhich is something that takes nine months and 21 years to develop, i.e. a generationcan grow up, plan its future and realize its potential.
In 2007, Friedman finally noticed that Russia could no longer even be termed a democracy and promptly wrote a column to this effect. I will spare the reader a long account of the unseemly events that occurred within that nation between the time of Friedman's 2004 column and the 2007 column in which he finally admits to Putin's autocracy; suffice to say that the political situation in Russia continued to degenerate to such a great extent that even Thomas Friedman eventually managed to figure out that something was wrong.