Tom Friedman, The New York Time’s meaningless columnist in chief published one of his best pieces yet last week – a true testament to his ability to regurgitate banal pseudo intellectual garbage week after week. The ludicrously highly paid Friedman churns out articles on the modern world that string baffling metaphors together, sequencing them to give the impression of coherence while laughing all the way to the bank.

In an article titled ‘This Ain’t Yoghurt’, Friedman tackles the crisis in Syria, using his typical arsenal of childish analogies and implied comparisons to make an incredibly simplistic point that he could have tweeted in 40 characters or less.

The argument, as far as I can deduce, goes something like this:

One of Friedman’s Arab friends told him a proverb about eating hot soup and getting your tongue burnt (apparently you’ll always blow on your yoghurt afterwards).

Friedman then equates this with America invading Iraq and Afghanistan (tongue burnt) and the conflict in Syria (which ‘ain’t yoghurt’, but hot soup again).

Friedman draws comparison between the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring, concluding eventually that they aren’t similar at all.

Friedman uses a birth metaphor about Syria being Iraq’s twin and needing a midwife to become a blooming democracy.

Friedman then expresses hope Arabs can “transition from Saddam to Jefferson without getting stuck in Khomeini or Hobbes” and argues for an Arab Nelson Mandela figure to fix all their problems (or a midwife).

Friedman then concludes that none of this is possible and the only way to solve the problem is to “occupy the entire country, secure the borders, disarm all the militias and midwife a transition to democracy”.

Friedman then says this is not possible and doesn’t want America to get heavily involved  (remember, this ain’t yoghurt).

Friedman finally concludes that we must wait until everyone is exhausted from fighting to send the midwives back in.

If you are scratching your head at all of this, don’t worry. Friedman’s piece makes about as much sense as standard Glenn Beck rant on Obama’s closet Communism. It’s not that Friedman doesn’t get it – if you mine through the nonsense, he clearly sees Syria is screwed and US intervention won’t do much. He just packages his thoughts in a series of garbled paragraphs that any half decent English teacher would dismiss as bullshit from the 9th grade upwards. Friedman clearly prides himself on being able to distill complicated events into easily digestible nuggets of prose – hence his relentless use of metaphors – which makes reading him all the funnier. It’s like watching a mal-coordinated tennis player serving the ball into the net over and over again while strutting infront of the crowd to remind them of his athletic prowess.

And while Friedman’s columns are a genuine source of comedy (see Matt Taibbi for some epic takedowns) , they should also be a cause for serious concern. The New York Times is a respected paper and Friedman has an enormous platform to spread his musings on foreign policy and current affairs. This means hundreds of thousands of people get to see the world through Friedman’s dangerously simplistic eyes.

In Friedman’s world, incredibly complex events can be turned into neat parables to give his readers dinner party talking points. And while they might go down a treat after a few glasses of wine, his readers should be wary that upon closer inspection, a Friedman distillation might not be as clever as it sounds. As Taibbi points out, “Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.”

Want to talk about slavery? Here’s a Friedmanesque metaphor: “Slavery was the Walmart of its day, arguing against workers rights while offering slaves benefits”. World War Two?: “Hitler was the big bad wolf trying to turn Europe into sheep for him to lead”. [Editors note: these are made up Tom Friedman metaphors]

There are only two rules for a Tom Friedman metaphor: 1. They must be childishly simple. 2. They must not make sense if you examine them closely.

So while Friedman’s “This Ain’t Yoghurt” piece kind of makes sense if you boil it down its core argument (Syria is buggered and we shouldn’t go anywhere near it until the fighting stops), you have to wade through a litany of stupid metaphors and analogies about midwives refereeing countries that are like post Soviet Union Eastern Europe but aren’t, imagining non existent Arab Nelson Mandelas and yogurt that is actually hot soup.

Thanks Tom. It’s all perfectly clear now.

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David Brooks on gay lifestyle: Too much of this

David Brook’s latest NYT column on gay marriage is, well, rather weird. After reading it a couple of times, it’s clear Brooks thinks gay marriage is ok, but his argument is so convoluted and condescending it makes you want to dunk his head down a toilet bowl.

Brooks essentially argues that for the past 40 years, homosexuals have only been concerned with promoting their permissive lifestyle, but now they are growing up and want to act like heterosexuals. He writes:

Last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy.

Brooks wants the gays to be grateful for this wisdom he is bestowing upon them – after all, ‘the composure class’ (a term he invented for genetically superior upper middle class white people) is an exclusive club, and he is personally giving them the key.

Writes Matt Taibbi:

Brooks is trying to make a “point” here – he takes something like 800 words to make it, but it boils down to a single snarky observation: “Isn’t it ironic that these same people who’ve been fighting for the right to personal indulgence for all these decades since the Sixties are now fighting for the right to be legally restrained?”

This is absurd on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. First of all, gays and lesbians are not asking to be forced into marriage – they’re actually campaigning for a new legal choice they didn’t have before. So technically speaking, they are campaigning for more freedoms, and Brooks’s argument is already fatally screwed.

Brooks’s attempt to frame the gay marriage issue in these terms fits with his world view that liberal social attitudes have destroyed the fabric of society. Continues Taibbi:

The reason Brooks lunges for that other explanation is because he’s been so convinced for so long that many of America’s problems stem from a post-Sixties inability (of poor and non-white people, usually) to manage all of our newly-won personal freedoms. He’s spent his entire career longing for a return to the formal and informal constraints of some of our old social conventions – you know, the days when having a child out of wedlock brought shame from a community, and people didn’t just live together, but got married, and folks listened to their priests and rabbis, instead of just shagging and getting high all day long and living on welfare and credit cards.

I mean, I guess it’s a good thing that Brooks is on board with gay marriage and his voice might help further the cause, but wow, what a dickish way of saying it…

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It really is a guilty pleasure, but I do love it when clever, funny writers take on not so clever, humorless writers. Intellectual slap downs are like junk food to journalists, and Matt Taibbi has provided years of unhealthy food to people like myself, largely at the expense of the New York Time’s resident metaphor butcher Tom Friedman. I try not to poke fun at other writer’s too much, but with Friedman it’s hard to resist.

In his latest Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi takes apart Friedman’s latest attempt to explain the crisis in Syria with a series of metaphors so absurdly convoluted you wonder whether Friedman might be having his readers on. Inexplicably, Friedman seems to have changed his views on the state of Iraq post America’s invasion and occupation, at least in comparison to what we’re now seeing in Syria. Friedman had once used described Iraq as a “pottery barn” that had been “broken” by “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Friedman described the pottery barn (Iraq) as being “held together only by Saddam’s iron fist,” that was subsequently smashed by the US invasion. Friedman then argued that Iraq was a disaster in part because the US didn’t give it “political therapy” during its occupation.

But now the emotionally stunted broken pottery barn once held together by Saddam’s iron fist looks rather appealing, at least in Friedman’s eyes. Writes Taibbi:

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Matt Taibbi: Romney has America's best interest at heart?

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi – his mixture of acerbic wit and penetrating insight is a rarity in journalism these days, and I pretty much agree with his stance on most issues. That’s why I was little alarmed to read this from his blog on Rolling Stone today:

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins. If some foreign agent attacks us, I seriously doubt a president Mitt Romney would wave the white flag and invite the enemy in. Right? He’ll try his best as Commander-in-chief, just like Obama has, and just like Bush did, and Clinton did, and Reagan did and so on.

That should be the way we think. We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.

Perhaps the storm has affected Taibbi’s memory a little, but here’s what he wrote about the prospects of a Mitt Romney economy a few weeks back:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

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Matt Taibbi and the Huffington Post’s Ahmed Shihab-Eldin had a great discussion about Mitt Romney’s naked hypocrisy when it comes to the national debt. Taibbi pointed out that Romney’s entire career was built around loading companies up with debt then extracting as much value out of them as possible with no concern for their long term well being – the opposite philosophy he is espousing for political office. Check out the highlights of the conversation:

Romney preaches minimal spending and debt for government not because he genuinely believes  in it, but because he wants to eradicate government programs that help people he doesn’t care about (the 47% he discussed in front of his rich friends last year). The relentless focus on government spending and debt isn’t born out of a real desire to ensure the survival of future generations as he so often claims on the campaign trail, it is born out of  desire to ensure government works for people like himself – the rich and powerful. It should come as no surprise that Romney backed the Wall St bailout in 2008 – after all, his friends livelihoods were on the line. Of course Romney did not extend that empathy towards the automobile industry, a largely blue collar industry that he would not have regarded as equal in social value, and has had no time for welfare programs vital to the survival of the poor.

Romney understands the power of debt and how to use it – he made millions out of it in asset management and understood that for the economy to survive, it was vital to take on more debt in order to sustain the financial system. In Romney’s world, debt is good when rich people make money, but not when the poor stand to gain from it. And how does Romney deal with this seemingly obvious contradiction? Pretty easily – he lies about it.

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Watching Mitt Romney lie truly is a sight to behold – he now does it so effortlessly that you have to give him credit. There has been a metamorphosis in front of our eyes over the past year. Romney once appeared like a stiff robot, fumbling lines and committing gaff after gaff while trying to pass off completely contradictory policy proposals to different demographics. It was painful to watch as you got the feeling that even Romney didn’t believe what he was saying. But now it seems he does, and Romney is lying with astonishing ease.

Matt Taibbi points to his first debate performance where Romney finally figured out that he didn’t need to feel guilty about making things up:

From the start of the first debate, Romney has almost seemed liberated, spouting line after line of breathless, ecstatic inventions – things that are, if not lies exactly, at the very least just simply made up out of thin air, and seemingly on the spot, too. The business about the $25,000 “bucket” of deductions which he prefaced, with seemingly half of America watching, with the phrase, “Let’s pick a number”: awesome. Then there was the jobs plan that creates 12 million jobs, another number seemingly plucked out of the ether: it turned out that when asked to justify the number, the Romney campaign cited three studies, none of which came anywhere near justifying claims of a 12 million-job increase…..

Romney’s realized that numbers don’t matter, and past facts don’t even matter that much: he’s run all fall on completely made-up, mathematically-incoherent jobs and tax plans, and not only is he not suffering, he’s made it all the way to a statistical tie with the president (or even a lead, if you believe the Gallup polls), and the presidency is in sight. He’s finally released the burden of all those internal contradictions, and the inventions and devious distortions are coming so fast and so furious now, it’s energized him psychologically, and he seems to be taking flight before our eyes.

I think that Obama’s performance in the second debate successfully highlighted the sociopathic lying Romney has been engaging in, but he’ll have to ram it home again in the next debate to stop Romney from getting away with it. After all, voters are notoriously flaky and they’ll go with the guy offering the rosiest sounding deal. Obama just needs to remind them that purchasing Romney as President is akin to buying the cheap IKEA bed frame. It looks like a real bed, but once you lie down, it falls apart pretty quickly.

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Matt Taibbi on the vice President’s scoffing last night:

The Romney/Ryan platform makes sense, and is not laughable, in only one context: if you’re a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences. But if you’re not one of those rooting gazillionaires, you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn’t matter if you’re the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn’t take it seriously.

The idea that you could run for President on a platform of cutting taxes without actually showing how you pay for it really is contemptible. Biden laughed his way through the debate because his opponent is laughable. How Romney and Ryan can run around the country selling a plan that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is beyond my comprehension. As Taibbi writes:

Forget being battered by the press, he and his little sidekick Ryan should both be tossed off the playing field for even trying something like that. This race for the White House, this isn’t some frat prank. This is serious. This is for grownups, for God’s sake.

If you’re going to offer an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without explaining how it’s getting paid for, hell, why stop there? Why not just offer everyone over 18 a 1965 Mustang? Why not promise every child a Zagnut and an Xbox, or compatible mates for every lonely single person?

Obama needs to hammer Romney on this in the next debate as it is a potential goldmine in terms of political payoff. Romney is running on the ‘I’m going to turn the economy around’ platform, but he can’t because he doesn’t have an actual plan.

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Another bad sign for Obama. Pew’s latest poll:

It really is astonishing that just by looking the part, Romney has propelled himself back into the Presidential election despite lying for the better part of 90 minutes. As Matt Taibbi writes:

Romney’s performance was better than Obama’s, but only if you throw out criteria like “wasn’t 100% full of shit from the opening bell” and “made an actual attempt to explain who he is and what his plans are.” Unfortunately, that is good enough for our news media, which drools over the gamesmanship aspects of these debates, because it loves candidates who sink their teeth into the horse-race nonsense that they think validates their professional lives.

Romney’s bounce is more an indicator of just how ridiculous the political process in America has become rather than Romney’s abilities as a candidate. Consistent lying should disqualify him from being taken seriously, but it has the opposite effect these days. It’s actually encouraged if done well.

We’re going to be following up on a piece we broke last week on Romney’s seriously shady behavior regarding his personal finances, proving again that Romney is a serial liar who cannot be trusted in the slightest to be forthcoming about literally anything. Stay tuned.

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After a week of Romney trying to undo the damage of the “47%” video, these are the latest numbers on his likeliness to win the election if it were held today (from Nate Silver):

What conclusion can we draw? Andrew Sullivan deduces the obvious:

We have found that Romney in general loses votes the more he opens his mouth in public and private (two categories fast merging). He’s lost the core terms of this campaign (it’s now a choice, not a referendum), he has lost the specifics (the vagueness of his tax plan is indeed a red flag), he is insisting you can cut the debt by cutting taxes for the very rich like him, then calls half the country deadbeats.

It’s hard to see how Romney can come back at all now – bar a series of incredible performances at the debates and a hidden video of Obama saying something equally as stupid as Romney’s “47%” diatribe, it’s basically over.

Because as Matt Taibbi writes, Americans simply don’t like Mitt Romney. He fails the ‘which candidate would you rather have a beer with’ test that seems to be the most trustworthy predictor of Presidential elections these days:

How many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife’s name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing “entitlements” like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it’s paying its bills to him on time?

As it’s turning out, not that many.

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The poorhouse: Where most people will live under a Romney Presidency

By Ben Cohen: If you want to understand the type of country a politician wants to build, it is often a good idea to take a look into the life they built for themselves before stepping onto the national stage. Obviously it’s not the only indicator, but someone who has dedicated their life to public service would be more likely to have a more socially minded vision for the country as opposed to a businessman who has spent a lifetime dedicated to profit making.

Let’s take the two Presidential candidates this year. One of them, Barack Obama was a community organizer and a law professor, while the other, Mitt Romney worked exclusively in private equity and asset management.

During his tenure as President, Obama has to a degree reflected the life he led before coming into office. The President has fought to maintain the social safety net and provide support for the poorest people in America. His record on civil rights is not fantastic, but his commitment to using what is left of government to do good from an economic standpoint is fairly clear. He passed the stimulus package, reformed health care and extended unemployment, all in the face of an opposition that did everything in its power to stop him.

Mitt Romney on the other hand has spent most of his adult life making extraordinary amounts of money through private equity, and a short spell in government passing tax cuts for the wealthy.

The picture is obviously more complicated than this – Obama’s record on standing up to Wall St is pretty desultory and his policy is certainly not reflective of his social background or rhetoric, and Romney passed a widely praised health care plan in Massachusetts that did benefit the economically disadvantaged.

But as a whole, the difference is pretty clear – at least for office in 2012. The community organizer from a disadvantaged background is running on a platform to help the poor and middle classes, while the private equity rich kid is running on a platform to almost exclusively cater to the rich at the expense of everyone else.

If you look more closely at Mitt Romney’s professional background, a very disturbing picture emerges. Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece in Rolling Stone takes a good stab at trying to understand Romney’s pre-political life and his world view, and it’s a pretty frightening account of his life as a modern capitalist titan. Writes Taibbi:

Romney was a prime mover in the radical social and political transformation that was cooked up by Wall Street beginning in the 1980s. In fact, you can trace the whole history of the modern age of financialization just by following the highly specific corner of the economic universe inhabited by the leveraged buyout business, where Mitt Romney thrived. If you look at the number of leveraged buyouts dating back two or three decades, you see a clear pattern: Takeovers rose sharply with each of Wall Street’s great easy-money schemes, then plummeted just as sharply after each of those scams crashed and burned, leaving the rest of us with the bill.

In the Eighties, when Romney and Bain were cutting their teeth in the LBO business, the primary magic trick involved the junk bonds pioneered by convicted felon Mike Milken, which allowed firms like Bain to find easy financing for takeovers by using wildly overpriced distressed corporate bonds as collateral. Junk bonds gave the Gordon Gekkos of the world sudden primacy over old-school industrial titans like the Fords and the Rockefellers: For the first time, the ability to make deals became more valuable than the ability to make stuff, and the ability to instantly engineer billions in illusory financing trumped the comparatively slow process of making and selling products for gradual returns.

Romney basically helped pioneer a horrific form of vulture capitalism that saw financial trickery and leverage as legitimate ways of creating inordinate amounts of wealth through massive amounts of debt. The trick at Bain was to buy companies with other people’s money, load them with debt, then get out before the house burnt down with a massive pay off for themselves. It worked brilliantly – at least for Romney and his fellow finance pals – but not so much for the companies that were often left crippled by the deals they made. As Jesse Eisinger at ProPublicanotes:

The Wall Street Journal found that many of the businesses Bain bought went bust, even when Bain reaped big financial wins. The paper analyzed 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mr. Romney led the firm from its 1984 start until early 1999, finding that 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested. An additional 8 percent ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost. .

It is stunning that a candidate running almost exclusively on reducing the deficit spent a lifetime accumulating debt for other people then walking away as they crumbled underneath it. But no matter for Romney who has always emerged unscathed from the looting his company engaged in. He’s a multi millionaire, and proof at least in his own head that anyone can make it in America.

Mitt Romney is running on a platform to codify this type of vulture capitalism, and astonishingly, he picked a running mate even more extreme than him. Writes Ezra Klein:

In picking Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has doubled down on his own campaign promise to give big tax breaks to the wealthy, uniting himself with a candidate who goes even further to do so: While Romney would bring taxes for top incomes down to 28 percent, Ryan has proposed bringing the top rate down even lower, to 25 percent. Meanwhile, Ryan’s plan would actually increase the effective tax rate on the very poorest Americans by getting rid of tax breaks that benefit low earners.

So this is the world envisioned by Romney and his side kick Ryan – a bleak, cutthroat society where the poor are left to fend for themselves and the rich given more power and control over everyone’s lives with the explicit protection of the federal government. Says Taibbi:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

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