Thomas L. Friedman has done it again. He has written a column that in its willful blindness and a TOTAL lack of understanding of how the world actually operates surpasses much of his previous blather - of which there’s a plethora. My mother’s z”l maiden name was Friedman and I am inordinately proud that Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman is my second cousin. I hope this dunce is not related to our fabulous family tree. If you want to read the whole pile of verbal effluent, here’s a link - but don’t read on a full stomach:
I have copied a short segment which I’ll comment on here. Hold your nose and read:
There are three things that absolutely cannot be allowed to happen: Israel cannot be allowed to turn into an autocracy like Viktor Orban’s Hungary; Ukraine cannot be allowed to fall to Vladimir Putin; and Donald Trump cannot be allowed to occupy the White House ever again.
If all three were to happen, the world that I want to leave my children and grandchildren could completely collapse.
Israel, the only functioning pluralistic democracy in the Middle East, tempered by the rule of law, albeit imperfect, would be lost.
The European Union — the United States of Europe, the world’s other great multiethnic center of free markets, free people and human rights — would be at Putin’s mercy.
And the United States of America, with a vengeful Trump back in the White House, effectively pardoned for his many attacks on our democratic institutions and his assault on the integrity of our elections, would never be the same. Trump would be unchained — an utterly chilling thought.
It's as if Friedman purposely and with great precision took the facts as we know them, then typed it all backwards, google-translated to Swahili, then back to English. Every. Single. Thing. that he says is an inversion of reality.
Zelensky is losing, and losing bigly. You will not read about this in the New York Times or even the Wall Street Journal. FOX is now an all-out “Putin is the devil” outlet, so you won’t know about it from them either. What the US and NATO are doing is prolonging the agony of the Ukrainian people and using them as pawns in their warmongering power game in which the US is trying really hard to provoke WW3. Those of us old enough to remember Nixon’s visit to China will recall that the trip’s main strategic purpose was to make sure China never aligns with Russia. In this, Nixon succeeded - until now. Our CCP puppet president has driven Russia into Chinese arms with inexplicable relish. The sanctions have made absolutely no difference to the war in Ukraine but they sure as hell have made a difference to the status of the dollar. Not good. Not good at all.
The European Union is not and will not be at “Putin’s mercy”. The danger of Putin attacking France is less acute than the US attacking...well, choose a country. Isn’t that what NATO is actually for? Had Putin attacked Poland or Slovakia, I would not be writing this. A 10-year old can understand this but Friedman can’t. He lives in a Swahili-translated reality.
Victor Orban’s Hungary is not a beacon of liberty. There is racism, anti-Semitism and many other unsavory elements but it’s no more an autocracy than Jacinta Ardern’s New Zealand. As far as I know Orban also hasn’t mobilized his cavalry to stomp on protestors in Budapest.
Israel is a mixed bag and deserves a column of its own. The optics are terrible: for a man under indictment to try and re-shuffle the judicial system smells and looks really bad. All that said, as someone who reads the Hebrew press and has family in Israel, I can assure you Israel is not about to fall into some dark hole of tyranny. It is at the moment far freer than the United States where we still live under a Covid emergency regime and don’t allow dirty, unjabbed “furners” to cross our borders - unless they do it en-masse via Mexico. The debate in Israel is free and vigorous and there’s no uni-party such as exists in the US.
I’m not going to say much about Friedman’s rabid Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s an illness that has no cure. But here too, his perspective is the obverse of our actual reality. While I would never vote for Trump - the man who allowed the Covid Kabuki theater to take hold and hijack our lives and who still claims the jabs “saved millions of lives” - he represents no threat to our democracy when compared with the dangers of the continuing CCP-sponsored Democratic regime.
The tragedy that while a delude “journalist” is no big deal (as I said, he’s written a lot of pap over the years), a delude populace is a huge deal. And sadly, there are millions of people in this country who think that Fauci is a national hero, that Trump should be working on a chain gang, that we are in Ukraine to “defend Ukrainian democracy” (does Friedman really think that Zelensky’s “democracy” is of a higher order than Orban’s in neighboring Hungary?)
Friedman is an aging deluded journalist living in an alternate reality who writes for millions of deluded Americans living in an alternate reality. That reality is as certain to utterly collapse, as is the dollar’s status, the relevance of NATO and the Build Back Better order that is being foisted on us. It will take some time but every delusion comes to an end. An ugly end, I should add.
Well said and I agree with everything but what you wrote about Trump. He was a man at the mercy of people who he trusted and they screwed him. If Atlas was allowed to continue in St FaucXii position things would be different. If if if.
Nailed it, as always George. x