The Democratic Police State: Thomas Friedman wants your name on a list

[Karmadillo]

If you object, that just proves you should be blacklisted.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8535

Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York Times. He has been described as "a guard dog of US foreign policy". Whatever America's warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it. He boasts that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist". He promotes bombing countries and says world war three has begun.

Friedman's latest bark is about free speech, which his country's constitution is said to safeguard. He wants the State Department to draw up a blacklist of those who make "wrong" political statements. He is referring not only to those who advocate violence, but those who believe American actions are the root cause of the current terrorism. The latter group, which he describes as "just one notch less despicable than the terrorists", includes most Americans and Britons, according to the latest polls.

Friedman wants a "War of Ideas report" which names those who try to understand and explain, for example, why London was bombed. These are "excuse makers" who "deserve to be exposed". He borrows the term "excuse makers" from James Rubin, who was Madeleine Albright's chief apologist at the State Department. Albright, who rose to secretary of state under President Clinton, said that the death of half a million Iraqi infants as a result of an American-driven blockade was a "price" that was "worth it". Of all the interviews I have filmed in official Washington, Rubin's defence of this mass killing is unforgettable.

Farce is never far away in these matters. The "excuse makers" would also include the CIA, which has warned that "Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of 'professionalised’ terrorists'." On to the Friedman/Rubin blacklist go the spooks!

Like so much else during the Blair era, this McCarthyite rubbish has floated across the Atlantic and is now being recycled by the prime minister as proposed police-state legislation, little different from the fascist yearnings of Friedman and other extremists. For Friedman's blacklist, read Tony Blair's proposed database of proscribed opinions, bookshops, websites.

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[jwcomer]

1. Why read TF? He's a fool. n/t

[GreenArrow]

"fool"

Tool might be more apt. You can be sure he gets more than one paycheck for disseminating his crap.

[silverweb]

2. Appalling.

This is the new McCarthyism -- just getting underway. It has to be stopped cold, and soon.

[shance]

3. Looks like 'Joe McCarthy' is mad about a recent article in the Prospect.

So now the king baby, what else do you call him, wants to hurt and eliminate everyone that doesnt idolize him?

Are we seeing a pattern of amazingly petulant and immature reactions not to mention vile threats against American citizen's civil liberties when these people get called on the floor for the truth?

What has this country come to?

[JAbuchan08]

4. God I frickin' hate that guy

I want to puke every time I see him.

On edit: having said that I'm still curious enough to read what Friedman said first hand.

[RethugAssKicker]

5. Lets lock that fucking bastard up first.

What he's stating is absolutely un-American.

[shance]

6. Excerpt from the Prospect article: Friedman's own narcissism

<< Friedman’s foolishness seems rooted in an almost willed ignorance of the figures in the Bush administration and the worldviews that defined them. How much attention to administration folkways did one need to pay to realize that Bush would never fund the war through a tax increase, nor care if he had broad international backing or not? “I have to admit I’ve always been fighting my own war in Iraq,” Friedman wrote in the summer of 2003. “Mr. Bush took the country into his war.” Was it too much to ask the nation’s most important foreign-policy journalist to focus on Bush’s war -- particularly because, well, it was Bush, and not Friedman, who was president? >>


http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10113