(no subject)

Look - a Shiny Shiny Thing! Please stop paying attention to the massive rolling clusterfuck that is the Brian-Burke-corruption thing we triggered last week.

I mean, shit, it's so very unheard of for an Indonesian airplane to fall out of the sky - it's only happened, what, 5 times in recent years? Ah - the age has another piece, pointing out "More than 250 people have been killed in Indonesian crashes since 2004."

(no subject)

You know that when Matt Taibbi writes on the subject of Thomas Friedman, the results are going to be gold. His latest doesn't disappoint. Some of the gems:

Thomas Friedman has been subdued lately. I get the feeling that he's taken some of the criticism of his nutty metaphors (I'm only one of a great many people who've been on him about this) to heart and decided to chill out, which in a way is kind of a shame. He's still an arrogant, wrong-headed prick, but he's no longer a walking literary time bomb like he used to be. I often feel now, like I did on the day Red Auerbach died, that the world has lost one of its leading lights.

but he's only getting started...

The notion that our problem in Iraq is a resource deficit is pure, unadulterated madness. Our enemies don't have airplanes or armor. They are fighting us with garage-door openers and fifty year-old artillery shells, sneaking around barefoot in the middle of the night around to plant roadside bombs. Anytime anyone dares oppose us in the daylight, we vaporize them practically from space using weapons that cost more than the annual budgets of most Arab countries to design. We outnumber the active combatants on the other side by at least five to one. This year, we will spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined -- more than six hundred billion dollars. And yet Tom Friedman thinks the problem in Iraq is that we ordinary Americans didn't tighten our belts enough to support the war effort.
Friedman should be hung upside down and have holes drilled in his skull for even suggesting this, of course. We're talking about one of the richest men in media, a guy who in recent years got still richer beating the drum for this war from his $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot mansion in suburban Maryland. He is married to a shopping mall heiress worth nearly $3 billion; the Washingtonian says he is part of one of the 100 richest families in America. And yet he has the balls to turn around and tell us that the pointless, asinine war he cheerleaded for failed because we didn't sacrifice enough for it. Are you reaching for the railroad spike yet?

Previously: Taibbi on Friedman's most recent book (one of my favourite reviews ever), Taibbi on the literary genius of Friedman's columns.