Anybody Hear Friedman On Imus This Morning?

[Dinger]

I know, Imus . . . BUT to me, Friedman totally & completely ripped * , his cronies, and this W-ar.
The best part was when he said something about bu$h, after he leaves office, crawling under a table, in a fetal position, with Barney. He went on to talk about getting out of Iraq, and riping this war up and down, and sideways. Sorry, I don't have a transcript, so if anyone finds it, please post it for me. I'm not to savvy at that sort of thing, but I will see what I can do.

[aquart]

1. "After he leaves office"? Why wait? Crawl now.

[Dinger]

4. No Kidding

It almost seemed to me like Friedman was thinking along those lines.

[acmavm]

2. Old Tom sure is singing a different tune these days, isn't he?

[Jack from Charlotte]

11. That was my thought as I listened on Imus.............

to some but not all of his talk. He ALMOST admitted he was wrong as he said......very quickly...... he was originally for changing the landscape in the Middle East. He jumped on the.... "The idea was good it's just Bush was too stupid to carry it out..".. bandwagon.

That idea needs to be challenged now. Every single person who was for this war needs to be called out and branded. I'd love to see a list started here on DU of all the pols and press people who supported this disaster. List their comments along with az link and rub it in their faces EVERY time the try to make a public statement the rest of their lives.

[goclark]

13. Great Idea!

Tim Robbins wrote a play about the NeoCons that was like a crystal ball of this war.


These people should have their feet to the fire instead of coming out now saying, "Oops!"

[seemslikeadream]

15. Well I have this

2506 "I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' Dick Morris, 4/9/03
Tue Jun 20th 2006, 03:59 PM
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/seemslikeadream/109


"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom
that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively
bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly
shattered skeptics' complaints." (Fox News Channel's Tony Snow,
4/27/03)



"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside
liberals, and a few people here in Washington." (Charles Krauthammer,
Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)



"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego
that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to
take that wager?" (Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)



"What's he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war
went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose
their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean--4/9/03)



"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the
broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that
nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him.
The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)



"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in
Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)



"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's
most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just
wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to
say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House
will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now,
Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....

"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N.
weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr.
Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, "The United
States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs,
defeated." Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail,
again.

"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this
guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and
so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is
going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)



"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To
hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory
meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at
least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend.
Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and
for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a
defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened.
Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront
an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might
can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)



"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don
Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war
with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There
is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated
so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)



"Shouldn't the prime minister and all of us who thought the
war was hasty and dangerous and wrongheaded admit that we were wrong? I
mean, with the pictures of those Iraqis dancing in the streets, hauling
down statues of Saddam Hussein and gushing their thanks to the
Americans, isn't it clear that President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair
were right all along? If we believe it's a good thing that Hussein's
regime has been dismantled, aren't we hypocritical not to acknowledge
Bush's superior judgment?... Why can't those of us who thought the war
was a bad idea (or, at any rate, a premature one) let it go now and
just join in celebrating the victory wrought by our magnificent
military forces?"
(Washington Post's William Raspberry, 4/14/03)



"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless
military intervention.... The president will give an order. attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by
the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring
it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer,
3/30/03)



"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State
Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb
and the desperate could ignore it."
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)




Until the philosophy,
Which holds one race superior
And another inferior,
Is finally and permanently
Discredited and abandoned,
Everywhere is war.

WAR

Until there is no longer first class
Or second class citizens of any nation.
Until the color of a man's skin,
Is of no more significance than
The color of his eyes,
I've got to say "war".

WAR

That until the basic human rights,
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to race,
I'll say "war"

Until that day the dream of lasting peace,
World-citizenship and the rule of
International morality will remain
Just a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never obtained.
And everywhere is war.

Until the ignoble and unhappy regime
Which holds all of us through,
Child-abuse, yeah, child-abuse yeah,
Sub-human bondage has been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war.

War in the east,
War in the west,
War up north,
War down south,
There is war,
And the rumors of war.

Until that day,
the african continent will know no peace
There is no continent,
Which will know peace.

Children, children.

Fight!

We find it necessary.
We know we will win.
We have confidence in the victory
Of good over evil
Of good over evil

Fight the real enemy!

Bob Marley

[Hubert Flottz]

17. Very well done...but very sad.

PLEASE give that a thread of it's own.

[seemslikeadream]

18. Thanks Hubert Flottz I did awhile back

It got 87 recommondations and was posted at BuzzFlash

[Hubert Flottz]

20. Hard hitting combination.

Damn, I hate these lying monsters for what they've done...in our name.

And Bush and Blair are on TV right now, being the same old unrepentant assholes and liars.

[americanstranger]

19. With your kind permission...

I would LOVE to turn your post into a Flash animation.

Let me know.

- as

[seemslikeadream]

21. OF COURSE americanstranger!

I would love for you to. Would you look at these also, please? They are very dear to me.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1671438

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=2691935

[Jcrowley]

22. kick for this post

[Marr]

26. Right- the idea itself was inane. Anyone who supported it

was either an out-of-touch fool with no knowledge of history or the middle east, or they were a mouthpiece for war profiteers.

It wouldn't have mattered if you had Napoleon running this show- it still would've failed.

[petgoat]

38. Oh, TOM zzzz Friedman? I thought you meant BRAD woo hoo! Friedman. nt

[warrens]

3. This is "Six-Months" Tom, the insane Likud dude?

Well, only four years late. A mere rounding error in CYA politics.

[LiberalEsto]

5. Only if Barney wants to

and I think Barney knows better than to curl up with that slimeball

[blm]

6. Friedman wrote the best column he's ever done after dropped pronoun-gate.

Springsteen put it up on his site's front page. The Friedman column showed up in papers all over the country a few days before the Nov. election.


http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html



Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence, by Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times, November 3, 2006

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry -- a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service -- and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, "They must think I'm stupid." Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team's real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry's mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men -- to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld's response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you've got -- get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories -- from "Cobra II" to "Fiasco" to "State of Denial" -- all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we've been making it up -- and paying the price -- ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they're fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we're addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing -- demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation -- to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country's health, prove him wrong this time.
Let Karl know that you're not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has -- through sheer incompetence -- brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

>>>>>>>>

[Cha]

25. WoW! Go

Figure! Keeper..and I'm sure it enlightened many who might have been, otherwise, brainwashed.

[blm]

27. People now realize BushInc BELIEVES they're stupid, and Hillary sided with Bush

against Kerry on this. Which means SHE must think people would continue to be stupid, too.

[Cha]

31. Too bad for her that

the peeps have wised up since bush's polls were in the '90's, '80's, 70's, '60's, '50's, 40's, 30's, ect, ect, ect.

[tblue37]

36. Yeah, but when you could have helped, during the push for war,

you were all for Bush's plans, and you have supported the stay the course "plan" with all your endless friedmans* since then.

*A friedman is a 6-month period starting from whenever the speaker or writer is expressing his opinion that another 6 months will decide the outcome of the Iraq War. A friedman is like the horizon--you an never actually reach it. Whenever soemone speaks about how much time we need to wait before something decisive will happen in the war, the friendman starts afresh, so its end point is always six months from then.

[brentspeak]

7. Is this Tom "Outsourcing is good for you!" Friedman you're talking about?

The one who previously was an Iraq War cheerleader? That Friedman? I hate that guy.

[dmosh42]

24. Yep! Same one who thinks 'Free trade' is best for us!

Yessir! This is ole take it in the ass, Tom!

[regularguy]

30. Yep. Tom "Give War a Chance" Freidman. N/T

[HughBeaumont]

33. Ecch. Don't even get me started on his offshoring praise.

Wrong ALL over.

[AlinPA]

8. I remember him say this morning "It's over". He usually has suggestions on what

they should do about Iraq at the White House. Now he says "I just don't know".

[Jacobin]

9. Friedman was the head cheerleader for the invasion

Now, he acts like he can't believe anyone would have been stupid enough to try it.

Typical pundit talking head idiot.

[kentuck]

34. That's the way I remember it ....

also..

[Webster Green]

10. I won't read that asshole's stuff, even if he has finally figured it out..

What a fucking idiot!

Why does he get a column?

[Little Star]

12. So, is the world still flat????

Day late and dollar short there, Mr. Friedman.

[HughBeaumont]

32. Let's not even mention that title is STUPID considering his position.

A round earth is more interconnected than a flat one.

[UTUSN]

14. The a-hole was a top drumbeater for the Iraq attack

As for his claiming Shrub will be in a fetal position at the pig farm------shows how much FRIEDMAN *still* gets EVERYTHING wrong: Shrub is a psychopath, INCAPABLE of registering experience in a sentient way, has NO remorse, NO conscience. Just look at his constant shoulder-shaking "laughter".

SL-IMUS said something about, "You're not telling us anything we didn't already know." Not that sL-IMUS is any better.

[Nimrod2005]

16. Yes - It was awesome, the BEST EVER analysis-type taking heads stuff...nt

[RamboLiberal]

23. As far as I'm concerned Friedman and Richard Cohen

ought to crawl under that table with Bush and Barney. They were f'ing cheerleaders for this war.

[Tom Joad]

28. Friedman is a war-mongering piece of shit, too.

and worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He speaks for the super-wealthy.

[rodeodance]

29. yes, i had a good chuckle over the 'fetal position' comment.

[CatWoman]

35. found the transcript, Dinger

:hi:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3226997/

NEWS QUOTE OF THE DAY

Imus and NY Times columnist Tom Friedman discuss what should be done in regards to the war in Iraq following the release of the Iraq Study Group's report:

Imus: "It just seems to me in listening to you and others, that at the end of the day, I hate to use that phrase, but when the dust clears, we're going to have another--we're going to have another nut to deal with who--whether it's al-Sadr, or whoever it is, but on top of all that we've got who knows how many dead Iraqis, and we do know how many dead Americans. You know?"

(Moments Later)

Tom Friedman: "It's about do you have at the core of that country, a will of--a majority of people to live together. And the other thing..."

Imus: "...Before that, are you willing to fight and die for your country?"

Tom Friedman: "Yeah. I mean..."

Imus: "...Before that."

Tom Friedman: "Because you know we are--you know? And the problem with Iraq up to now Don, has been in my view, that our vision for that place, and you know shame on me for hoping that people wanted a different Iraq, you know--as much as I did. But the problem is, that it’s been clear to me, is that, --our vision for Iraq is every Iraqis second choice, all right? That is, the Kurds first choice is an independent Kurdistan, the Shiite's first choice is a theocratic Iraq that they dominate, and the Sunni's first choice is a return to Saddam's rule. So democracy--a democratic power-sharing Iraq is all of their second choice, and we cannot go on having our first choice kids die for their second choice. That's just it. We lost."

Imus: "That's a good way to put that."

Tom Friedman: "You know, we lost Don, it's a tragedy, but it's over."

Imus: "Yep."


MORE AT LINK.............

[hatrack]

37. So what's the story? Is he asking for a mulligan?

Sorry, Flat Tom - not in our bag of tricks.

It's nice to see that he is in some sense in touch with reality, but it would pretty much take sackcloth and ashes to even start scrubbing his War Ho status.