No, seriously, he is outright saying that the autocratic one-party Chinese government is superior to our own. There is no equivocation in this line:

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

And why are things better in China? Because the current "reasonably enlightened group of people" in charge of China, at the moment, can just impose "politically difficult but critically important policies" like raising gas prices to encourage clean power investment and so on.

So, yes, the party may be increasingly corrupt and full of the Princeling children of former Communist party officials, the party may stoke violence against ethnic minorities, it may censor the media and lock up journalists and cheerfully ignore human rights, but at least they can get cap-and-trade passed.

The rest of his column is about how the GOP is ideologically bankrupt, obstructionist, out of ideas, and actively damaging the nation, but prefacing that obvious point with one-party rule envy is a little bizarre. Friedman, you'd be the first against the wall in the Cultural Revolution!

Roger L. Simon proposes a theory on Friedman's buttugly house (see below): as is the case with his infamous pornstache, he's trying to impress the Saudi Royal Family - who he's inserted himself with on a number of world issues, like, uh, peace treaties - by going less with style, more with excess:

Chez Friedman seems like the most unimaginative of McMansions. Why, I wondered, would the New York Times man invest his (semi) hard-earned millions on something so dull and pompous, pretentious even? Why not hire one of those expensive avant garde architects so often trumpeted in his own paper? At least then he could come up with something that looks as if it's environmentally friendly (with solar panels on the roof, etc.), even if it is isn't . And it wouldn't be such an eyesore into the bargain. Then I realized – how could I have been so stupid? Friedman spends a lot of time romancing the Saudis. It's their Royal Family he wants to impress. What does Rem Koolhaas mean to Prince Abdullah? Not a lot, I would imagine.

And impress them, he'll need to, especially now that the self-parody of a columnist has to return moneys he's getting from speaking engagements because of the New York Times' stoopid ethics rules. Saudi Princes think little of paupers like Friedman (who makes $75K a speaking gig, and that's not when he's getting terror-pied). Meanwhile, if Friedman really wants impress the Saudi Royal Family with flashy excess, he's probably gonna have to learn a few moves, first. Observe:

Thomas Friedman – keeping up with the Saudis [Roger L. Simon]

Here are two paragraphs from today's column:

I've long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan - just one question: "Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?" If you answer "yes," you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way - not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar.

I call them: "The Class Too Dumb to Quit." I say that with affection and respect. When all seemed lost in Iraq, they were just too stubborn to quit and figured out a new anti-insurgency strategy. It has not produced irreversible success yet - and may never. But it has kept the hope of a decent outcome alive. The same people are now trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Their biggest strategic insight? "We don't count enemy killed in action anymore," one of their officers told me.

Ugh. Would anyone actually get in trouble for editing him? Could someone at the Times just try it, as a favor to us? "Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers." That is just an impressively terrible sentence.

This is what Thomas Friedman is saying, this week: the officers serving their fourth, fifth, or even sixth terms in Afghanistan and Iraq are dumb, but being dumb is good, but it still might not work. Or: "So, here's hoping that The Class Too Dumb to Quit can take all that it learned in Iraq and help rebuild The Country That's Been Too Broken to Work." The capitalization means Thomas Friedman has coined two exciting new and original phrases.

Here is another sentence: "America has just adopted Afghanistan as our new baby."

Friedman uses the power of "humor" to explain complex situations in terms we can all understand. And what we mean by that is he tells crappy old jokes and then tries to make them sound relevant to whatever topic he's simplifying to the third-grade reading level of his corporate audience.

The New Republic's Dylan Matthews actually tracked down all of jokes Friedman has made in his Times columns (it's easy to do, because he prefaces jokes by explaining that he is about to tell a joke), and it is delightful reading.

Here is a joke he told in 1993, about the Arab-Israeli conflict:

"For years I have explained the longevity of the Arab-Israeli conflict with a joke about a very religious Jew named Goldberg who wanted to win the lottery. He would go to synagogue every Sabbath and pray: 'God, I have been such a pious man all of my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?' And the lottery would come, and Goldberg would not win. This went on week after week, month after month. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg couldn't take it anymore, and said to the Almighty: 'God, I have been so good, so observant. What do I have to do to win the lottery?'

And suddenly the heavens parted and the voice of God boomed out: 'Goldberg, give me a chance. Buy a ticket.'"

Ha ha, get it? It's just like how the Israelis pray for peace but never buy peace tickets. And here is a joke he told this year, about the middle east situation:

"During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. It goes like this:

There is this very pious Jew named Goldberg who always dreamed of winning the lottery. Every Sabbath, he'd go to synagogue and pray: "God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?' But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn't win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn't win. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: 'God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?'

And the heavens parted and the voice of God came down: 'Goldberg, give me a chance! Buy a ticket!'"

Oh man, it is even better this time! Because of italics!

In a statement released by the school this afternoon, Franco blames his heinous betrayal of his alma mater on some crap scheduling conflicts.

"I deeply regret not being able to keep my commitment to giving the commencement speech at UCLA's graduation this year," Franco said in a prepared statement provided to UCLA. "Unfortunately the date conflicts with me needing to be on location to begin pre-production on my next film. I wish everyone in the 2009 class the best of luck in all of their future endeavors."

Whatever! What a load of BS. We heard that some Fordham kids were throwing a kegger at a house on the Jersey shore next Friday night, and there's no freaking way James Franco is going to miss out on that action. James Franco just bailed on UCLA to get high and laid, just like Bill Clinton did last year.

Meanwhile, the slighted UCLA grads are venting their angst on Twitter, naturally.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

See what you're doing James Franco? That's the youth of America speaking right there, and you're destroying them! How will the school ever find someone whose academic and cultural significance is on par with yours on such notice? Who can they possibly find to take their high five-figure speaking fee to step before a podium and spout a bunch of horrible lies cloaked as truth in flowery rhetoric about how they're the future of the nation and how they can change the world and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Who will they find to tell them that in five years there's no way they'll ever regret starting out their lives $100,000 in debt for a seemingly worthless piece of paper when they could have been traveling the world having orgies with beautiful strangers and experimenting with mind-altering chemicals? Oh yeah, we almost forgot—- Tom Friedman will cash just about any check!

Whatever, James Franco hates UCLA and he really hates America. This much is certainly true, even though some UCLA students were hoping this would happen.

James Franco not speaking at UCLA commencement ceremony [UCLA Newsroom]

See, the Globe is owned by this bankrupt little mom-and-pop media concern called The New York Times Company. This company also pays one Tom Friedman a ridiculous amount of money to travel to places like Iceland and India and probably Dubai, so that he can talk with a CEO and then report back on how smart that CEO is.

So meanwhile this company is trying to renegotiate contracts with employees at the Globe, this newspaper they keep threatening to shut down. And Mr. Friedman bragged, in The New Yorker, about how he has a literally unlimited expense budget. This rubbed Brian Mooney the wrong way! So he wrote a letter.

"The New York Times Co. wants you to slit your own throats and take money out of your pockets so Tom Friedman (and others in New York) can travel in style and at great expense — and then brag about it. The Times (not the Globe) lost $74.5 million last quarter and will lose a bundle in this quarter. Stand up and tell the Times the contract they're trying to shove down your throats is an outrage. Vote No on June 8."

So, yes, the mailers and press operators agreed to some concessions, but this might not bode well for the upcoming editorial contract vote! Thanks, Thomas Friedman, you just personally killed a newspaper. Well, you and Pinch and the internet. But mostly you.

The Flat One gave a speech to the "Bay Area Air Quality Management District" last week, and charged his normal fee, $75,000, which also includes a chance for some of the attendees to ask him questions (regarding ice cream preferences only). So then a motherfucking poor media critic at the LA Times gets all pissy and starts asking questions about whether this is "good" or "fair" or whatever and then they discover hey, the NYT doesn't even let you give paid speeches to lobbying groups like that, and now Tommy has to give back the money!

Do you think Thomas Friedman likes to fly to the West Coast on an airplane and ride in a taxi and stay in a hotel, for free? That's three columns worth of material for him, but no, he does not like to do it for fucking free. Sprawling suburban mega-mansions aren't fucking free.

[LAT]

General Growth Properties filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, which is notable because it's one of the nation's largest mall operators, with 200 malls in 44 states—the Times called the company's failure "one of the biggest commercial real estate collapses in United States history."

It's also notable because Friedman's wife, Ann Bucksbaum Friedman, is an heir to the family that founded GGP, and her family still owns about a quarter of the company. Two years ago, a quarter of GGP was worth more than $4 billion. Today it's worth less than an olive tree. Friedman does OK—incomprehensibly so—with his books and speaking gigs, so he's got a little breathing room. Still, it's got to hurt when your spouse's family loses $4 billion.

Here's what Friedman had to say about his family's business back in 2000:

My relatives are in the mall business, where everyone is worried about all the stories of the high-tech age, just around the corner, when you will be able to do all your shopping online from your Palm Pilot, and your refrigerator will automatically order more milk via the Web when its high-tech sensors indicate you're low. I jokingly suggested to the shopping center folks that they run an ad that would say: "Imagine a world in which you will be able to go to just one place, walk from shop to shop, and see, touch, feel or try on anything you like, and then buy it right there and take it home with you — without worrying about your credit card number being stolen, or how U.P.S. will deliver it, or how you will ship it back if it doesn't fit. Imagine such a world! It's also just around the corner — right now. It's called a mall."

Man that guy's a genius. GGP should have hired him as a marketing consultant. We were kind of excited to see what Friedman might have to say about his relatives' business latest challenge, but the Times' said he was "off" yesterday.

The Times catalogued GGP's woes last week, but they didn't mention Friedman's connection.

No, today Thomas types letters into Google Suggest, sees what Google suggests, and uses that to write a "state of the nation's psyche" piece. Did you know that if you type "m-e-r-e" into the Google Suggest it doesn't suggest Family Ties star Meredith Baxter Birney, but rather the banking analyst lady who said Citigroup was moribund back when only a couple other people much smarter than Thomas Friedman dared suggest such a thing? After this bombshell, Thomas delivers one of his patented brilliantly simple insights:

Do you know how many people have to be searching for you if all you have to do is put in four letters and your name pops up first? A lot! But I am not surprised.

This shocking fact, that Google suggests a pessimistic banking analyst instead of the popular Latin dance merengue, is pretty much proof that Barack Obama's entire first term is basically doomed. More proof: when you type in "b-a" into the Google it thinks you are searching for "Bank of America" and not our wonderful new president!

Someone just showed Thomas Friedman the Google Suggest toy, and he spent a day playing with it instead of, like, going to an igloo to write about the Global Warming. He was probably perturbed to discover that fewer people are searching for his wise pronouncements than are looking to noted mass transit expert Thomas the Tank Engine.

(Dowd, today, is about John McCain's Twitter, and earmarks, and King Lear. So she's sticking with what works.)

*What we will say about Thomas Friedman: he has the mind and prose style of a child delivering a school report, the Iraq quagmire is partially his fault, his influence in the halls of power (though diminished) is one of the reasons we are doomed as a nation, and god, his mustache....

Princess Dowd noticed that one thing that many people at Citronelle have been talking about, lately, is greedy bankers, and how shameful it is that they are all so oblivious to how much people are probably suffering, somewhere (Detroit?). Dowd couldn't really come up with a good, derisive nickname for these greedy bankers, because they are faceless examples of greed and not specific, fey liberal politicians, so she borrows the terribly clever moniker the New York Post bestowed on them: "The 'Citiboobs.'" (Maureen Dowd just wanted to write the word "boobs.") (Boobs.)

So these boobs bought a private jet with their bailout money, but Maureen Dowd had to spend $400 on her credit card, because she is a real person, like you and me! (She shouldn't have picked up the check at Citronelle!) "Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel," Maureen Dowd heard on CNN, yesterday.

Oh, and John Thain, he is a bad dude. Her friends Andrew Cuomo and Carl Levin told her so.

Bartiromo also asked Thain to explain, when jobs and salaries were being cut at his firm, how he could justify spending $1 million to renovate his office. As The Daily Beast and CNBC reported, big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a “Roman Shade” for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.”

Does that mean you can only throw used parchment in it or is it made of parchment? It’s psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.

It would probably be unfair and pointless to ask about how much money Dowd has sunk unto the home office at her 1819 Georgetown townhome. Not that she's received government bailout money for it! Though the Times did need Mexican Billionaire Bailout Money, and she's probably paid a bit better than your average "actual reporter."

But speaking of actual reporting: Thomas Friedman actually interviewed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia about Middle East peace! The interview took place in 2002. He couldn't get another interview, so in today's column he makes up what he thinks Abdullah would say about the current crisis in the holy land.

Back in 2002, Abdullah proposed "full peace and normalization of relations, by all 22 Arab states, for full withdrawal from all occupied lands and creation of a Palestinian state." Friedman claims this was his idea. Now that is not so much of a viable option, for lots of reasons that everyone in the comments can argue about. So Friedman imagines that Abdullah would now propose some hilarious "neither side would agree to any of this in 100 years especially now" plan that is pretty much the same as the other one except even harder to implement.

And it's written from the perspective of King Abdullah—apparently Abdullah is doing his impression of Matt Taibbi's impression of Thomas Friedman! Like:

President Obama, too much has been broken to go straight back to the two-state solution. It would be like trying to build a house with bricks but no cement. There’s no trust and no framework to build it. Israelis and Palestinians need the kind of cement that only Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan can provide.

The real problem right now is that Israel and Palestine don't have enough cement. (Shouldn't have wasted so much on that security fence, right?) The "bricks" in this analogy represent... well, actual bricks, as far as we can tell.

Thankfully, we have a solution to everything, in the world: in order to save the Times, some guys write in the op-ed page today, they should stop being for-profit and establish a foundation or something, like a university's endowment. Hilariously, the op-ed is cowritten by the chief investment officer at Yale, who just lost the school billions. But still! It is a good idea! Especially because of this:

One constraint on an endowed institution is the prohibition in the same law against trying to “influence legislation” or “participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.” While endowed newspapers would need to refrain from endorsing candidates for public office, they would still be free to participate forcefully in the debate over issues of public importance. The loss of endorsements seems minor in the context of the opinion-heavy Web.

Sure, we'd miss the laughs. But the Times, and America, would be better off. Thomas and Maureen would surely still find work elsewhere, making up crazy nonsense. Thomas could write children's books and Maureen could marry a banker.

Number one is Paul Krugman, who is so influential that he never supported Obama in the primaries and continues to use his blog to impotently push for a bigger eceonomic stimulus plan without tax cuts. The Obama Economic Team has steadfastly ignored the Nobel-winning economist, which is why Krugman is a guy to watch this term!

Hah, and number four? It's Flat-Earther Thomas Friedman, the third-grader who somehow ended up with a successful career as a pundit and author. The Forbes summary of his importance is perhaps more correct than they realize, in a scary way:

Behind the seemingly glib sound bites lie opinions that are genuinely influential among the educated, tome-reading public and the Washington establishment.

Simple-minded powerful people enjoy the simple-minded work of this mustachioed free-trader, which is why we are doomed. At least Tommy now cares about the Global Warming, or something, apparently.

His original story was all about The Earth is Flat, and why Tom Friedman is a rich asshole who butchers the English language and is not particularly bright. So the new piece is on, you know, pretty much the same theme, except it's about 'stache's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Sample:

And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?”Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

Ha, he sounds like us! Matt Taibbi is great and if you think you are too cool to like Matt Taibbi, you are incorrect. Suck it, 'stache. [NYPress]

10. Thomas Friedman vs. Greenwash Guerillas

9. The View vs. Keith Olbermann

8. Bill O'Reilly vs. Gawker

7. Jesse Jackson vs. Barack Obama

6. Katie Couric vs. Sarah Palin

5. Anonymous vs. Scientology

4. David Letterman vs. John McCain

3. Hipsters vs. Hipsters

2. Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama

1. Soulja Boy vs. Ice-T

Collins' reign over the Times op-ed page until the end of 2006 wasn't altogether a hapless one - she brought along a number of popular columnists. (She did move Frank Rich to the op-ed page, where the best columnist on the paper got a larger platform.) We can't personally testify to any of her editing abilities, but she must have been one hell of a re-writer to have stayed with the paper this long as a weekly writer. She makes Maureen Dowd's column ideas look unique and original. The only advantage she has on Maureen is that she's not a racist (probably).

The theme of today's opus is on her impatience for Barack Obama to replace George W. Bush. Thanks, Gail — you've taken what we're all thinking, albeit weeks ago, and somehow turned that into a column. A long column. A column that actually contains the words, "Can I see a show of hands? How many people want George W. out and Barack in?"

More boring than outright bad, here's the kind of high level thinking that Gail makes you do:

The person who would like this plan least probably would be Barack Obama. Who would want to be saddled with the auto industry’s problems ahead of schedule?

Insight! And it's not like she hasn't done this before. Her column last Saturday was titled "Hillary for Secretary?" and it ended with the line, "She might do a terrific job." Every single day she writes a column, all she does it take the first story on Drudge and make alleged jokes about it by appending a question mark to the news in question. Look, Gail, if you're going to bore us with this type of inanity, there's only one place to put it: a blog.

Time For Him To Go [NYT]

This anecdote about Friedman's massive ego is joke fodder at the Times' D.C. office:

Immodesty occasionally shows; and, when Paul Krugman, his Op-Ed colleague, won the Nobel Prize in Economics, a few weeks ago, I was told that the reaction heard most often at the Times was "How's Tom going to take that?"

Wait until Krugman becomes Secretary of the Treasury! Friedman's really going to be steamed he endorsed the Iraq War!

That's just part of the hypersensitive columnist's overall insanity. The profile opens with Friedman in Greenland near the Arctic Circle, where he is blissfully whaling away on his laptop at all times of day while his wife watches on. We had always wondered why a woman would copulate with the putzy Friedman:

"My dad worked every night," [Friedman's wife Ann] said. "I'm sure that's why I was attracted to Tom, because my dad went back to the office my whole life. That's how I grew up." She reads her husband's columns before they are submitted, and a few times a year she causes him to start from scratch.

The ensuing depiction of the overly repetitive columnist is none too flattering, describing him witlessly coming up with a book idea after a short conversation with Bill Gates and characterizing his golf game: "a fine striker of the ball." That no doubt means exactly what you think it means.

Because everyone in America self-identifies as middle class, and America is so determined not to become Great Britain that we allow everyone to just make up whatever class they want for themselves (which is why rich people are middle class and young white college-educated Brooklynites are working class and Barack Obama is an elitist).

Just this week, in a mostly decent column (surprisingly!), globalist Thomas Friedman lambasted John McCain and Sarah Palin for refusing to agree that paying taxes is patriotic. You see he should know what patiotism is, he is the middle class personified!

Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

Ok, Tom, a couple things:

• Every time you bring up your own middle classness, you should probably add "of course now I'm a fantastically wealthy globe-trotting author!"
• His point about Minneapolis is kind of true. The liberalism of that town is strong enough that we're sure the "middle class" there does view tax-paying as a patriotic duty! But that liberalism does not extend to the first- and second-ring suburbs that make up the huge base of anti-tax Republicans like Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, nor does that attitude extend to the "middle class" in demographically similar cities in the rest of the country.
• Because when you are truly middle class, paying taxes is not simply an annoyance, like it is for fantastically wealthy authors; it is actually a burden. Sometimes it is a great burden that prevents you from being comfortably middle class! You should brush up on your Fear of Falling, Mr. Friedman. Or maybe you should just read it for the very first time, Mr. Globalization Will Solve All Our Problems!
• Related: when you are middle class, a lot of your money is likely to be tied up in your home! Right now is not a great time for your money to be tied up in your home. (Or in the stock market! Or your 401(k)! Or anywhere but GOLD.)
• All that said, shifting the tax burden off the middle class and back onto the wealthy, like in those wonderful Great Society days, is a Good Thing that should be done right away. But no one can explicitly say this because we still need to pretend it's the 1990s?

Oh, right, what were we saying? Pretend Middle Classness! Honestly, it bothers us less than Chris Matthews' even more divorced from reality pretend working classness. But it is still ridiculous. It is ridiculous for Joe Biden to go around pretending to understand the middle class on account of his being the lowest-paid Senator and a guy who rides the train every day. Because that train is the terribly overpriced Acela, and Senators make nearly $200k/year. Even if Biden is deeply in dept, like the real middle class, his pension's certainly in no danger.

And yes this is just another strain of the deeply misguided authenticity fetish. Everyone please limit your discussions of the middle class to, like, which policy proposals would help them, the most. (But ha ha they can't do that because it's biased to explain that Class Warfare goes both ways.)