Thomas Friedman blames America for Bush

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has been in a distressingly public tailspin since 911, has now become so delusional that he mistakes George W. Bush for America and blames the former’s inadequacies on the latter.

In a column datelined Singapore, Friedman cites instance after instance in which the US compares poorly to the buttoned-down city state, and which demonstrate for him that this country has lost its fabled post-World War II moxie.

The discipline that the cold war imposed on America, by contrast, seems to have faded. Last year, we cut the National Science Foundation budget, while indulging absurd creationist theories in our schools and passing pork-laden energy and transportation bills in the middle of an energy crisis.

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

Well, actually, Tom, “we” didn’t do any of that: the Bush administration and their Congressional cronies did, abetted by a pathetically cowed opposition party and people such as you, who decided in the days after 911 that the administration deserved a blank check so long as they could protect you.

You threw yourself on their tender mercies, you got raped and now you’re blaming the rest of the country for your poor judgement. And while I generally shy away from blaming the victim, in this instance there’s no alternative.

It’s your fault, Tom, you and every other bonehead pundit who couldn’t recognize a pack of jackals in jackal clothing wearing jackal lapel pins and flying the internationally recognized jackal flag.

A great many of us aren’t suing anyone or selling our homes to one another; in fact, I would venture to say the vast majority of Americans aren’t doing either of those things even when the opportunity arises, which it never does for most people, and nor did we cut taxes on people in your bracket, and nor did we slash the budget at NSF or stash our cronies in $180,000 gigs at FEMA.

That, Tom, was the Bush administration, all of whose sins were forgiven in advance by you because you was skeered.

Indeed, Singapore believes so strongly that you have to get the best-qualified and least-corruptible people you can into senior positions in the government, judiciary and civil service that its pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line.

Maybe I’m missing something, but is there a dearth of qualified Supreme Court candidates? Would jacking the pay scale up a few notches somehow have prevented Bush from appointing ideological lunatics to the federal bench, or his father from appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court? Would paying the head of FEMA a million bucks have discouraged Brownie from taking the gig offered him by Joe Allbaugh?

Of course not. We’d just wind up with a bunch of really well paid ideological lunatics and a bunch of Bush cronies who don’t have to wait until they leave office to score big.

And maybe I’m missing something else, but haven’t we come up with some fair-to-middlin’ presidents even with the dismal wages they’ve gotten in the past? And when you throw in the fringe benefits, modern day presidents do okay: Bush’s vacation time alone is worth more than 90% of Americans make in a year, and who knows how many dollars of tax-free home improvement he’s gotten for that Potemkin ranch of his. It isn’t a lack of pay that makes him the worst US president ever.

It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply someone’s college roommate.

Here’s the thing, Tom: It is actually possible to have a country in which one can spit out one’s gum, uncivil as that might be, and simultaneously possess some sense of confidence that the campaign manager of a frat-boy brat president didn’t appoint an idiot to run the country’s emergency response agency. Six years ago, we all lived in that country, and even someone as disoriented as you should still be able to find that country on a map.

It’s called America, and it really, truly doesn’t look like George Bush. So quit blaming him on us.