Wednesday, September 07, 2005

It's always about Thomas Friedman

I'm taking out the garbage today because . . .

There really is no polite way to say it. Because Thomas Friedman doesn't do a damn thing.

So I bump into Jess from upstairs and he tells me he doesn't know what to make of "Osama and Katrina." That's my husband Thomas Friedman's return to the op-ed pages after a lengthy summer vacation of sulking and shorty robes.

The column is supposedly about the country but Thomas Friedman can't write about anything but himself. That's why in his first paragraph he uses "I" three times. Three or four sentences and "I" statements pop up three times. It's all about Thomas Friedman.

When we were watching the destruction on TV, the first thing he said to me was, "Thank God I went to New Orleans last year." We're seeing people with nothing, we're seeing dead bodies. But it's all about him. It was as though, if he were watching the crucifixtion, he'd be saying, "Thank God I had my picnic there last week." No sense of perspective beyond himself.

His next statement was one of worry, would they pull Invasion due to this? He really wants to watch that television program and seeing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that was his second thought.

He never did get around to addressing the issues. When I read the column this morning, I was surprised to see that he was still unable to.

What he could do was try to justify his push for war and justify his many valentines to the Bully Boy. "It's not my fault" was the subtext because it's always about him.

But it is his fault. He endorsed the Bully Boy. He propped him up. He is responsible for what the Bully Boy did. You give someone a blank check, you can't act surprised when they break the bank.

"You give someone a blank check, you can't act surprised when they break the bank?"

Good Lord, I said to Jess, I'm even starting to talk like my husband Thomas Friedman!

Jess assured me that I was still me. I hope so. He tried to cheer me up by showing me some stuff in the paper he was carrying: "NYT: What can the Times do about Todd S. Purdum's smelly jock strap?" and "TV Review: Prison Break Tease" and "Kat's Korner: Joan Baez Bringing It All Back Home on Bowery Songs" which were all funny. We even read an editorial about the aftermath called "Editorial: Let's play politics." But the whole time, I knew that waiting inside the apartment was the demon in the shorty robe.

Thomas Friedman looks at the world and sees only himself. Lying on both ends of his flat earth in a shorty robe, it's all about him.

Reading "Osama & Katrina" and you get how it's always about Thomas Friedman.