"Leave the obscenely wealthy alone!" pleads America's leading obscenely wealthy media person.
For a brief an pleasant time I was able to forget that Thomas "Metaphor Killah" Friedman existed. Oh what happy days those were. But it was just a dream: The Mustache of Understanding's tiny, ridiculous self does, in fact, continue to wander the pages of the New York Times, soaking up valuable sunlight and nutrients which could be used elsewhere to, say, grow arugula or recharge the batteries of adorable kitties:
But no, in his extremely finite wisdom, Andrew Rosenthal continues to permit the Mustache of Understanding roam outside the paddock, spattering the pages of his once proud newspaper with silly word-like effluvium and generally bringing shame to the entire Rosenthal family.
Which brings us to yesterday's incoherent rambling plea for "pluralism" in which Thomas Friedman -- the New York Time's own in-house Anubis, Weigher of Souls and Wielder of the White Feather of Ma'at -- would like you to know that while Ted "Eobard" Cruz may, in fact, be an incarnation of pure evil...
Unlike Sanders, Ted Cruz does not have a good soul. He brims with hate, and his trashing of Washington, D.C., is despicable.
..at least he's not a diddly darned Socialist like Bernie Sanders!
...
Sanders seems to me like someone with a good soul, and he is right that Wall Street excesses helped tank the economy in 2008...
I’d take Sanders more seriously if he would stop bleating about breaking up the big banks and instead breathed life into what really matters for jobs: nurturing more entrepreneurs and starter-uppers. I never hear Sanders talk about where employees come from.
"Golf and the world golfs with you." The Mustache seems to be struggling to say. "Socialism and you socialism alone."
In short, we’re not socialists.
Yep. That's what he's saying alright.
And you know what? Thomas J. Friedman is right! Because with the exception of our nation's police and fire departments, military, coast guard, national park service, EPA, OSHA, our entire public education system, every college of the community, state and land grant variety, our roads and bridges, most of our water and waste systems, our workforce development and job training programs, TAANF, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the VA, our bailout of the American automobile industry, our bailout of the American banking industry and a several dozen other vital public services and institutions (Libraries for fuck's sake! Publicly-funded museums. Public conservatories. Sorry. I get carried away) I could name but apparently fall beneath Mr. Friedman'd imperial gaze...
...we are definitely not socialists.
But even if Bernie Sanders is right and we as a nation are at least socialism-curious, and Wall Street is still filled with fiends and con men, it doesn't matter because all that shit is fixed now!
But thanks to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, that can’t easily happen again.
Except, of course, it's not fixed and it can happen again, From NPR:
One of the leading figures in the government's bailout of banks deemed "too big to fail" after the 2008 financial crisis says major banks are still at risk.
Neel Kashkari, now the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that despite changes to Wall Street made as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, big banks are still too big to fail.
"If there were another crisis and banks ran into trouble, I'm afraid that taxpayers would have to step in again and bail out these banks. So we have not solved that problem, and we need to," Kashkari says.
...
Mr. Friedman scrapes this shitpile of random adjectives fired in every direction together under the heading "Who Are We?" and concludes his rambling embarrassment thus:
...
America didn’t become the richest country in the world by practicing socialism, or the strongest country by denigrating its governing institutions, or the most talent-filled country by stoking fear of immigrants. It got here via the motto “E Pluribus Unum” — Out of Many, One.
Our forefathers so cherished that motto they didn’t put it on a hat. They put it on coins and then on the dollar bill. For a guy with so many of those, Trump should have noticed by now.
Mr. Friedman does this because he is a creature of the wealthy and entitled. because he is actually kinda stupid, because he is a terrible, terrible writer and because for reasons known only to Ammit, the Devourer of Souls, he is one of a select group of wretched hacks to whom Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times has given a job for life.
Crossposted from Driftglass
