Do you mean to say that Tom Friedman has written a column worth reading? Yes, we mean to say that. Here’s why: Quoting the spokesman for a delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists who cut short a visit “to study the workings of American democracy,” he reports their stunned reaction to the Bullshitter-in-Chief telling Republicans they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court because of her religious beliefs:
“Now let me get this straight,” Judge Mithaqi said. “You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.
“How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: ‘Don’t pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.’ Is that the
Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don’t think so. We can’t have our people exposed to such talk.”
Since you can’t read the column online unless you have access to subscribers-only TimesSelect, we thought we’d cite the good stuff for the open record. Here Friedman quotes a Shiite lawyer in the delegation:
“I survived eight years of torture under Saddam,” Unfi said. “Virtually every extended family in Iraq has someone who was tortured or killed in a Baathist prison. Yet, already, more than 100 prisoners of war have died in U.S. custody. How is that possible from the greatest democracy in the world? There must be no place for torture in the future Iraq. We are going home now because I don’t want our delegation corrupted by all this American right-to-torture talk.”
Although Mr. Unfi doesn’t sound credible when talking about “no place for torture in the future Iraq” or about his motivation — he’ll have to do a lot more than shut his ears to keep the delegation from being corrupted — his point is timely, today especially.
And finally, this reaction from another delegate member, the editor of a new Iraq newspaper, as he watched the rehearsed videoconference between the Bullshitter-in-Chief and 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq:
“It was right from the Saddam playbook. I was particularly upset to hear the Iraqi sergeant major, Akeel Shakir Nasser, tell Mr. Bush: ‘Thank you very much for everything. I like you.’ It was exactly the kind of staged encounter that Saddam used to have with his troops.”
But it’s the end of the column, written in parenthesis, that makes you appreciate Friedman’s effort: “(Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren’t so true.)” Let’s just call it a triumph of the absurd.
— Tireless Staff of Thousands
