Yes, that's right: Thomas Friedman got pied.

(looks like the YouTube video got yanked. It's available here on Google Video, for now at least...)

It's long overdue that this guy get exposure to the taste of sweet, goopy justice, and I think lots of public figures -- on the left and the right -- could use a good pieing every so often. After he was cleaned up, he did go on to deliver his speech (at Brown University), which focused on market-based and techno "fixes" to the environment.

As it becomes more and more clear that the problems we're facing are rooted in the very foundations of market economics, we can see capitalism's apologists, like Friedman, offering more and more incredulous "solutions" to those problems (something tells me that putting price tags on even MORE things isn't a good solution to the problem created by pricing things in the first place). But one thing is painfully clear: lefties need to learn better aim!

He might as well have said that, anyway. In his Op-Ed in the NY Times today, Thomas Friedman shows us the tough options we have to choose between in Iraq, either phased withdrawl over the next 10 months or re-invading and rebuilding the country with 150,000 more troops over the next 10 years. Anyone who suggests a plan that involves deploying more troops needs to immediately follow-up with a plan for where these troops will come from. Draft, anyone? No, I didn't think so. And by the way, could you please factor in that we might want to keep a little bit of our military available just in case we need them here in the US? But if you can come up with a plan to increase our military forces by 150,000 troops, or leprechauns for that matter, be sure to let us know.

I'll confess, I'm fairly critical of anything Friedman says (see this post for clues as to why his grand globalization scheme leaves the taste of vomit in my mouth). I can't even give him credit for gradually shifting to a more pragmatic view on the war in Iraq, since he only did so when the political tides turned in that direction and he has no remorse for his former warmongering. He's criticized the administration for "bad intelligence" on WMDs, but nonetheless feels that we should have gone in, just with more troops to allow for "political therapy".

Friedman ends his column by stating that the mishandling of the war "has left us with two impossible choices." No, it's left us with only one possible, though difficult and unfortunate, choice. Thanks so much for so long acting as cheerleader for the policies and policymakers that have landed us in this latest quagmire, Tom!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no "Third Worlds." There is no "West." There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars. Electro-dollars. Multi dollars. Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon—those are the nations of the world today.
-quote from the 1976 movie Network

Alright, so I'm about 30 years late with this movie review, but given how long ago Network came out, I'm guessing that a lot of people my age and younger haven't seen this movie, just as I hadn't until this weekend. The messages in this movie are even more relevant today than when it was first released.