Hit someone, anyone...THEN make them good democracy consumers....

What color is the sky in Tom Friedman's world?
Can you smell colors therein and perform other extra-rational miracles?

All sorts of fantasies, grim and otherwise were implied from his call in to the Imus program yesterday.
His latest justification for the war (on the heels of "Saddam has a doomsday bomb" and "I saw skulls, Human Skulls!!!")
is that we must save that those stalwart progressives, the House of Saud.
Yup...Tom Friedman insists that 9-11 was cooked up by Bin Laden as part of a scheme to embarrass Saudi Arabia by loading up the operation with suicidal Saudi terrorists.
Never mind the fact that Saudi Arabia has been exporting terrorists for years, bankrolling them, and is perfectly happy as the world goes up in chunks as long as their tribal hegemony is not attacked.
Nope we are doing all this to save that olde tyme religion in Riyadh.
As usual, Tom sounded scared, and when Friedman is scared he starts spouting "complex" theories about foreign policy and quoting ad nauseam from the "Arab Human Development Report".
His conclusion? The yokels are starving, stupid, fertile, and angry...and that represents a threat to "our open society".
He also loads up his discourse with gratingly trite cliche's like "empower", "invest", "alternative energy", "shareholder" and my favorite "stake-holder".
As if the voters of the once proud republic are a bunch of grizzled miners a'la Gabby Hayes.
To Tom, it is a mere matter of weaning John Q. Public-Iraq off the local roast and enticing him across the street to the new Starbucks franchise wherein the coffee is just more reliable.
I've called Friedman a lot of names down through the years, "hopeless naive' hack" being a fave, I've also derided him as spineless and a passive aggressive yutz.
But yesterday I finally figured it out, Tom's real problem is that he is a helpless utopian, he really believes in his heart of hearts that the global free market can create nothing but positive change for the man on the street in Baghdad.
In truth, it is not all Tom Friedman's fault.
He came of age in a fiercely illiberal age and feels the only alternative to being a mindless reactionary is to assert patently liberal utopian ends can be achieved by simply cheerleading the free market.
After a while if you mumble this patent nonsense to yourself often enough, you begin to believe it.
It's called auto-suggestion and Tom has it bad.
Meanwhile he goes on prattling nervously about "our free society" ....that once glorious polity in which elections are overturned and recalled on a moments notice....this blessed plot in which thieves run amok in high places, louts make the laws, and young Americans die for a policy summarized as "hit someone anyone!".
Tom looks at all this and sees a utopia....
Me?
I'm looking into cheap plots of land in the Baja.