Exclusive: Pundit Thomas Friedman laments that the new Cold War isn’t funny enough for him, but there really isn’t anything funny about the U.S. plunging into an unnecessary nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine while Friedman and his fellow VIPs misreport what’s happening, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Sometimes I wonder if today’s crop of U.S. pundits and pols could ever rise to meet some truly urgent need of the American people, let alone the interests of the world. Everything, it seems, is done with a snigger and an attitude — even as we stumble into a wholly unnecessary confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia over which batch of thieves and oligarchs gets to run Ukraine.
There’s an old joke about Washington being Hollywood for ugly people, but Washington also turns out to be Comedy Central for unfunny people. We’re left with a tedious column by The New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman lamenting that we’re having a new “Cold War without the fun — that is, without James Bond, Smersh, ‘Get Smart’ Agent 86‘s shoe phone, Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging, a race to the moon or a debate between American and Soviet leaders over whose country has the best kitchen appliances.”
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.
Yuk, yuk! So, clever! But Friedman, the ever-clueless columnist, misses the fact there was another side to the best humor and satire about the Cold War. Movies, like Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), pointed to the grim absurdity of mutual assured destruction. Even some of the goofier comedies, like “Get Smart,” parodied the supposed glamour of Cold War spy-craft.
But there was really very little funny about the very real threat of annihilation of all life on the planet, nor about the vast sums of money wasted on building up super-sized nuclear arsenals, nor about the enduring influence that military contractors and their legions of apologists then had — and still have — on the federal budget.
In 1953, less than three months after becoming President, Dwight Eisenhower decried the diversion of so much money and talent into the pursuit of more and more deadly weapons, saying: “Every…