Opening the Day: Happy Suck On This 5th Anniversay

by: Matt Stoller

Fri May 30, 2008 at 09:48

• The Rules and Bylaws Committee meets tomorrow, and the Puerto Rick primary is on Sunday.  There's basically no way that Clinton comes back at this point, unless the DNC awards her everything she wants on Saturday and she convinced about 100 superdelegates to switch to her.

• Happy suck on this day!  It's been five years to the day since Tom Friedman explained the rationale for the war in Iraq.

  I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
  ...
  We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
  ...

  What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

  You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?

  Well Suck. On. This.

  Okay.

  That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

  Fun fact about Friedman, he's married to a billionaire.  

• Wingnut Senator Tom Coburn says that Republicans 'deserve' to lose seats.

• Obama is apologizing for another preacher.

• Bush is having surrogates go out and deny Scott McClellan's story about Bush's cocaine usage.  Really?  That's how they are pushing back?  

• Esther Kaplan has a long article out on SEIU and CNA, that actually gives background on the dispute.

• Hard core leftie Camille Abate is lying about progressive Democrat Dennis Schulman and the Responsible Plan.  This is actually quite common, and has happened in Maine and Colorado.  The protest industry, while less noisy than it has been in years past, is still irresponsible.

• Ezra Klein has more on the hyper-masculine archetype of successful Democratic Party leaders.

• Here's Nancy Pelosi: ''This war is a big lie. It was a lie to begin with..and it continues to be a lie..at some point, maybe the lies just got to be too heavy for him to carry,'' [Pelosi] said of the former White House spokesman.

  Why can't journalists say the same?

So happy anniversary.  It's been five years since Tom Friedman said we hit Iraq so we could tell some Arabs to 'suck on this'.  I'm glad the premier foreign policy columnist in our country has a fragile ego that he covers with bloodthirsty racism.  

What are you reading?  What do you expect to happen tomorrow?