478 Comments

Don't knock dating China until you've tried it.

Sincerely,

Eric Swalwell

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Lousy metaphors aside, the CIA handlers at the NYT and Post seem to have issued their marching orders. Hold onto your lederhosen, the warhawks are chomping at their bits and beating their tin drums from atop their ivory towers.

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Holy crap...this is some funny shit. Matt is riffing like Robin Williams during his coke fueled genius younger days. There's too much funny stuff to reference all of it, so I'll just start and end with this hilarious line: "On the other hand, the image of a scorned gay giant with micro-wiener dressed as Peter the Great and trapped in a doorway talking to his shoulder-boil is pretty dynamic stuff." For us older, reformed hippies who remember Hunter S Thompson, this line is like morphine on an open wound. Thanks for some new memories Matt, too bad no one in the US media can write or talk or think like this - minus you and a handful of others.

Freidman, in typical fashion, exhibits the ramblings of a college student who can't believe he got the gig writing for his college newspaper. He's just so damned excited that people are paying him to write whatever thoughts come into his head, that he throws everything he's got - esp ill advised and hard to follow metaphors and similes - at the wall hoping some of it will make sense. To paraphrase J Peterman, the rest is a story.

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The notion that Putin has an inferiority complex because of the US is dead wrong. He thinks the US is a decadent, deeply confused, emasculated society at war with itself. He believes that he and Russia are on the right side of history and will survive and strengthen while the US shrivels or implodes.

Is he wrong? We'll see. But there's nothing weak or crazy about it.

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Sounds like the New York Times has finally completed its metamorphosis into Weekly World News.

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Is “metaphorrhea” a word, or a diagnosable condition?

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Ol' Tommy Boy is really on a roll. Just last week he proposed a Biden-Cheney 2024 ticket with a straight face.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/opinion/democratic-ticket-liz-cheney-2024.html

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Putin committed the gravest sin to the oligarchy of the empire; he put the government/himself back on top with the oligarchy still in the middle and the workers at the bottom. China, the same. We operate in what I believe is best described as inverted totalitarianism with the oligarchy and corporations on top with the government below doing their bidding and the workers (who actually do everything) on the bottom. The struggle between the oligarchy and the government has gone on forever although in Egypt and Sumner the King would forgive debts from time to time to keep the people on their side for corvee labor and the military. In this sense, it used to be better; no jubilee now and they've cut your wages to where you have to borrow from them. Of course, they get the money by having the Fed and banksters conjuring it up from nothing. Forget about democracy, sucker, what we have is "manufactured consent"; the illusion of choice, you have no real choice, they own you unless you wanna live off the grid.

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Jan 20, 2022·edited Jan 20, 2022

It's funny but only if you laugh so you don't cry. This abject moron getting paid tens of millions of dollars over 30 years to "explain" the world to Times readers encapsulates like nothing else how we got where we are. Trump is only possible as half of the folie a deux with this crap.

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founding

Thanks for reminding me why I choose not to read Friedman.

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I about harfed up a lung reading this, Matt. Bravo! Friedman is such a toad, and his writing leaves me wartified, like a giant toadstool without a condom.

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Nothing makes my day like Matt analyzing a Thomas Friedman piece. Thank you, thank you. I needed a good laugh. Can’t wait to see the competition results!

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I can envision Friedman, as he was writing his column, feeling very proud of his wordsmithing skills and waiting for the accolades to pour in from his adoring NYT fan base. I hope no one shares Matt's column with him - he'd be crushed.

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The only thing that would be better than this column would be a long-overdue swipe at David Brooks.

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How does Putin get out of a tree (what tools does he use)?

Step 1: Rhythmically rub a "Navalny gazing" poison around the knob of the tree

Step 2: Take a dose of Invermectin, and read the most recent gain of function literature

Step 3: Make speech about inflationary costs of FBI informants and how they have no business taking January 17th off since they killed MLK. Be sure to mention that when Americans are in your tree, it can be difficult to stay alive, avoiding being robbed, or raped. Just ask Native Americans of North America, Koreans, Vietnamese, Panamanians, Yugoslavs, Libyans and Syrians.

Step 4: Say a Mujahideen incantation roughly translated in Russian to F U Zbigniew

Step 5: Get a small piece of Larry Summers' liver biopsy (the oil should work) - Jabba the Hut

Step 6: Take off your shirt and whistle call for your horse to prepare an election pose

Step 7: Ridicule all people named Boris as stupid ass drunks who can't run a country

Step 8: Create a buffer zone around the roots of tree, so that the CIA can contain it. And call an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Tree Organization to recount the forgotten history of this tree.

Step 9: Ask for a delivery of the Beatles rendition of back in the USSR and a naked picture of Chrystia Freeland.

Step 10: Get Bellingcat to tweet the Atlantic Council about the tree's poisonous gaseous emissions - and have them bring in the white helmets to stage an actual rescue.

Step 11: Send the sanctioned bill to Moscow and Beijing

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I'm sorry... my head is spinning. Did he have a stroke? Did he give a chimp his keyboard?

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