The Moustache speaks

Imagine if Thomas Friedman, overwhelmed by the tabloid travails of such celebrities as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, wrote the following lines:

It is the age of the madwoman. The time for giving them chocolates and flowers is passed; now is the time to lock women in cages and, if necessary, burn them as witches.

My guess is we’d accuse him of falling prey to the availability heuristic and perhaps have him committed. Meanwhile, writing lines like this merely assures you a sinecure at the New York Times:

But this is increasingly an age of pirates, failed states, nonstate actors and nation-building — the stuff of snipers, drones and generals, not diplomats.

Chaos and anarchy everywhere! Somalia, Afghanistan: when will it end? Actually a non-pod person would look at the world around him and conclude that we live in an era of sovereign states (203, and counting). Granted, many of these only exercise de jure sovereignty, but those represent a minority and, more importantly, retain less power. Consequently, we still live in an era largely defined by state-to-state relations, also known as diplomacy.

While this may indeed not be a “great age of diplomacy,” that has as much to do with people like Thomas Friedman as anything else.

Of course, no matter how far out on a limb one goes, there will always be a neoconservative a step ahead accusing you of timidity:

Now he tells us. Funny, he didn’t mention that “This is not the great age of diplomacy” back in 2008, when he lamented that “Bush had no coherent worldview to animate [Condoleezza Rice’s] diplomacy.”

Good lord, Mr. Greenwald, don’t feed the animals (note: if I had referenced one or more actual animals, that would have been ripe material for a Friedman column).