Sunday, May 25, 2008

One last little edit

In today's NYT, Thomas Friedman bemoans the state of education for inner city children. He reports on a public school in Baltimore designed primarily for disadvantaged minority kids that will be run as an elite boarding school. To get into this school, children must participate in a lottery. Friedman argues that it's very sad that the fate of a child is decided by little more than chance.

All well and good. Chuckling is the first to agree that all schools should be good schools and that a child's fate should be something which he or she, or the parents, can reasonably influence. But in the final paragraph, Friedman actually up and pulls Iraq out of his ass. Get this:

There are so many good reasons to finish our nation-building in Iraq and resume our nation-building in America, but none more than this: There’s something wrong when so much of an American child’s future is riding on the bounce of a ping-pong ball.

That man is mentally ill. Were he sane, it would read more like this:

"There are so many good reasons not to finish our insane murder spree, umm nation-building, in Iraq and to begin nation-building here in America, but none more than this: There’s something wrong when so much of our fucking money is irresponsibly borrowed and spent to pay for a stupid war that does no good for anyone except a small circle of war profiteers who don't give a shit about you or me, much less some inner city kid who wants an education. Our political culture is totally fucked and fucktards like me, Thomas Friedman, bear a lot of the blame."