It’s then that it hits me: Here I am playing an ancient Scottish game with metal sticks in Java while doodling giraffe penises on my Apple Blackberry Etch-a-Sketch function designed by brown-blacks in Eritrea and there are Mongolian goats in the background ordering garlic hummus at the Taco Bell/KFC where the hobbit employees are albino and French and robots and then the Kenyan-Hawaiian president of the Pan-American representative democracy is with me but he’s chasing Chinese rabbits across the New York Stock Exchange floor which is covered in Saharan turpentine — metaphorically, this is a metaphor — and I see God: it is called “the Yuan” or maybe “iPod.” Suck. On. This. [The Nation]

We were going to do another Children’s Treasury to “honor 9/11,” to remember the most cosmically mind-fucking outbursts that various still-to-this-day-employed pundits said about death & war between 2001 and 2003, but why not just give the full stage to The Mustache of Truth and his famous “Suck. On. This.” Manifesto from May 30, 2003? You know, the most evil thing anyone has ever said about anything! MORE »

In the most shameful “gaffe” since Watergate, socialist prime minister Barack Obama’s press office has apparently put some crappy best-seller book on his vacation reading list even though he was supposedly reading the book last year. God, this guy. Why not just put him in jail now? MORE »

Notable New York Times stater of the obvious, occasional pie-target, and secret True/Slant commentator Thomas Friedman used to be made of money. His wife’s money, specifically, from malls. But then the malls went into bankruptcy and poor Tom Friedman must sing for his supper in tiny $75,000 increments. MORE »

READ THIS REVIEW OF THOMAS FRIEDMAN: This is brutal and necessary. Ha, but it’s from 2005. April Fools, etc. [Matt Taibbi]

“One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. … Give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.” PUT THAT AWAY. [New York Times]

On-again, off-again douchebag New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was pleasantly trenchant in his column on the “gas tax holiday” yesterday, in which he proved in eight or nine different ways why John McCain is a traitor for proposing this. A CNN anchor brought up Friedman’s column with McCain today, and McCain comically called Friedman a gay New York rich liberal pinko elitist. And then he felt bad and said he loves Thomas Friedman. What gives? We’re hearing that his campaign advisers forgot to give him his strawberry cream cheese-coated “Remembrall” this morning. MORE »

Here is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman getting pied at Brown University by some Communists. It’s tragically comical, watching him slip ‘n’ slide across the stage like some… hmm… let’s think of a good Friedmanian way to say this… slip ‘n’ slide across the stage like a rikshawallah in Bangladesh trying to navigate the cyber-global marketplace while sending “SMS” messages via Blackberry to his half-koala, half-Robocop legal associate in Java (in Outer Space). [YouTube]

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a decent book many years ago and has since made a living by promoting the Iraq War, going on sabbatical, and coming up with useless concepts like these: “the world is flat,” “a Lexus is like an olive tree, in that both are on my book cover,” and “I used my NYT corporate Amex credit card to buy a trinket from this Pakistani, which I’ll conflate into a hackneyed worldview cliche.” This modern day soothsayer spoke to some kids at Brown University last night about the environment and got pelted with green pies, which is what happens in the Global Marketplace of Ideas. MORE »

“I saw that Onion thing about Rudy running for president of 9/11, too, and once again I have been to China.” [New York Times]

And just like that, TimesSelect is gone. Everyone can read year-old Bob Herbert columns again! For free and everything! We haven’t read a Times op-ed in two years (we did have a TimesSelect subscription, but still, it was kinda annoying). Thankfully the New York Times knows exactly what the nation needs right now, and they’ve given us, on this, the first day of totally free content in so long, the trifecta of terribly annoying and increasingly irrelevant columnists: David “BoBos Drive Like This” Brooks, Maureen “All the Democrats Are Pussies Except Hillary Who is a Dyke” Dowd, and Thomas “My Dr. Phil Mustache Is Here to Reassure You That Losing That Manufacturing Job Was a Good Thing” Friedman. Ye gods put it back behind the paywall, please. Yes, we did read them all. We’ll save you the trouble: MORE »