Friedman is a unit..

For years he's been the most hawkish of the hawkish, who never met a war he didn't like, always claiming tobe "cenrtist." Why? "Because I'm liberal on social issues."

Except, of course, that he would never write anything at all about those liberal positions on social issues, only paranoid rants about how we need to do whatever we can, no matter what, to defend Israel, preemptively, if need be.

But now he offers us this:

"George W. Bush did the opposite. He used 9/11 as an excuse to lower taxes, to start two wars that — for the first time in our history — were not paid for by tax increases, and to create a costly new entitlement in Medicare prescription drugs. Imagine where we’d be today if on the morning of 9/12 Bush had announced (as some of us advocated) a “Patriot Tax” of $1 per gallon of gas to pay for education, infrastructure and government research, to help finance our wars and to slash our dependence on Middle East oil. Gasoline in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, averaged $1.66 a gallon.

But rather than use 9/11 to summon us to nation-building at home, Bush used it as an excuse to party — to double down on a radical tax-cutting agenda for the rich that not only did not spur rising living standards for most Americans but has now left us with a huge ball and chain around our ankle. And later, rather than asking each of us to contribute something to the war, he outsourced it to one-half of one-percent of the American people. Everyone else — y’all have fun.

We used the cold war to reach the moon and spawn new industries. We used 9/11 to create better body scanners and more T.S.A. agents. It will be remembered as one of the greatest lost opportunities of any presidency — ever."

I'm sorry, but you don't get to say that, because you were one of the folks happiest to hand the war agenda over to Bush, happy to see us invading. Hell yeah!

Suck on this, Thomas Friedman, suck on this. Your own words. You don't get to ever say "Iraq" without saying "I'm sorry I lied to the American people and acted as a jingoistic propagandist, thereby enabling the Bush administratioin to do everything I now decry ten years after the fact."