AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

You think you’re playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.

You win today's Thomas Friedman award for nonsensical metaphors.

It's not competitive on the same level as "When you're in a hole, stop digging. When you're in three holes, bring a lot of shovels." But then, what is?'

Edit: I got the quote wrong.

Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn't make them up even if you were trying-and when you tried to actually picture the "illustrative" figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman's take on Bush's Iraq policy? "It's OK to throw out your steering wheel," he wrote, "as long as you remember you're driving without one." Picture that for a minute.

Or how about Friedman's analysis of America's foreign policy outlook last May: "The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels." First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you're supposed to stop digging when you're in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense?

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

Courtesy of the formerly-glorious Matt Taibbi.