Step one: Point out that a president that isn’t George W. Bush or of his party is doing something he otherwise would support.
Step two: There is no step two. When you’re an intellectually bankrupt pundit like Thomas Friedman, you spend most of your time trying to define yourself and the rural parts of America as “sensible” using turgid prose. The maintenance of this image requires constant focus of will, leaving very little time for thinking about motivation… or really anything at all.
Step three: Give him ample space in his column about Afghanistan to defend his support of Iraq, the war we didn’t need to get into, and has veered from boondoggle to clusterfuck, depending on the month. Do not edit out “Iraq was about ‘the war on terrorism.’ The Afghanistan invasion, for me, was about the ‘war on terrorists.’”
