Exclusive: Pundit Thomas Friedman laments that the new Cold War isn’t funny enough for him, but there really isn’t anything funny about the U.S. plunging into an unnecessary nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine while Friedman and his fellow VIPs misreport what’s happening, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Sometimes I wonder if today’s crop of U.S. pundits and pols could ever rise to meet some truly urgent need of the American people, let alone the interests of the world. Everything, it seems, is done with a snigger and an attitude even as we stumble into a wholly unnecessary confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia over which batch of thieves and oligarchs gets to run Ukraine.

There’s an old joke about Washington being Hollywood for ugly people, but Washington also turns out to be Comedy Central for unfunny people. We’re left with a tedious column by The New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman lamenting that we’re having a new “Cold War without the fun that is, without James Bond, Smersh, ‘Get Smart’ Agent 86‘s shoe phone, Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging, a race to the moon or a debate between American and Soviet leaders over whose country has the best kitchen appliances.”

Yuk, yuk! So clever! But Friedman, the ever-clueless columnist, misses the fact there was another side to the best humor and satire about the Cold War. Movies, like Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), pointed to the grim absurdity of mutual assured destruction. Even some of the goofier comedies, like “Get Smart,” parodied the supposed glamour of Cold War spy-craft.

But there was really very little funny about the very real threat of annihilation of all life on the planet, nor about the vast sums of money wasted on building up super-sized nuclear arsenals, nor about the enduring influence that military contractors and their legions of apologists then had and still have on the federal budget.

In 1953, less than three months after becoming President, Dwight Eisenhower decried the diversion of so much money and talent into the pursuit of more and more deadly weapons, saying: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Then, in his farewell address in 1961, Eisenhower warned that the nation “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

We now know that both the waste and the influence survived even the Cold War’s end and they are now roaring back to life with the birth of a new Cold War. None of this, however, is funny.

Earlier this year at a New York conference on the renewed prospects for nuclear war, legendary activist Helen Caldicott had the participants watch Stanley Kramer’s 1959 movie, “On the Beach,” set in Caldicott’s native Australia. I had not seen the movie for decades and had forgotten many of the details in the tautly written drama starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.

Peck plays a disciplined but very human American submarine commander whose ship finds itself in Australia after a nuclear war has wiped out life over much of the world though the causes of the conflict remain vague throughout the movie, with the suspicion that the war might have begun as an accident involving a panicky radar man and then quickly raged out of control.

For the people in Australia, the inevitable end was coming, too, and much of the movie deals with the various characters facing not only their own mortality but that of their children and the entire human species. Despite the despairing outcome, there is a warmth and sensitivity to the film.

“On the Beach” even had a touch of genuine comedy, including a scene of drunken Australians crowding onto a favorite fishing stream for a last carousal, singing “Waltzing Matilda,” a sadly haunting song that becomes the anthem for the doomed planet.

Juvenile ‘Humor’

But the humor in “On the Beach” is not the hoo-hah juvenility that we now see in today’s mainstream yucking it up over the fun of provoking a confrontation with Russia by supporting a coup in Ukraine, followed by ethnic cleansing of ethnic Russians and then, of course, blaming everything on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

Friedman can’t resist the cheap poke-in-the-side of mentioning Putin “riding horses bare-chested,” which Friedman deems “an apt metaphor” for the new Cold War. If anyone wants to be taken “seriously” in Official Washington, you must mention Putin riding shirtless with a smirk on your face, just as you must sagely talk about the need to “reform,” i.e. slash, Social Security.

At least Friedman does acknowledge that “we fired the first shot when we expanded NATO toward the Russian border even though the Soviet Union had disappeared. Message to Moscow: You are always an enemy, no matter what system you have.”

But then Friedman veers back into Official Washington’s false narrative blaming the Ukraine crisis all on the diabolical Putin. Though there is not a shred of evidence that Putin wanted the Ukraine crisis, there is substantial evidence that U.S. officials and operatives were seeking to destabilize the Ukrainian government as a scheme to weaken Russia.

Yet, no “serious” pundit or pol can acknowledge that reality. You can’t mention how the neocon National Endowment for Democracy was funding NGOs inside Ukraine for years to create an infrastructure to implement U.S. policy preferences or that NED’s President Carl Gershman, in 2013, deemed Ukraine “the biggest prize” and a stepping stone toward regime change in Russia.

Nor can you mention that neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was overheard plotting with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt how to “midwife” the ouster of elected President Viktor Yanukovych and the installation of Nuland’s favorite — “Yats is the guy” — Arseniy Yatsenyuk. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Neocons: Masters of Chaos .”]

You also can’t mention the role of neo-Nazi militias who prepped for the coup with training in the western city of Lviv and then dispatched hundreds of militants a day into Kiev to turn the Maidan protests into a violent political clash. Nor can you reference the key role of neo-Nazi forces, such as the Azov battalion, in waging bloody attacks on ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

Sadly for the mainstream U.S. press, that unpleasant reality was implicitly confirmed when the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to bar U.S. military advisers in Ukraine from training the neo-Nazis of the Azov battalion. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine .”]

But the answer to that inconvenient admission of truth for The New York Times and other MSM outlets was to simply ignore the House vote, much as they also have blacked out Crimea’s referendum on a 96 percent vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. That gets summarized as simply a “Russian invasion.”

So, off we go again into a new Cold War that will transfer trillions of more dollars into the military-industrial complex and could push the world into a nuclear conflagration. Assuming, however, that we don’t commit nuclear suicide, there’s still the prospect for the planet’s slower death as the United States and other major nations ignore global warming in the rush for more weapon building.

There really isn’t anything very funny about any of this nor should there be despite Thomas L. Friedman’s disappointment that this latest madness isn’t amusing enough for him.