Sebastian Mallaby, the WaPo's low-rent Thomas Friedman, out-stupids himself …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 11:34 AM on January 29, 2007.

If the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby practices every day, his boot-licking hackery on the behalf of corporate America may yet rise to the level of Thom Friedman.

He has a dream, and he's working hard to realize it …

Last week brought fresh evidence of America's fallen standing in the world: The BBC polled 26,000 people in 25 countries and found that less than a third regard U.S. influence as positive.

That would be this study:

The number of those who said the US was a positive influence in the world fell in 18 nations polled in previous years.

In those countries, 29% of people said the US had a positive influence, down from 36% last year and 40% two years ago. Across the 25 countries polled, 49% of respondents said the US played a mainly negative role in the world.

When asked about US military presence in the Middle East, an average of 68% of respondents across the 25 countries answered that it "provokes more conflict than it prevents".

That's largely -- but not exclusively -- a result of the war in Iraq, a war which Mallaby championed ("Pretending that Saddam Hussein does not pose a threat is like pretending that global warming or global poverty poses no threat: It involves ignoring the evidence…The Bush administration, again to its enormous credit, is willing to engage this problem…. It is the critics who are blinkered").

Now, Mallaby's muse -- the juice that makes his columns run -- is American exceptionalism. He is the consummate Dem-leaning technocrat, deeply immersed in the Kool-aid of neo-liberalism and foreign policy hawkishness.

So, how does he reconcile his love of the American corporatocracy with a world that's soured on the product he's spent his entire career hawking? Why, he does it with this fantastically stupid premise …

But one symbol of America -- a more enduring one than President Bush, by far -- provided some more cheerful news. McDonald's reported its strongest business results in three decades, and brisk sales in supposedly anti-American countries were a large part of the reason.

Yes, supposedly "anti-American countries" are full of people who like fast, salty, fattening food on the cheap -- just like we do! Ergo, America's standing in the world is fine and dandy and never mind the nay-sayers with their stupid polls suggesting otherwise.That is cheerful news!

After a few more paragraphs of really sub-standard, trite boilerplate about the "McDonald's story" ("As America's car culture spread abroad, the hamburger followed") Mallaby comes to this:

Besieged by its critics, the company suffered its first financial loss in 2002, and for a moment its hegemony seemed fragile. But then the empire struck back. After 44 consecutive months of sales growth, McDonald's serves 6 million more customers a day than it did four years ago.

In ways both grim and inspiring, this recovery reflects American resilience. McDonald's closed down lackluster outlets, shed jobs and pulled out of three countries. […]

McDonald's has changed in … ways that reflect the problem-solving grit of American business. It has listened to its health critics and adapted: It sold 304 million pounds of mixed greens in 2005, and the U.S. operation claims to be the nation's largest purchaser of apples.

Yes, McDonald's has managed to sell several salads that are as fattening and toxic as their Big Macs.

American business succeeds in the world because it morphs, shape-shifts, learns from its mistakes; it is too paranoid, too anxious to please its customers, to stick with formulas that aren't working. The question posed by last week's BBC poll is whether American government can mimic that agility.

Yeah, Sebastian, tell it to GM.

There's a lot one might say about this column -- is Mallaby suggesting that only American businesses respond to changing markets? -- but it really doesn't merit much in the way of serious analysis. It’s like an Op-ed from The Onion.

Tagged as: iraq, economy, wing-nuts, mallaby

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.