A few weeks ago, I read with much pleasure all of Matt Taibbi’s pitch perfect and brilliant critiques of Thomas Friedman’s books and several of his columns.
His latest may be the best of them all:
My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.
Also, why did the New Yorker piece on Friedman neglect to mention that he married into General Growth Properties? Do they often write pure puff pieces and I’m too ignorant to know better?