A very funny review, excepting the obligatory Bush-bash which the Journalist Guild requires must be in every article, including restaurant reviews and obituaries. Friedman is certainly a fatuous, self-important windbag.
Boy does he rip Freidman. If I were Thomas, I'd kick the guys a$$ next time I saw him! He is right on, however. Freidman is one of those self important types. Even when he is on our side (he actually sided with the invasion of Iraq, for a while), he comes across as a windbag who takes himself a wee bit too seriously.
I never read freidman, so is he conservative or not? If so then is this a liberal bashing him?
He makes some valid points (where he gives examples of actual text) but you HAVE TO read everything with a filter- to understand the bias of the author.
I caught a few minutes of his discussion about his new book the other day.
It took me a while to realize he wasn't bashing creationists.
Already posted.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1388488/posts
Don't know Friedman. Don't know the author of this piece. But after reading a few paragraphs which contained f-words and self-important insults I realized this is a liberal who doesn't like this guy Friedman. His criticisms are lame. They are along the lines of, "Like duh!...f-word, f-word! Like everybody already knows the world is flat or level or whatever!"...."and like, I hope everybody notices how clever I am!"
As soon as I saw him on Hardball, I knew I had to flee the two gasbags.
Yes, indeed, an excellent review.
Marshal McLuhan once said, "The medium is the message," which is to say (among other things) that you can't divorce style from substance.
Thomas Friedman is a peculiarly deaf stylist. His has the proverbial tin ear. This article makes the point brilliantly. But his books are based on his images. Olive trees, Lexuses, steroids, Blackberries. So the deadness of his metaphors faithfully reflects the deadness of his mind and the bankruptcy of his ideology.
Much the same is true of Maureen Dowd, or Frank Rich, or Paul Krugman. The more they try to make up for the vacancy of their minds with the shrillness of their styles, the more they reveal how empty their minds really are.