Free Republic

Abraham Maslow once suggested that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If a carbon tax isn't the only tool on Thomas Friedman's belt, it's perhaps the most prominent one. So sure enough, when Friedman, as per his New York Times column of yesterday, looks at the dual threat to the United States posed by ISIS and Putin, his solution is, you guessed it, a carbon tax, coupled with freeing up US oil exports. Joe Scarborough struggled to stay respectful, but wound up citing Zbigniew Brzezinski's response in a similar situation: "I remember a couple...

Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist, tried to do a beleaguered President Barack Obama a favor by publishing a summary of an extended interview between the two men, which was grandly entitled “Obama on the World.” Friedman tried to present the President in a positive light, by calling his weak responses “feisty.” Yet there is no denying that Obama’s rudderless foreign policy has been a disaster. The international order has rapidly deteriorated since Obama entered the Oval Office. The current situation is so perilous that so long as Obama remains President, the phrase “presidential leadership” will continue to...

“When you get farmers, dentists and folks who have never fought before going up against a ruthless opposition in Assad, the notion that they were in a position to suddenly overturn not only Assad but also ruthless, highly trained jihadists if we just sent a few arms is a fantasy.” - Barack Obama to CBS on June 22 Editor's note: Obama reiterated the statement to Tom Friedman of The New York Times in an interview published on August 9. In one sentence, U.S. President Barack Obama disregarded the thousands of soldiers who defected from the Syrian Army since the uprising...

In yesterday’s G-File, I wrote about Obama’s tendency to insist that he has done everything right. Failures are always the result of people or institutions not pulling their weight the way he does. An excerpt: At the press conference, the president made no mention of this in his prepared remarks about the Africa summit, which he read aloud with all of the passion of a DMV bureaucrat explaining the different methods of payment for a parking ticket. He then took questions. Chris Jansing of NBC asked whether the sanctions against Russia were working. With his customary logic-chopping defensiveness, the president...

The definition of a maximalist is a “person who holds extreme views and is not prepared to compromise.” Although he accuses others of being maximalist saboteurs, there is no one who holds more “extreme views,” or is less “prepared to compromise” than Barack Obama. In an interview with a supporter and defender of progressive-style overreaching government Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, in a piece entitled “Obama on the World,” self-proclaimed moderate Barack Obama talked of Iraq, Putin, and Israel. The president used the unrest in the Middle East to describe the state of American politics in the following...

(snip) “What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. We need to reform our immigration system. That would be good not just for our domestic economy but for our position in the...

President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman About Iraq, Putin and Israel ... Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, the president said, it has to start with them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking...

U.S. President Barack Obama opined in a New York Times interview that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is too popular at the moment to make territorial compromises with the Palestinian Authority. Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, Obama said that this has to start with them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard...

From Thomas Friedman's interview with President Obama published August 8, 2014: TOM FRIEDMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Are you worried about Israel's long-term survivability? I've been there for the last week watching the war. What does it feel like to you? PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it is amazing to see what Israel has become over the last several decades. I mean, you think about the dream of the early Zionists to have scratched out of rock this incredibly vibrant, incredibly successful and wealthy and powerful country is a testament to the ingenuity and the energy and vision of the Jewish people. And...

It's always interesting to see what sort of people a President wants to surround himself with. The following is a list of some of the most powerful politicians in the country. All were either nominated by President Obama and then confirmed by the United States Senate, or else were simply appointed to their positions without Senate approval.

Today's New York Times op-ed page includes a wide-ranging interview on foreign policy that Thomas Friedman conducted with President Obama. Let's break down some of the low-lights. Excerpts from interview in italics, with my comments following. And sure, when President Obama said "I don't worry about Israel's survival," he explained his insouciance in terms of Israel's military might. But was he telling a deeper truth? Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no...

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just completed a series of landmark reports that chronicle an update to the current state of consensus science on climate change. Its conclusion: On our current path, climate change could pose an irreversible, existential risk to civilization as we know it, but we can still fix it if we decide to work together. But in addition to the call for cooperation, the reports also shared an alarming new trend: Climate change is already destabilizing nations and leading to wars. That finding was highlighted in last week's premiere of Showtime's climate change docu-drama...

“New York Times” columnist Thomas Friedman took a nasty swipe at conservatives over the subject of climate change on Sunday April 6. Friedman appeared alongside Heidi Cullen of Climate Central on Sunday’s CBS This Morning and proceeded to mock conservatives who question human-caused climate change. Speaking to host Bob Schieffer, Friedman claimed that 97 percent of scientists believe in climate change and “conservatives are saying I’m going go to with the 3%. That’s not conservative, that’s Trotskyite radicalism.” [See video below.] (video at link) Friedman’s obnoxious comments came after Schieffer wondered, “In our politics now, everything breaks on these ideological...

Wow. This was warped and offensive. New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman sited a debunked study to compare global warming deniers to Trotsky Marxists – then blames the Syrian revolution on global warming, not on Bashir Assad’s brutality. Let me put this in personal terms. Your son or daughter has a disease. And you go to 100 doctors. 97 out of a hundred say, “This is a cause and this is a cure,” and three percent say, “This is a cause and this is a cure.” It’s like 97% of experts say this. 3% say that. And, conservatives...

Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bull$hit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could...

Wow! File this one under: what would have happened to a conservative who had made the same un-PC statement? On today's Morning Joe, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, discussing the way American children have fallen behind children in other countries in academic achievement, and are coddled, handed trophies for non-achievement and protected from stress, said: "stress will be not understanding the thick Chinese accent of your first boss. That will be stress." View the video after the jump.

-excerpt- Whether we were feared or loved, America was always the outsized standard by which all others were compared. -- excerpt- Well, today, to many people, we look like the definition of a drunken driver — like a lifelong mentor who has gone on a binge and is no longer predictable. And, as for defining the future, the country that showed the world how to pull together to put a man on the moon and defeat Nazism and Communism, today broadcasts a politics dominated by three phrases: “You can’t do that,” “It’s off the table” and “The president didn’t know.”

Deep Thoughts by Thomas Friedman But don’t worry, the term “admits” is a bit strong. It’s more like the weatherman who predicted there wouldn’t be a flood for a month straight clinging to an antenna on the roof of his house and trying to find reasons why he was right all along even while the sharks are circling his chimney. The standard fallback position for Tahrir’s international cheerleaders is to argue that we were expecting positive results too quickly. The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on,” Friedman says. “It’s best we now speak...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Thomas Friedman Praises Palestinian Jew MurdererPosted By David Meir-Levi On April 12, 2012 @ 12:10 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments When it comes to Thomas Friedman’s all-too-often misguided and misleading commentary on the Middle East, and especially on the Arab-Israel conflict, one must keep in mind that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  In his New York Times article of April 4 (“A Middle East Twofer”), Friedman does offer one accurate insight into the psyche of Israel’s population:  Israel can accommodate a Palestinian state on its border only when...