Free Republic

The good news is that The New York Times has to dump another hundred reporters. The bad news is that Tom Friedman is still on the beat. But the paper, constantly eyeing Der Sturmer for inspiration, keeps losing readers in droves. People have begun to catch on. They’re catching on to what I’ve been saying for years, that The New York Times is the most anti-Semitic newspaper in the entire world. […] Today’s op-ed needle comes from yet another scoffer named Roger Cohen—or is this the same dunce who appears time and again? I don’t know. […] So what’s the...

The rationalizations for Obama’s failures are already beginning, and Tom Friedman employs the laziest of all strategies, tearing down a great man to make a small man look bigger. In his Sunday column in the New York Times, Friedman makes a number of highly dubious points. These days there is a lot of “if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan” talk by conservatives. I’ll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president. On the question of the domestic economy, there can be little doubt. Reagan inherited far higher unemployment and high inflation, and within a year or so had...

Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Friedman did not return from his visit to West Africa, where the worst outbreak of Ebola in history has spread to five countries and killed at least 1,500 people, with any good news. Friedman told CNN hosts on Tuesday that the Ebola outbreak in Africa is currently “completely out of control” and is now an “epidemic.” The CDC director added that “it will get worse in the future and our window of opportunity to turn it around is closing.”

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times. The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in...

Tom Friedman's latest column in The New York Times argues that employers don't care if you went to Yale: Since jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job — and, therefore, be hired. So, more employers are designing their own tests to measure applicants’ skills. And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?...

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...

I HOPE the president turns down the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (Who wants the U.S. to facilitate the dirtiest extraction of the dirtiest crude from tar sands in Canada’s far north?) But I don’t think he will. So I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350.org coalition go crazy. I’m talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change. We don’t get such an opportunity often — namely, a second-term Democratic president who is...

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a well-documented fascination with China’s authoritarian means the nation uses to run its economy and govern its people. But Friedman’s appreciation for benevolent authoritarianism is dangerous, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said Wednesday. On Dennis Miller’s radio program, Steyn gave his best effort to explain the logic behind Freidman’s theory on governance, which is predicated on a distrust on the citizenry to elect the right people. “I think it’s not so odd because Friedman succumbs nakedly to the totalitarian temptation,” Steyn said. “In other words, every so often he writes these columns and...

For decades New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel. His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel. Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer's and Stephen Walt's 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress's overwhelming support for Israel. As he put it,...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry stuck to his claim during last night’s presidential debate that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme.” The media are getting a lot of mileage out of that sound bite, and the Ponzi-scheme debate is very much alive this morning. On Thursday’s “Squawk Box” on CNBC, CME Group floor reporter Rick Santelli, known to some as the father of the tea party movement, challenged New York Times columnist and Rick Perry critic Thomas Friedman on that claim.

Grassroots Zionist group Israel Online Ambassadors has kicked off a Facebook campaign against New York Times columnist and close Barack Obama supporter Thomas Friedman, under the slogan – “Tom Friedman, Get Out of Our Lives!” This follows Prof. Phyllis Chesler's article slamming Friedman for distorting the truth about Israel and suggesting what could lead to violence and the start of another intifada against the Jewish state. In his most recent column (25.5), Friedman came up with a suggestion for the Arabs who claim parts of the Land of Israel, calling for them to march on Jerusalem. Friedman has “officially crossed...

This week, Tom Friedman more than earned his keep at The New York Times by essentially calling for the “non-violent” destruction of the Jewish State. I am not exaggerating. Wait until you read exactly what he’s written in his column: “Lessons From Tahrir Square.” First, Friedman calls for a “Tahrir Square alternative” in terms of the 'Israel-Palestine'” impasse. Tahrir Square? Did the man sleep through journalist Lara Logan’s gang rape there? Does he view such a mob as “peaceful” or “non-violent?” Does he not understand that the young Egyptian Wael Gonim has, perhaps unintentionally, paved the way for the far...

That is why I believe most Americans don’t want a plan for deficit reduction. The Tea Party’s vision is narrow and uninspired. Americans want a plan to make America great again, and at some level they know that such a plan will require a hybrid politics — one that blends elements of both party’s instincts. And they will follow a president — they would even pay more taxes and give up more services — if they think he really has a plan to make America great again, not just bring him victory in 2012 by 50.1 percent. That hybrid politics...

There are actually two Tea Party movements in America today: one you’ve read about that is not that important and one you’ve not read about that could become really important if the right politician understood how to tap into it. The Tea Party that has gotten all the attention, the amorphous, self-generated protest against the growth in government and the deficit, is what I’d actually call the “Tea Kettle movement” — because all it’s doing is letting off steam. That is not to say that the energy behind it is not authentic (it clearly is) or that it won’t be...

The hour is late, but there is still a sliver of time to pass a serious energy bill out of this Congress. To do so, though, would require President Obama to rustle up votes with a passion that he has failed to exhibit up to now, and, more importantly, it would require at least seven Republican senators to put the national interest above party and politics. Yes, I know that is all unlikely. You can laugh now. But just remember this: If we don’t get a serious energy bill out of this Congress, and Republicans retake the House and Senate,...

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is one of the regular pundits who appear Sunday morning on Meet The Press. Host David Gregory asked a fairly practical politics question and Friedman responds with a discursive look into the inner Thomas Friedman instead: MR. GREGORY:  Right.  But what you stood up to was your opponent, which is not terribly courageous given that that's what you do in politics.  What I'm asking is whether you are an Obama Democrat who supported stimulus, who supported health care, who's with him on all the major elements of his agenda. Are you or are...

TOM FRIEDMAN VIA NEW YORK TIMES : "I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years. Never mind. I’m sure like all such protest movements the Tea Partiers will get their 10 to 20 percent of the vote. But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more...

Back in September, Tom Friedman, speaking of China, proclaimed that "there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today." That prompted Jonah Goldberg to call Friedman a "liberal fascist," drawing an example from his seminal book, Liberal Fascism, to demonstrate how Friedman's fawning over the Chi-Coms "is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s." But far from being abashed, Friedman is apparently so enamored of his formulation that he has repeated it virtually verbatim. The Times columnist suffered another bad...

Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel, The Possessed, is a tale about a small town overcome by revolutionary ideas. After an intense meeting of a literary salon, a fire breaks out and one of the villagers comments, “The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings.” The historian James Billington used that phrase — “the fire in the minds of men” — to describe the incendiary ardor of Russian revolutionaries of all stripes, making it the title of his epic history of the subject. Now, in the hands of New York Times columnist Tom Fried­man, this scene could...

Perhaps President Barack Obama might have preferred New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to reserve these comments for their golf outings together, but has Friedman recognized this path toward a larger government is unsustainable? On MSNBC's March 5 "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough recounted his childhood in the early 1970s and the poor economy. He explained there was a different focus - that his family was hoping for the economy to turn around and could have cared less about the other issues of the day - Vietnam, Watergate, etc. It was all about the economy. ...more (w/video)...