Glenn Greenwald acknowledges that Thomas Friedman has value: If we listen to Friedman we will understand the way neocons think. We will understand their rage and we will understand how their rage tempts them to lash out indiscriminately. Here are Greenwald’s words:
If I had to pick just a single fact that most powerfully reflects the nature of America’s political and media class in order to explain the cause of the nation’s imperial decline, it would be that, in those classes, Tom Friedman is the country’s most influential and most decorated “foreign policy expert.”
Here is the mind of a neocon in action (from a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose):
Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/no-kidding-the-most-incoherent-tom-friedman-column-ever-20120725
Holy moly. That guy is serious. At first I thought he might be making a point about appeasement. But he uses mixed metaphor after mixed metaphor and in the end you see that it’s just about pure ego, the adrenaline hit of kicking ass. The words are just rationalization. And then comes the scariest part “It could have been Saudi Arabia, it could have been Pakistan, but we chose Iraq because we could.” WTF is that???
However, after first objecting to his use of the economic term “bubble,” I think it is not all that bad a metaphor for a general systems process.
Jay: Friedman is fuming with frustration, making over-generalizations that amount to racism. the essence is: We need to go over there and kick someone‘s ass. Notice that he doesn’t care whether we are retaliating against someone who was the original perpetrator or someone entirely innocent. Apparently, all people “over there” are the same. We’ve got to teach “those people” a lesson.
As you may know, I don’t have a TV. I access the internet probably way too much, but I have huge holes in my cultural knowledge. I had no idea who this was, and it saddens me that someone with this kind of simple hate has a regular column in the NYT.
Jay: You can thank Friedman and his colleague Judith Miller for making it so easy for the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses. Check out their Wikipedia entries for details. The rhetoric and dishonesty of both of these writers has been reprehensible. Their words killed and maimed human beings by enabling the Bush Neocons.