Another reason to loathe and ignore Tom Friedman

[Gabi Hayes]

he's on CSPAN now, pontificating on the importance of energy issues to national security

he just said something like, "how effective would it be for the president of the US to get rid of his big, heavy limo" and use something else. I tuned out by then, cause his example was so stupid

BUT, he'd just prefaced that by saying that no member of congress has had the guts to take on this issue

I didn't hear what he'd said before, but he DID say that NAMING the issue (Green was the word he used) would be an effective way of "educating" the masses. he went on to say the word has been, heretofore, a pejorative. NOW, however, we need to attach descriptives like necessary, strategic, patriotic, etc., to it, where it had been associated with things like "vaguely French" (that's the only one I can remember, but I think he said liberal, unpatriotic--he DID use that) to describe the way it had been characterized in the past

two things.....he may have mentioned Gore, but I didn't see it. don't see how he could have avoided it, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did

the thing that he must NOT have mentioned, and which highlights just HOW out of touch he is, how IGNORANT of history he is.....is this: Carter's 1977 energy conservation program, as spelled out in his speech to the nation



http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_energy.html




I'll post the whole thing in my first reply, so it's not so long

can you imagine how different things would be today, if those stinking politicians weren't bought and sold by the oil/car companies?

EDIT: I'm seeing the responses are to Friedman, which makes sense, but would anybody care to take the Carter speech and put it by itself? I'd like to see it discussed on its own merits. that's MUCH more important than discussing that sausage-faced poseur.

[Terran1212]

1. Friedman gets too much credit

He's milton's son and he writes books about the world (one of the few americans who travels through it and writes in a major newspaper).

That's the end of what credit he deserves.

[Common Sense Party]

8. Where did you get the idea that he's Milton's son?

That's a new one on me...

[Terran1212]

9. scratch that one off too then

[Gabi Hayes]

2. I lopped off a bunch of the beginning, for the sake of brevity...but this

is going to REALLY piss you off







......We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.

If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.

But we still have another choice. We can begin to prepare right now. We can decide to act while there is time.

That is the concept of the energy policy we will present on Wednesday. Our national energy plan is based on ten fundamental principles.

*The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.

*The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

*The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.

*The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.

*The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.

*The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.

*The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.

*The eighth principle is that government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.

*The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.

*The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.

These ten principles have guided the development of the policy I would describe to you and the Congress on Wednesday.

Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals, to measure our progress toward a stable energy system.

These are the goals we set for 1985:

--Reduce the annual growth rate in our energy demand to less than two percent.

--Reduce gasoline consumption by ten percent below its current level.

--Cut in half the portion of United States oil which is imported, from a potential level of 16 million barrels to six million barrels a day.

--Establish a strategic petroleum reserve of one billion barrels, more than six months' supply.

--Increase our coal production by about two thirds to more than 1 billion tons a year.

--Insulate 90 percent of American homes and all new buildings.

--Use solar energy in more than two and one-half million houses.

We will monitor our progress toward these goals year by year. Our plan will call for stricter conservation measures if we fall behind.

I cant tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.

This plan is essential to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future.

Whether this plan truly makes a difference will be decided not here in Washington, but in every town and every factory, in every home an don every highway and every farm.

I believe this can be a positive challenge. There is something especially American in the kinds of changes we have to make. We have been proud, through our history of being efficient people.

We have been proud of our leadership in the world. Now we have a chance again to give the world a positive example.

And we have been proud of our vision of the future. We have always wanted to give our children and grandchildren a world richer in possibilities than we've had. They are the ones we must provide for now. They are the ones who will suffer most if we don't act.

I've given you some of the principles of the plan.

I am sure each of you will find something you don't like about the specifics of our proposal. It will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful -- but so is any meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher costs, and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.

But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.

The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.

We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing.

There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country.

Other generation of Americans have faced and mastered great challenges. I have faith that meeting this challenge will make our own lives even richer. If you will join me so that we can work together with patriotism and courage, we will again prove that our great nation can lead the world into an age of peace, independence and freedom.

[Gabi Hayes]

3. they love to say dems don't have a plan.... well, HERE's the plan!

have you heard ONE dem talk about this?

what the fuck are they DOING?

[Gabi Hayes]

4. backwards.....here's the ironic/poignant beginning of the speech

this part, along with the end, makes me very sad, as well, as the myriad missed opportunities just jump up and hit one in the face







Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress. Its members will be my partners and they have already given me a great deal of valuable advice. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.

The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation.

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.

I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.

The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation's independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.

The world now uses about 60 million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about 5 percent. This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.

We must look back in history to understand our energy problem. Twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.

The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood -- which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel -- to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.

The second change took place in this century, with the growing use of oil and natural gas. They were more convenient and cheaper than coal, and the supply seemed to be almost without limit. They made possible the age of automobile and airplane travel. Nearly everyone who is alive today grew up during this age and we have never known anything different.

Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.

World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s by 5 percent a year as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.

I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.

All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska's North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years' increase in our nation's energy demand.

Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can't go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.

But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.

Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.

We can continue using scarce oil and natural to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process.

If we do not act, then by 1985 we will be using 33 percent more energy than we do today.

We can't substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain. The cost will keep going up. Six years ago, we paid $3.7 billion for imported oil. Last year we spent $37 billion -- nearly ten times as much -- and this year we may spend over $45 billion.

Unless we act, we will spend more than $550 billion for imported oil by 1985 -- more than $2,500 a year for every man, woman, and child in America. Along with that money we will continue losing American jobs and becoming increasingly vulnerable to supply interruptions.

Now we have a choice. But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs. Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil -- from any country, at any acceptable price.

If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.

We will not be ready to keep our transportation system running with smaller, more efficient cars and a better network of buses, trains and public transportation.

[boobooday]

5. Never has a pundit worked so hard and so long

And ultimately said so little.

[Gabi Hayes]

7. dunno about the 'hard' part`.

he's the classic case of a pseudo intellectual who NEVER does the grinding academic work necessary to support his facile claims

see the post below, with Krugman's analysis of his smug, anecdotal (and largely incorrect) explanation for the way the world works in his solipsistic experience

[boobooday]

16. Well, I mean, he does work hard at something

Self-promotion. He endlessly promotes himself as some kind of sage, in a hard-working way. And as you point out, there is no substance to promote.

[Gabi Hayes]

17. you hit it, nailer. you're the NAILER, as our prex is the deCIDER!

now, I'm off to be the Neil Innes LIStener

Brave, brave sir Thomas.....
http://www.stmoroky.com/sirrobin/song.htm

[Gabi Hayes]

6. Friedman exposed for what he really is, by someone who actually

has STUDIED SERIOUSLY things about which he writes:




Every few years a book comes along that perfectly expresses the moment's conventional wisdom--that says pretty much what everybody else in the chattering classes is saying, but does it in a way that manages to sound fresh and profound. Notable examples are Paul Kennedy's 1989 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with its theme of "imperial overstretch", of a United States declining under the weight of its military commitments; or Lester Thurow's 1992 Head to Head, with its vision of a desperate commercial struggle among the advanced industrial nations, and of a United States unable to compete effectively because of its naive faith in free markets. It is already clear that Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree--which tells the story of the new global economy, and of a United States triumphant because it is the nation best suited to capitalize on that global economy--is the latest in the series. The question is whether Friedman's vision will date as quickly as those of his predecessors.

It's possible to summarize what Friedman has to say fairly quickly, mainly because it's what you read in just about every issue of Business Week. Information technology, he tells us, has made the world a small place, in which ideas and money can move almost instantly across borders. This smaller world richly rewards countries and societies that meet its needs--which is to say places that have strong property rights, open minds, and a flexible attitude; but it inflicts devastating punishment on those who fail to live up to global standards. Old-fashioned power politics is becoming increasingly obsolete because it conflicts with the imperatives of global capitalism. We are heading for a world that is basically democratic, because you can't keep 'em down on the farm once they have Internet access, and basically peaceful, because George Soros will pull out his money if you rattle your saber.

This story is told via hundreds of anecdotes, most of them involving the author. (Someone once defined an intellectual as a person who can utter more than two consecutive sentences that do not mention himself or anyone he knows. This definition might have been specifically crafted to exclude Friedman; as a reader-reviewer at Amazon.com--hey, the Internet really can be a democratizing force!--puts it, he "uses the first person singular the way most writers use commas.") But these anecdotes, annoying as they may be, do serve a purpose: By personalizing the story, they make it seem more convincing to readers who find analytical abstractions off-putting. Of course, as the history of global visions teaches us, what is convincing is not necessarily true. Has Friedman got it right?

A good place to start is with something that he almost certainly has wrong. If there is one single fact that transformed America's image of its place in the world, that made earlier vintage global visions look so foolish in retrospect, it is the contrast between our own unexpected prosperity and Japan's even more unexpected economic malaise. There isn't really any careful discussion of what went wrong with Japan in this book, but the clear implication of his various parables and metaphors is that Japan is in trouble because it is hidebound and inefficient, and that this makes it unfit for the global economy. Yet, as Friedman himself points out, Japan's export sector remains world-class (In fact, it's sort of bizarre that he names a symbol of Japanese manufacturing prowess, rather than some American specialty like software or entertainment, in the book's title.) What has faltered in Japan is production for the domestic market--and while this production is and always has been inefficient, the immediate problem is not inadequate supply but inadequate demand. Put in a nutshell, the Japanese simply save too much; that is, although Friedman's only reference to Keynes is a disparaging one (he's a "defining economist of the Cold War system"), Japan is in fact suffering the most classically Keynesian crisis since the 1930s.......

more

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/books/1999/9906.krugman.lexus.html

[MannyGoldstein]

10. I Like Friedman

Why don't people like Friedman?

As far as I can see, he's honest and does a great job of putting complex issues in perspective. He may not always say exactly what some people want to hear - and we can disagree with his solutions - but I'm just not seeing anything to be angry about.

[Gabi Hayes]

13. manny, my man, did you read the above post?

ronald reagan was famous for seeming to come up with simple solutions to complex problems.
that seems to jibe with what you're saying

how did that work out for the country?

it took clinton his entire presidency to dig out from 12 years of Reaganomics

too bad he was a pawn of the globalists, like Friedman. he paved the way for the runamok policies of free (not fair) trade, World Bank/IMF policies that are raping the planet and making a third world banana republic out of this country

listening to his fatuous, thirty-years-too-late pronouncements alongside Richard Lugar today made me sick to my stomach

[givemebackmycountry]

11. Check this out -

http://buffalobeast.com/91/50.htm

THE BEAST an alternative newspaper out of Buffalo ranks Friedman #7 on their list of the 50 most loathsome Americans of 2005.

Here's a taste.
Go check it out.
The BEAST is a great read.

7. Thomas Friedman

Charges: The worst of all creatures in the political opinion jungle: a cretin who thinks he’s a genius. Friedman’s intolerable knack for converting irreducibly complex geopolitical/socioeconomic situations into simplistic, tin-eared insta-clichés makes him one of the most dangerous people on the planet, arming people even stupider than him with the illusion of knowledge in the form of a crude vocabulary of badly mixed metaphors and ill-conceived flashcard images, thereby having a negative net effect on the nation’s intellect. India and China are "like a bottle of champagne" which someone has been "shaking for 40 years;" the modern economy dictates that "you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex;" and the threat of terrorism is a "bubble" that threatens to "undermine" open society. Friedman’s disorienting literary ineptitude is nearly enough to distract us from the indisputable fact that he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. For this dolt-friendly parlor trick and a slavish devotion to globalization and technology as abstract, almost mystical tenets, Friedman has achieved iconic status. Exhibits the easy smile and benevolent smugness of an unjustly celebrated man who has never thought very deeply or rigorously about anything at all.

Exhibit A:

Despite his constant exaltation of the internet as some kind of global cure-all, Friedman had to actually fly to London to discover that European newspapers were having misgivings about Guantanamo Bay.

Sentence:

Column outsourced to Bangalore, where there is some difficulty in finding a peasant ignorant and ineloquent enough to please his audience. Compelled at gunpoint to write a 500-page retraction of his recent best-seller, called No, Actually the World is Round.

[Gabi Hayes]

14. great paper! home of a real journalist: Matt Taibbi, IIRC

check it out...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1078448




ha....what a coincidence....just out:

I have been trying to avoid writing about Thomas Friedman. Two years ago, when I had a serious drug problem, one of the worst symptoms was a monomaniacal obsession with Friedman. I called his office regularly from overseas, sent him rambling two-page letters, harassed him in 100 different ways. Once, I even called the office of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and, pretending to be Friedman himself, screamed at Sulzberger’s secretary. I told her that I was pissed, that "Arthur better get his car out of my fucking parking space" and that "golf this weekend out of the fucking question." I’d be curious to know how that one panned out. The poor lady seemed to genuinely believe I was Friedman and carefully took the message. But I never bothered to investigate, as shortly thereafter I got my act together and left those memories behind.

Reading Friedman is fascinating–the same way that it’s fascinating to watch a zoo gorilla make mounds out of its own feces. The gorilla is a noble, intelligent animal that will demean itself in captivity. Friedman is a less noble animal of roughly the same intelligence, whose cage is the English language. It’s an amazing thing to behold.

The mustachioed New York Times columnist’s May 7 piece, "Needed: Iraqi Software," was the culmination of an incredible two-month stretch of steadily worsening derangement and incoherence. Friedman’s columns during this period contain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, some of the very worst and most confused metaphorical/rhetorical constructions in the history of our language. That’s in addition to being decisively wrong in all of his opinions. It is a veritable mountain range of idiocy. Some of the highlights:

"Needed: Iraqi Software," May 7. The hallmark of the Friedman method is a single metaphor, stretched to column length, that makes no objective sense at all and is layered with other metaphors that make still less sense. The result is a giant, gnarled mass of incoherent imagery. When you read Friedman, you are likely to encounter such creatures as the Wildebeest of Progress and the Nurse Shark of Reaction, which in paragraph one are galloping or swimming as expected, but by the conclusion of his argument are testing the waters of public opinion with human feet and toes, or flying (with fins and hooves at the controls) a policy glider without brakes that is powered by the steady wind of George Bush’s vision.


more

http://www.nypress.com/16/20/news&columns/cage.cfm

hey, manny! did you read the whole article? still think he's your guy? your Ronald Reagann of the new millenium?

you're welcome to him



and welcome to DU!

[dorkulon]

18. More Taibbi blasting Friedman here

It is a delight to behold!

http://www.buffalobeast.com/73/feature4.htm

http://www.buffalobeast.com/37/friedman.html


"Only an American could describe another person’s country as a car."

Love the Beast!

[Gabi Hayes]

19. ha ha ha ha.....thanks for these.....great way to start a beautiful Sunday

''But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e. two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World is Flat. I'm not shitting you, I did this at random; just flipped open to a page somewhere in the middle, which happened to be page 174, and looked at the top left-hand corner. Here, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest airlines (Friedman never, ever forgets to name the company or the brand name; he is like a fetishist this way; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic) from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.
Forget the Cinnabon; name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up, and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He literally never misses.

On an ideological level Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in mainstream America. It is a tale of a man who walks ten feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry, and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT-scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism; says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore). That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.''

[Gabi Hayes]

20. had to include this, too

In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president, and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it.

[charlie]

21. Only Friedman

can hear a hackneyed phrase in India -- "the playing field is being leveled" -- and have it stew and percolate in his subconscious for 2 whole days before suddenly upending his world... as another hackneyed phrase:

"MY GOD! HE'S TELLING ME THE WORLD IS FLAT!!"

That's a Friedman quote, BTW, recounting his wide-eyed awe at the splendor of his insight.

[Gabi Hayes]

22. yeah...Taibbi has his number. too bad the rest of the media, with

few exceptions, slobber all over that fat creep

[TomClash]

12. Funny how for years he virtually ignored the energy issue

In fact, right after the War began, on Charlie Rose, he refused to name oil/energy shortages as a reason for the Iraq War, preferring to shill for Bush by pushing "WMD, Democracy and the Dictator Saddam" as the three reasons to go to war.

What a fraud.

[Gabi Hayes]

15. why does Friedman hate democracy?

I remember reading this at DU last year

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2598

7/27/05

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has urged the U.S. government to create blacklists of condemned political speech--not only by those who advocate violence, but also by those who believe that U.S. government actions may encourage violent reprisals. The latter group, which Friedman called "just one notch less despicable than the terrorists," includes a majority of Americans, according to recent polls.

Friedman's July 22 column proposed that the State Department, in order to "shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears," create a quarterly "War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others." But Friedman said the governmental speech monitoring should go beyond those who actually advocate violence, and also include what former State Department spokesperson Jamie Rubin calls "excuse makers." Friedman wrote:


After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism," Mr. Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."