This isn't exactly surprising, but still troubled me coming from the Big Dog:
Tom Friedman is our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow and figuring out a clever way to say it that sticks in your mind-like “real men raise the gas tax.”Here's partly why:
Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.Apparently Bill Clinton likes his thinkers to be entrenched in 1990s global corporate navel-gazing. Heh. No surprise there. Tom Friedman is the archetype of the lazy, first person narrative. His columns often rotate around someone Friedman had lunch with in a far off city who said something terribly obvious. He's the Mustache Spice of journalism prose. Worse still, his ideas aren't particularly new, enlightening or provocative. But, hey powerful people read him. So, uh, I guess Friedman could just tell me to suck on this.
