A vastly overrated blowhard that happens to have been wrong about most major issue of our times.

Ah yes, little Tommy Friedman, age 7. Remember how eloquent he was about our delicate situation in the Middle East, right around about, oh, say, 2003?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFaSpca…

SUCK. ON. THIS.

I was hoping he was going to tell us that we'll see a big turn-around in Iraq in the next 6 months.

We're still waiting for that one, Thomas....

Was this piece sarcasm? I... I can't tell any more.

The only way I can stomach Friedman is if I pretend that at some point an eagle is going swoop down and tear his stupid smug face from his worthless skull.

Why does the NYT keep it's Op-Editors around for so long? He's been doing those columns since, what, 2000? Even for writers who I really like, that's absurd. There should be term limits of 4 years or something.

@4: He's always lived in a bubble of wealth with his head up his ass, crafting fake stories about cabbies and flattenings.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21856/flat…

The only silver lining to Friedman are the epic takedowns written by Taibbi.

Pretty disappointing to see the Stranger uncritically post bullet points of his talk. Let's see, a neoliberal free trade cheerleader who lives in an elite echo chamber speaking in Seattle shortly after Clinton's shocking loss? Yeah, nothing to talk about here, just take notes.

Wait, the Mustache of Understanding has not one, not two, but THREE Pulitzer Prizes?

Oh he thinks without a box! What a fucking insight! What the fuck, Stranger? I had a certain amount of confidence that none of your writers would subject readers to this overpaid shithead with a stupid mustache without a massive amount of editorial scorn.

This is what happens when you let Ansel go, I guess...

@ 9, I did a spit-take at that as well. Apparently, you get your ass kissed plenty by telling rich Baby Boomers exactly what they want to hear, even if it's factually wrong 100% of the time.

I miss Ansel now more than ever.

@11 well. Speaking as a rich boomer/cusp-of-X'er I personally can't stand The Mustache's fraudulent Golly-Gosh Just-So-Stories he pretends are "reporting."

Both he and David fucking Brooks. Neither of whom have met an obvious anecdote that they couldn't stretch into a novel of painful gibberish.

How those two failed high school social studies substitute teachers managed to turn being wrong about everything into six figure careers I'll never understand.

Not sure how old Frizzelle is, but he clearly buys this sort of Important Person tripe (after all let us not forget Frizzelle's editorial love for Neo-Con bullshit in 2003).

@9 Kind of puts the quality of that so-called gate-keeper institution in to stark question, doesn't it?

thank you commenters for giving me faith in humanity

Tom Friedman is a billionaire and a tedious old windbag. Funny how whe now talks about the wonders of the internet instead of the wonders of globalization. He and boring old moralizer David Brooks are two of the reasons I no longer subscribe to the New York Times.

And FUCK YOU Stranger for letting Ansel go. He's a better and much more necessary writer than the whole pack of you put together.

Friedman is an sick amoral finger-to-wind hack and I wouldn't be surprised if in 6 months he's backing some fucked up shit the Trump administration is doing, but maybe not, since it took even him a long time to rehabilitate himself as a "reasonable" professional white mansplain' centrist after the bigoted evilly twisted way he advocated for the Iraq war, not as justified in any way for something Iraq did or didn't do, but instead advocating for it as a way of frightening other "untouchable" Muslim states into towing the line. Here he is on Charlie Rose in March 2003:

"….there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said ‘we’ve got you’ this bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don’t care about life, we’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your hummers. And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad uhm, and basically saying ‘which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’. You don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy we’re going to just let it go, well suck on this. Okay. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan, We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth. “

@18 Maybe sometime I'll open up about how I really feel about Friedman.

@3 Friedman unit reference FTW !!

I'm so happy right now. I thought it was just me.

@13 I know this thread is pretty dead, but I thought this comment of yours really gets to the heart of the matter:

"How those two failed high school social studies substitute teachers managed to turn being wrong about everything into six figure careers I'll never understand."