Tag Archives: Tom Friedman

Taibbi Takes Down Friedman (Again)

Writer Matt Taibbi provides another hilarious takedown of a Tom Friedman book, this time skewering the mustachioed moron’s latest effort, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” Friedman’s hypocrisy and obtuseness are given ample space, but the best lines engage the billionaire New York Times columnist’s raging malapropisms.

 

(Taibbi summed up Friedman as follows while eviscerating his previous book, “The World Is Flat”:

[Friedman] 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 never misses.)

This time, it’s even easier for Taibbi:

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out. Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.