Matt Taibbi's Relentless Hounding of Tom Friedman Continues, Thankfully
In 2005, Matt Taibbi wrote a takedown of NYT mouthbreather Tom Friedman's unique idiocy that remains the greatest thing ever written about the mustachioed private-jet-frequent-flyer. Now Taibbi has a new piece; top ten anti-'stache material.
His original story was all about The Earth is Flat, and why Tom Friedman is a rich asshole who butchers the English language and is not particularly bright. So the new piece is on, you know, pretty much the same theme, except it's about 'stache's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Sample:
And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?”Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.
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.
Ha, he sounds like us! Matt Taibbi is great and if you think you are too cool to like Matt Taibbi, you are incorrect. Suck it, 'stache. [NYPress]