Taibbi on Friedman

Matt Taibbi has another good one – this time he disembowels Thomas Friedman, a guy whose position in the punditocracy I have never understood. I stopped reading Friedman back around the start of the Iraq War when Friedman would write things along the lines of “Invasion of Iraq will be a good thing if the Bush administration does ‘x'” when “x” was something the Bush administration would never, ever do.

Taibbi, among other things, goes after Friedman’s bizarre metaphors:

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.