Tom Friedman Is a Bad Writer Too

One of my least favorite columnists these days is Tom Friedman. He's been an apologist for the Iraq war from the beginning, from his so-called liberal perspective. Please, please, Tom, leave the Great Left Wing Conspiracy! We don't need you! I still read him more often than not, but reading him is like watching a victim of spousal abuse maintain faith in their abuser. Every column he writes now has the same structure--the Bush administration has screwed everything up, and lied about everything, but I know, in my heart of hearts, what they are really aiming for, and I forgive them for everything, especially if they will listen to me this one last time.

Then follows another Bush outrage, and Friedman writes the exact same column.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I read From Beirut to Jerusalem, and I have to admit I found it interesting, especially when he wrote about Israel, but even then, I found him to be glib and facile on a lot of things, and since the war, he has gotten worse.

He has a new book out: The World Is Flat.

Here's a few paragraphs from a review by Matt Taibbi in New York Press (thanks Atrios):

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He 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.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

*****

Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world is flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen to argue that the moon was made of cheese.

More.