Thanks egregious. Good stuff.

Taibbi is a treasure!

Thanks egregious.

digg

Friedman has been such a reliable inverse-barometer that it scares me to hear that he’s chosen to embrace environmentalism and the greening of the economy.

How am I going to deal with the loss of one of the best predictive indexes I’ve ever used?

This says it all:
“Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.”

Yep – I think the word for today is “Hypocrisy” — can you say that? Betcha could. :)

Didgeridoo-d it.

Hey Prairie – thanks for putting that in the comments on STH. I started reading and just could not stop laughing. Had to share.

Taibbi might be crazy but he’s a genius.

don’t know if it was included in taibbi’s article (haven’t read it yet – i’m looking forward to it later today), but i have an additional answer to egr’s question:

So, why does it matter whether Friedman makes any sense?

because a week an a half ago, when the senate committee on energy and natural resources held a hearing to get briefed on what to do about green technology and what to do about the economy and global warming, who did boxer get to advise them? that’s right tom friedman.

It is surprising that someone who is wrong as consistently as Friedman spent the last eight years working OUTSIDE the Bush White House.

lol

OT
My favorite demagogue seems to have taken Obama’s measure.

My other question to him, should I ever meet him is this: And what, sir, are you and your family doing to reduce your own personal footprint? And is your family having to tighten their belts, put more beans and rice on the family table? Hmmm?

I’ve often enjoyed Chavez’ Bush baiting, however I don’t appreciate his comparison of Obama to past U.S. leaders who all met violent ends.

He was making the point that “they” would get Obama if Obama didn’t do what “they” wanted. So he wasn’t himself threatening Obama, but pointing out what the U.S. did to those prez who choose to be different. Given that, I agree with you that it was tasteless and that Chavez has no idea how that lands on U.S. ears, and all the baggage we have about those prez. However, that’s why Chavez is a demagogue. He doesn’t care how he is heard.

Lunch is finished. Back to my book. BBL.

Friedman also advised the ISG on what to do about Iraq

Not that they’re any great shakes but it means that Friedman’s opinion is considered “important” and he’s going to have influence way in excess of anything he deserves

which makes taibbi’s takedown helpful as well as entertaining as hell.

Ok one more quote from the article, just spot on:

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” And off he goes.

You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you don’t notice that tri-planes don’t have headlights. And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks.

And you give up. There’s so much shit flying around the book’s atmosphere that you don’t notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.

After reading that article, I would suggest that Tom Friedman conduct an analysis on the correlation of how many otherwise unemployable airheads (or perhaps glue-heads) were put in positions way beyond their merit simply by being married or born to rich elites.

Except in doing the analysis, I’m sure Tom Friedman would only screw it up by being diverted by the number of Starbucks in Monaco.

Matt Taibbi is like peerless in the way a great musician is peerless. But had it not been for Mr. Friedman’s colonic boosterism, we would be in an alternate present I’d rather never wish for. The house of cards would have come crashing down when Bush had just taken office. No? Not Bush, but Al Gore? And Vice-President Lieberman would have been the heir-apparent?

Oddly, I kind of agree with Friedman’s column in today’s NYT.

The Treasury needs to be doing its own brutal, burn-down analysis of every major bank’s balance sheet — and then acting accordingly.

Get that word “burn-down”? Compare Friedman with Gretchen Morgenson from December 14 in the NYT:

What is needed is a small army of TARP analysts — a lot of former bankers are out of work, by the way — to conduct a worst-case analysis of the banks’ assets and capital cushion. In private equity circles, this is called a “burndown analysis.”

I’d rather say I agree with Morgenson.