Flat earth, pointy head

I was reading the latest bullshit from New York Times' Bush apologist Thomas Friedman this morning, another one of those helpful advice columns where rabid right wingers tell left wingers what they're doing wrong and how they can fix it (the answer--surprise!--is progressives need to act more like conservatives.) Anyway, watching Friedman worm his way up Tony Blair's asshole put me off my breakfast, so I was pretty pleased to read this review of Friedman's latest literary endeavor. In particular I loved this dig:

On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.)

And this sums neatly encapsulates everything that is wrong with Friedman and America in general:

It's impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical approach. It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today." That it's Friedman's own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman's own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

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.

The rest of the review is, as Friedman would say, the icing on the sizzling steak. Or something like that.