http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1492737#---------------------------------
The End of The NY Times Continues: Tommy Friedman is SHIT
I've tried to think ofother ways to say how I feel about Tommy Friedman...but SHIT covers it.
Yes, he is a neocon. Yes, he is the great pseudo-intellectual of our time. But first and foremost, he is a terrible writer. Not quite as frighteningly bad as Davey Brooks, but in his own self-centered globalized way, he is worse.
Only read this is you want to feel rage and/or nausea.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/29/opinion/29FRIE.html?pagewanted=print... Jumping Out of Sick Bay
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
TOKYO
So I come to Tokyo to get away from it all, and what do I discover but more bad news for the John Kerry campaign. Not only does the U.S. economy appear to be headed for at least a burst of recovery around election time, but so does the world's second-largest economy, Japan, which should also help buoy the U.S. recovery. It's more evidence, to me, that Mr. Kerry may have to run in the most difficult of all environments, and exactly the opposite of the one Democrats had hoped for: an environment where the U.S. economy is rebounding, and Iraq is reeling.
As I lie awake in my Tokyo hotel, jet-lagged out of my mind and having my Bill Murray "Lost in Translation" moment, I am clicking back and forth between CNBC and CNN on the television. All the news on CNBC seems to be about how Asia's economies are now on fire, and all the news on CNN seems to be about how America's Humvees in Iraq are now on fire.
Maybe that will change in the months ahead, and maybe American voters will develop a different reaction to those contrasting images, should they continue. But for the moment, judging from many polls, it seems that Mr. Bush is being rewarded for the economy's tentative recovery more than he is being punished for Iraq's troubling slide. I'm sure the Kerry camp was hoping for the opposite — a stable Iraq and a slumping economy that would start to recover only after November — because it would play much more to Mr. Kerry's strength with voters. But, for a lot of reasons, that doesn't seem to be what's happening, and the Kerry folks had better start positioning their candidate for the world we're in.