Skip to main content

Tom Friedman: STFU already

I'm sick of his windbaggery. Friedman's on The Today Show this morning, literally pontificating about the U.S. and its "addiction to oil"[TM] and the Middle East. Host Matt Lauer lets him go on and on, rambling, rambling, lets him exhaust his hot air without forcing him to make concrete points about oil and democracy and the U.S. role in Middle East politics.

Gah. This *sshole apparently has no clue about his responsibility in relation to the current mess in the Middle East. It's idiots like him who were rah-rah about the Iraq War that encouraged this situation, and now he's making a buck off people who think he still has something relevant and prescient to say.

Just like his book, The World is Flat -- jeepers, wow, globalization! -- Friedman acts as if he discovered this concept. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to trademark that term before the White House gets to it. I can only figure that companies like NBC's corporate owner, General Electric, must be ready to cash in on the green movement and will now spend the bandwidth on promoting the same through useful tools like Friedman. Worse, Friedman onlhy belabors points he made in a previous book on globalization. I think we get the point now, okay? I only have to drive my Japanese-Mexican-American vehicle fueled with Venezuelan gasoline to the grocery store's produce department to buy Chilean grapes and New Zealand apples to get it.

What really frosts my chaps, above and beyond the annoyance of Friedman's general uselessness, is that the man who was truly prescient about the state of energy today and the politics that surround it gets little to no love. He wrote a book on the subject as a Senator, before he became Vice President, discussing our need to free ourselves from oil for the sake our environmental and national security. Forteen years ahead of windbag Friedman, forteen years ahead of the man currently occupying the White House, Al Gore was all over it, calling for a "global Marshall Plan" to head off the ravages to our environment and related political fallout.

This country elected the wrong guy after Bush I.

Don't even bring up the election of 2000.

Do yourself a favor and find a copy of Gore's book -- skip Friedman's hot air.

Comments

Rob said…
And even before Gore, there was a much-maligned prophet in the wind named Jimmy Carter. A quarter century blown, and so little done. Sobering, to say the least.
Rayne Today said…
Both Democrats, and from back-to-back generations, yes? Both Southern Dems.

Seems like there's a meme there we should be using.

Popular posts from this blog

Tinkering in progress

Nuts. I tried to post a rather long piece yesterday, attempting to create an expandable post so that only a lead-in appears on the main blog and the body is expanded only on selection of a link. I'm tripping over the auto-formatting that Blogger inserts into posts; it insists on embedding a begin-font tag all over the place, but no closing font tag. It's driving me nuts! I guess I'll have to try using a post template so that the text on all posts is the same unless indicated otherwise, to try and override the default fonting. Bear with me; you might see what looks like an old post appear between here and the previous post. But enough about me -- how are you?

Veep in deep

The Veep "accidentally" shoots a fellow hunter. From here on there is absolutely nothing good about this story. It stinks like curdled milk and three-day-old fish on a summer's day in Dallas. How do we even begin to count the ways in which this reeks? The 22-hour gap: WTF? There's absolutely no excuse for this, we can all agree on this point. But why? Was a key person in this story under the influence of a substance that would take a day to clear? Were they trying to get their stories straight? Heck, could they not come up with a story? Or was the victim not in the clear for that long? The "group" of hunters: Why did it take even longer than the 22-hour gap to identify the third hunter? Why is the media repeatedly using the word "group" to describe two people (Dick Cheney and Pamela Willemore)? The composition of the party: A divorcee ranch owner. An older man who does not appear to be married at this time. A woman sans spouse....

In a bit of a pickle

As I came down the stairs I heard somebody moaning in the general vicinity of the kitchen. Unnhh. Mmmfff. Unh-huh. Mmm-mmm-mmm-unh. What the hell is going on, I wondered? Standing over the kitchen island, eyes closed, murmuring to himself is my spouse. With a half-eaten jar of pickles in his hand. "Oh my God, these are so good." "Good," he said, as if I didn't hear him the first time through the mouthful of pickles. "My mom would have loved these, these are soooo good. What are they?" Just bread and butter pickles. Pickles and peppers from our garden, and some big sweet onions from the farmers' market, with some extra garlic. That was a week ago. He's eaten another jar since then. I don't think I've made enough to make it through the winter, at this rate of consumption. Try them yourself, they're easy to make. But you'd better do it soon if you live in northern climes as hard frosts will take out the rest of the pickle crop over...