When The Only Tool You Have

is a multi-billion dollar real estate empire (Caution: Huffington link)

...
As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

...Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he's married into such a giant fortune, it's probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that's more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he's coming from.

Mind you, I don't think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman's not everyone. He's not just "doing pretty well" and is not just any old columnist. He's not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire - he's member of one of the wealthiest families in the world...

...I suppose every problem looks like a bad sub-prime mortgage (From the Mustache of Understanding):

Barack Kissinger Obama
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 25, 2011

...
In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama handled his role exceedingly well.

No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
...

A bad sub-prime mortgage that everyone who graduated Villager Courtesy Class will now obligingly forget that you, Tom Friedman, were leveraged into up to your fucking Pornstache.


And which you, Tom Friedman, remained leveraged into up to your fucking Pornstache while calling for shoveling ever more blood and treasure -- other people's blood and other people's treasure -- into the maw of Operation Clusterfuck for one, agonizing Friedman Unit after another...

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006.

A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future. The Huffington Post cited it as the "Best New Phrase" of 2006.

The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated use[10] of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times, in which he stated: "The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."

...long after it was perfectly clear to the rest of the sentient Universe that you and your Neocon cuddle buddies never had the slightest fucking clue what you were talking about, and were just making shit up to postpone your day of reckoning; that day that managing editors and producers began either throwing you ass-over-Pornstache out the door for daring to show your face in an American news outlet ever again, or at a minimum insisted that every time you tried to sneak a sentence like this

"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations."

into an American news outlet, you be required to change it to

"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney and I, Thomas L. Friedman, thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations."

followed by a solid , three-column wall of 75 point, Railroad font "I am so fucking sorry"'s before permitting it to be published or aired under their masthead.

Well, you needn't have worried, Tom: your day of reckoning never came and will never come.

You are rich beyond the dreams of Avarice and in the Mainstream Media, that is all that matters.

Like Jethro Bodine being indulged his every whim and crackpot fantasy

-- from playing at guru to "double naught spy" -- because of his uncle's fabulous wealth, no matter how many times you publicly and spectacularly trip over your own dick, your media pals will continue to invite you back onto their teevee shows and into the pages of their publications forever.

Continue allowing you to ramble on like a four-year-old on acid while you pimp your latest heaving mound of terrible prose to clueless American CEOs, who -- because you are rich and will continue to appear on your pals' teevee shows forever -- will continue to look to you to explain to them in keening bursts of lobotomizingly-bad metaphors that Technology is Good, Innovation is Important, Centrism is Awesome and a laundry list of other things are either as completely ass-end-up wrong as your "Suck On This" foreign policy, or were obvious to everyone else 20 years ago.

(Mr. Friedman might have had more to say after those two paragraphs, but after allowing them into my head, my optic nerves went on a wildcat strike and refused admittance to any more of The Stupid. My vision slid harmlessly down the rest to the page like olive oil down a glass mountain...

...until it slammed into Mr. Friedman's final, fetid sentence:

"So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president — not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we’ve done more nation-building at home.

At which point I staggered -- stiff-legged, glassy-eyed and stone-tongued -- away from the computer, mourned silently that such a gargantuan pit of bromide assfoam as Tom Friedman was allowed anywhere near the language of Shakespeare, and did not regain the power of speech until I had rinsed out my head with some Raymond Carver.)