Tom Friedman Continues to Dominate

The Venn diagram intersection between:

• (The set of all people who get lavishly paid to write about Big Ideas 'n Stuff),


• (The set of all people who are apparently congentially unable grasp Big Ideas 'n Stuff) and.


• (The set of all people whose writing appears to be randomly generated by a bag of mice having seizures on a keyboard.)

Gawker picks up this perpetually breaking story:

Thomas Friedman’s Thumbs Firmly Grasp the English Language

...
Today, Tom Friedman explains what you need to know about the American presidential contest:

So far, the most accurate slogan for Obama's campaign would have to be: "I'm not Mitt Romney." And when you consider that Romney - a former liberal Republican governor - has spent the whole campaign disavowing his past, for the first time in history both candidates could legitimately run on the same slogan: "I'm not Mitt Romney."

And that's our problem. Romney has embraced the Republican budget drawn up by Representative Paul Ryan that proposes to shrink our long-term structural deficit in a way that not only would make the rich richer and the poor poorer but would deprive the country of the very discretionary spending required to do what we need most: nation-building at home. Sure, Ryan makes deep spending cuts to balance the budget in the long term. If I cut off both my thumbs, I'd also lose weight. But I'd also have a hard time getting another job.

1. "Both candidates could legitimately run on the same slogan: 'I'm not Mitt Romney.' And that's our problem." Is it? Is that our problem? Because directly afterwards, and for the remainder of the column, you explain that the candidates' budget plans are our problem. Whereas here you're saying very directly that this slogan, which you made up, is our problem. The slogans that Tom Friedman makes up and puts in his widely-read newspaper column are my problem, I'll grant you, because I am jealous that someone in my own profession can make an entire career out of writing one single column over and over again, and that that column can be dumb, on top of everything else. But this is more of a personal problem for me, rather than "our" problem.
...

In my life I have seen lots of staggeringly incompetent people move almost effortlessly from one prestigious, highly-paid positions to another while lots of (often staggeringly) competent people in the same organization were fed into various reorganization/downsizing/rightsizing layoff wood chippers.

And after the fact it turned out there was always an explaination, usually involving sexually gratifying the right people, blackmail, bribery, clout or some other more genteel form of extortive or nepotistic quid pro quo.

That Mr. Friedman is talentless goiter on the neck of the American press

is a fact well beyond debate.

The only question here -- the only story here (ahem!) journalists -- is an explanation of the exact mechanism he uses to retain his sinecure at the New York Times.

And speaking of Inexplicable Wankers, Atrios is doing a countdown of the worst-of-the-worst over at his blog.

Guess who's #4?


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