The first half of "Beirut to Jerusalem" is a good read.
But overall, yeah.

A "good" Friedman column is where, in the first half of the column, he describes, in a fairly accurate manner, a security issue or other problem. In that he is, for a liberal, unusually frank and level-headed. He gets right up to the part where a common sense (ie conservative and/or aggressive) solution is called for, and then he weasels out, and cloaks a half solution in the robes of the UN or some other kind of fuzzy multilateralism. You know he knows what really has to be done, but he's not willing to offend his liberal buddies by actually saying it. Thus, the column ends with a whimper.

Also, he had an a amazing ability to torture metaphors, similes and cliches. He is the Lindy England of turturing similes, the SPC of metaphors and the BGen Karpinsky of cliches.

Sorry - SPC Graner.

The guy who wrote the article for New York Press specializes in invective. He's the same douchepail who wrote the "Top 50 funniest things about the Pope's death" a few weeks back.

I know, and I resisted reading it because of that, but I really dislike Thomas Friedman.

Say what you will about Taibbi - irredeemable leftist, loathsome politics, nasty and mean-spirited nature; I won't disagree with any of that - but his technical writing skills are absolutely superb. Even reading his AlterNet columns is a pleasure, as much as I disagree with his opinions.

First time I've read Taibbi. I'll grant that he writes well. Certainly not boring. And maybe my real gripe is that he's not on my side, but I feel like I have to take a shower.

Now, I like a good hatchet job as much as the next guy, but I'll pass when it's all coming from 'not cool enough' corner. Really, anyone tossing round that 'middlebrow' slur is really saying Friedman's ideas are of the sort favored by the masses. 'And we know the masses aren't really the ones that matter, right darling?' (Yes, I am implying that it's unmanly too)

That arch, snide, 'high school cool girls' viewpoint shit seems everywhere nowadays. But that Oscar Wilde stuff gets tedious when everyone's trying so hard to be Oscar. Maybe Taibbi's archer, snider than most of the other gals in the clique, but i'll pass. (ahh, maybe my problems not with him, just getting out a beef I have. Still though, bugged me)

...

Yeah, I think you might've started talking about someone else somewhere towards the end of your second paragraph, Ray. "Snide" and "arch" aren't really big components of Taibbi's style - at least, I don't see it.

Really, anyone tossing round that 'middlebrow' slur is really saying Friedman's ideas are of the sort favored by the masses. '

That's not quite how I take the word "middlebrow." I take it to mean intellectual enough to fool dummies but not really intellectual at all.

Is that a knock against "the masses"? I guess in a way it is. But still... it's a useful word. There's lowbrow, there's highbrow, and there's middlebrow... I tend not to like middlebrow, because it tends to have the airs of intellectualism (or, in entertainment, of high art) without actually being so.

It's not the same thing as saying dumb, medium, or smart... Airplane! is lowbrow, but it's obviously the work of genius.

Yeah, but where does "unibrow" fit into that spectrum?

KC--"Yeah, but where does "unibrow" fit into that spectrum?"

The unibrow is a well-known element of the female wrestling circuit.

Take it from me...

I don't think Friedman's too bad. After Brooks I guess he's the only NYTimes columnist I'd go see if he were signing books at the local store.

I hope you'd go to that signing with a pie or a rotten tomato.

I'm getting sick to my stomache just thinking about him at a book signing. I have a hard enough time as it is looking at his dorky countenance next to his columns, and seeing him #2 on the NYT Bestseller list.

Speaking of Brooks, he's been a tremendous disappointment since moving to the Times. A total powder puff.

Yes, including this rather nice column from a few days back. Powder puff paradigm.

Public Hedonism and Private Restraint
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: April 17, 2005

You see the febrile young teens in their skintight spaghetti strap tank tops with their acres of exposed pelvic skin. You hear 50 Cent's ode to oral sex, "Candy Shop," throbbing from their iPods. You open the college newspapers and see the bawdy sex columns; at William and Mary last week I read a playful discussion of how to fondle testicles and find G spots.

You could get the impression that America's young people are leading lives of Caligulan hedonism. You could give credence to all those parental scare stories about oral sex parties at bar mitzvahs and junior high school dances. You could worry about hookups, friends with benefits, and the rampant spread of casual, transactional sexuality.

But it turns out you'd be wrong.

The fact is, sex is more explicit everywhere - on "Desperate Housewives," on booty-quaking music videos, on the Internet - except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious.

Teenage pregnancy rates have declined by about a third over the past 15 years. Teenage birth and abortion rates have dropped just as much.

Young people are waiting longer to have sex. The percentage of 15-year-olds who have had sex has dropped significantly. Among 13-year-olds, the percentage has dropped even more.

They are also having fewer partners. The number of high schoolers who even report having four or more sexual partners during their lives has declined by about a quarter. Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990.

Reports of an epidemic of teenage oral sex are also greatly exaggerated. There's very little evidence to suggest it is really happening. Meanwhile, teenagers' own attitudes about sex are turning more conservative. There's been a distinct rise in the number of teenagers who think casual sex is wrong. There's been an increase in the share of kids who think teenagers should wait until adulthood before getting skin to skin.

When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don't want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he's really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.

In other words, American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.

The first lesson in all this is we shouldn't overestimate the importance of the media. People like 50 Cent may produce hit after pornographic hit, but that doesn't mean his fans want to lead the lives he raps about. It's make-believe.

What matters is reality. The reality is that we have a generation of kids who have seen the ravages of divorce, who are more likely to respect and listen to their parents and their ministers, who are worried about sexually transmitted diseases and who don't want to mess up their careers.

Second, it's becoming clear that we are seeing the denouement of one of the longest and increasingly boring plays on Broadway, the culture war.

Since the 1830's, we've witnessed the same struggle. One camp poses as the party of responsibility, lamenting the decadence of culture and the loss of traditional morality. The other side poses as the army of liberation, lamenting Puritanism, repression and the menace of the religious right.

No doubt some people will continue these stale kabuki battles on into their graves: the 50's against the 60's, the same trumped-up outrage, the same self-congratulatory righteousness, the same fund-raising-friendly arguments again and again.

But today's young people appear not to have taken a side in this war; they've just left it behind. For them, the personal is not political. Sex isn't a battleground in a clash of moralities.

They seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right. You may not like the growing influence of religion in public life, but the lives of young people have improved. You may not like the growing acceptance of homosexuality, but as it has happened heterosexual families have grown healthier.

Just lie back and enjoy the optimism.

KCTrio: That's Brooks in full bobo mode. I don't care about that shit. I was refering to his Friemanesque case of the wishy washies on foreign policy matters. He had more backbone at the Weekly Standard. I recall he actually made the case for removing Saddam in unequivocal terms; but then, at the Times, he suddenly developed his own case of "heart-ache" because it turned out wars were conducted by human beings and not all-knowing, all-seeing moral supermen.

OK, Blain, I get your drift. I still think the above is vacuous. Check out that last paragraph and tell me if he doesn't sound like a fool. I don't care whether you agree or disagree with him on the column, it's a rather lame ending.

Let me dig a little bit deeper and find an example of what you speak. You must understand, my local rag doesn't carry every column of his, and I don't go fishing around the NY Times on a daily or weekly basis to devour his latest brilliance.

Sorry, can't grab the fucker's puff pieces on foreign policy that look similar to mustache-brandishing, worldly-wise, middle-brow cocksucker. The NY Times locks you out of his older columns unless you pay a fee. And I refuse to go into my lexis-nexis account to fish around for something I don't want to read to begin with.

Maybe a few beers, and I'll change my mind on the matter.

You can access Friedman's old columns free of charge at the International Herald Tribune website. Might take you a while to find what you're looking for, but they're all there.

Not sure about Brooks, though.

Thanks, Allah.

I've had my first brew, and one more ought to get me motivated to go onto lexis/nexis to find the Brooks-like-Friedman columns.

I don't know. I don't think Brooks and Friedman are meant to be insiteful or interesting to people who live in the modern world. I think they're there to bring the lefties out of the dark ages. Imagine reading Brooks or Friedman if you were a Robert Redford or Chris Matthews. It's just close enough to what you already believe that you can understand it, but different enough that it moves you along. Read Steyn and Hanson if you want to see the future, read Brooks and Friedman if you want to see the education of a liberal in action. You guys just aren't the audience. Lexus and the Olive Tree is way behind the curve if your Milton Friedman or Hernando de Soto, but it's just right if you're a recovering Keynesian.

Megan: Yeah, you're right. I think I still had something spoiling inside me leftover from an earlier screed on the contemptible Wonkette/Denton empire ethos, and was looking for a patsy to fight.

Ace: Think you're right too. 'Middlebrow' primarily, to me too, means something - art, whatnot- that self satisfiedly pretends to something greater. Intellectually, whatever. But it also, to me, more and more, carries a nasty, class systemish connotation of being 'of the masses' and therefore downclass. The old, if it's liked by too many, that, in and of itself, shows it can't be really good. It seems I see this sense used more and more by the loathesome intellectual elite and their black-clad shocktroops, the hipster SS, both jealously guarding access to their fickle ranks based on brand choices and whether you dig the right bands. That nowadays you don't just have bad taste, you have a less worthy soul somehow. (Ok, now I'm drifting off into another tangential screed of mine, but you see where I was going with that thing...)

Funny you should bring up Mr. Matthews' name, Appologist. The first thing I found on L/N was a transcript of an NBC discussion (from Sunday, April 17, 2005) among Matthews, Ms. Norah O'Donn-ell (WH Correspondent with NBC), Michael Duffy of Time Magazine and Mr. Brooks.

The discussion is all over the map, and Matthews is his typical self, but Brooks is alone in a sea of fools. This is not a good find when my goal was to find Brooks-is-lightweight examples. Read the last coment from Matthews; it's priceless numbnuts.

Here's a choice few words from the discussion:

MATTHEWS: Assuming everything he says is wrong, Mike, let me ask you, Mike, about this question of the Third World because almost half the Catholics in the world are from Latin America. It means they don't go to church, they're down there. Is it time for the church to just say, `Look, we're going to try to embrace Latin America, to become part of it,' or do the thing like we do in this country like naming John Bolton to the UN thing: `Forget about it. We're the one--we're the country that matters.'

Mr. DUFFY: Well, we're going to find out next week, pretty quick. I don't think you can put sort of, you know, PR imperatives on a church. I think they would--if they actually beatified Jope Pohn--Jo--the last pope, they probably recognize they've got a, you know, a good box office hit here. But that does not mean that they're going to actually go the next round and pick a pope particularly from that place that has the most--the largest number of Catholics, you know, or the newest number of Catholics.

Ms. O'DONN-ELL: Geography.

Mr. DUFFY: They're very European-centered still...

MATTHEWS: You believe Old Europe?

Ms. O'DONN-ELL: Geography...

Mr. DUFFY: ...and I do, yeah.

Ms. O'DONN-ELL: ...is not important. It is the man and his faith and his ability to lead the church. No one thought that a pope from Poland could grow the church in Latin America the way that he did over the past 30 years. It's still dependent on the man. And his ethnicity and geography...

Mr. BROOKS: And friends.

Ms. O'DONN-ELL: ...while very important...

Mr. BROOKS: And his friends.

Ms. O'DONN-ELL: ...is still not as important as the politician that even Pope John Paul was. He was a quote/unquote, "world leader" that he became.

Ms. BUMILLER: That's what--you know, that's what our religious writers have reported--Laurie Goodstein--that they're looking for a great communicator. It sounds like Ronald Reagan, but--but that seems to be the--the one consensus that I--that I've learned.

Mr. DUFFY: And it was remarkable that they picked a Pol 25 years ago.

Mr. BROOKS: And it's not politics.

MATTHEWS: I stand corrected. It's not about politics.

Mr. BROOKS: It's theology.

MATTHEWS: OK. I stand corrected. It's not about politics, therefore I know nothing about it.

I'll be right back with the best scoops on television: Tell me something I don't know. Stick with us.

KC, the whole thing is lame. Really lame. Especially the ending, which chides the reader who would deny the public virtues of buggery.

But none of it really bothers me because I don't hear anything like conviction in it. He's just writing to meet a deadline. I don't fault him for that because even good writers do it on occasion.

What Brooks has become is a moral powder puff. I simply can't believe that he didn't understand how bungled the war would be when he came out in favor of it. War is bungling almost by definition. The trick is to bungle less than the enemy, and so far, by any standard, we've done that.

Unfortunately, this isn't enough to cover Brooks' ass at the Times. Hence the hemming and hawing.

He keeps himself safe by delivering something for everyone in his assessments. In the end this aids only those who are served by public uncertainty -- the cowards and the ruthless. (A point I've been trying to articulate half as well for some time.) But it also flatters the vanity of those who mistake their ambivalence for sophistication. Friedman's final pre-war piece today is a classic of smug gutlessness.

Great post! Tried as I might I could not stand to wade through all of Friedman's dissembling and maddening gutlessness. Like all Liberals, he manages to trip over his own mental dick in trying to be so "analytical" in thinking he is exploring the subtleties and complexities of every nuiance, "after all there are always many sides to every story" and Liberals will always find a way to paralize themselves and everyone else if we let them. Trying to fixate upon each leaf of every tree and the veins in every one of them and celebrating their diversity, they manage to ignore that there is a fucking forest fire headed straight for them! There are times when we no longer have the luxury of indulging in the paralysis of analysis and someone must cut the Gordian Knot and actually DO SOMETHING!

Friedman is a confused and silly man. He is precisely like Molotov, who as Stalin's chief diplomat in dealing with the Nazi's as they invaded the Soviet Union came up with what he thought was a subtle, clever (and no doublt "complex") way of dealing with the ongoing Nazi push: no war, and no peace, they refused to fight but they refused to give in! Surely this would confuse and stop the enemy and leave him in the embarassming position of not having a war but not having peace. This bit of brilliance doubltless left the Nazi's rolling on the floor with laughter at what a Titantic Asshole Molotove was, for as Paul Johnson wrote: "the Germans were not at a loss as what to do, they simply resumed fighting and moved deeper into Soviet territory until the Russians made even greater concessions."

Friedman deserves to be given the Molotov Award:

Asshole of the Highest Rank.

Holy shit. Look at the transcript that I posted from Chris Matthews from April 17th and compare it to that contained in the thread entitled "Chris Matthews, Fair and Balanced."

What a fucking dickhead.

Again, look at the smart ass fucker comment Matthews made right before the commercial break:

MATTHEWS: OK. I stand corrected. It's not about politics, therefore I know nothing about it.

This guy really is an asshole. That thread should have been entitled "Chris Matthews, Complete Cocksucker."

Matt Taibbi is great. Loved his and Mark Ames's work at exile.ru. Very smart, cool, funny guys who are terribly mean-spirited.

Too bad Freidman won't challenge Taibbi to a duel. I can think of all kinds of ways that could work out great.

The architect of the "No War, No Peace" strategy was Trotsky in the First World War. The Soviets walked out of the peace talks with the Germans in the winter of 1917-18. The Germans then resumed their advance in Russia and Ukraine. Trotsky then sheepishly came back to the table and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.