Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool, cont’d

Mark Hemingway draws attention to Thomas Friedman’s latest candidate for inclusion in our “Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool” series. Let me turn the floor over to Hemingway:

Thomas Friedman, apparently trying to top his many previous attempts to convincingly demonstrate coherence is just beyond his grasp, opens his column today thusly[.]

Hemingway quotes Friedman:

The Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban Web site, following a Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign.

Hemingway comments:

Alas, Friedman has a special talent for complaining about a “competition of idiocy and ignorance” in such a way that it appears he’s the one winning the race. I’d could say more, but moments like this are Mark Steyn’s raison d’être[.]

Here Hemingway turns the floor over to Mark Steyn:

Aside from the minor detail that Marxists have been complaining about the disconnect between pro-market political parties and “global reality” since the original Marxist sat in the Reading Room of the British Library riffing on the internal contradictions of capitalism, I was struck by Mr Friedman’s sparkling way with words. I’m not a credentialed Professor of Prose Style at Columbia School of Journalism or anything, but, for the “it’s generally not a good sign”/”you know you’ve got a problem” cliche to work, doesn’t the bit before it have to be something unexpected or unwanted? “When Fidel Castro’s hailing the GOP platform as just the ticket, it’s generally not a good sign.” That sort of thing.

Instead, Friedman goes on to peddle his usual globalist soft-core erotica, none of which Castro would support and none of which his enslaved people have any access to.

Steyn concludes with an exercise in Friedmanesque logic: “Oh, well. When right-wing loons are complaining that your opening paragraph is entirely disconnected from the rest of the column, presumably Thomas L Friedman takes that as a good sign.”

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