Thomas Friedman

[[File:Thomas Friedman 2005 (4).jpg|thumb|right|165px|I mustache you all to remain calm.]]{{pundits}}{{bronze}}
{{hatnote|Not to be confused with [[Milton Friedman]].}}

{{cquote| Respectfully, why don’t you shut the fuck up? . . . . You know what, Thomas Friedman? You are bad at writing and nobody likes you. |||Noho Hank.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAH-SQ_wgbg]</ref>}}

'''Thomas "Moustache of Understanding"<ref>[http://voidmanufacturing.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/moustache1.jpg Moustache of Understanding]</ref> Friedman''' {{lived|1953}} is an author and [[journalist]] at the ''[[New York Times]]''. He's won the Pulitzer Prize three times: In 1983 for his coverage of [[Lebanon]], 1988 for his coverage of [[Israel]], and 2002 for his commentary on the [[War on Terror]] and its effect on the global political climate. 

Friedman's columns are probably the definition of "your mileage may vary." On the plus side, he covers a lot of foreign and international affairs, something sorely lacking in much of the [[US]] media. He travels extensively and does a good amount of in-depth first-hand reporting. On the flip side, you'll also get a lot of limp, tepid, "Washington consensus"-type commentary (often bundled with anilingus toward the powerful) repackaged as something deep and insightful. That's exactly the type he is — Friedman is touted as "the guy all the [[politician]]s and [[Beltway]] insiders read." That in itself makes him worth reading, right or wrong, though, as a barometer on just ''what'' the "Washington consensus" is.

Friedman has a bachelor's degree in Mediterranean Studies and a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies.<ref>[http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/official-bio/ Thomas L. Friedman Official Biography]</ref> He's been falsely claimed by others including by [[Snopes]] to be an economist,<ref name=kargill>[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-countries-war/ Have Two McDonald’s-Containing Countries Ever Been at War with Each Other?] by Alex Kasprak (6 December 2018) ''Snopes''.</ref><ref>[https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/IPE/Golden_Arches_Theory_of_Conflict_Prevention Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention] (23:45, 16 November 2010‎) Middlebury Mediawiki.</ref> perhaps because of his [[McDonald's]] Theory of Conflict Prevention (a.k.a., "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention") or because he taught a single class in economics.

==Iraq==
Friedman is now infamous for his incessant cheerleading for the [[Iraq War]] and repeatedly failing to predict when the [[Mission accomplished|mission would actually be accomplished]]. This got to the point where the term "Friedman Unit" briefly entered the political lexicon as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "six months" (the length of time that Friedman expected the war to take). Interestingly, he skipped right past the trumped-up [[WMD]] charges [[George Bush|Dubya]] made up and supported the war for the purposes of regime change. Guess he was ahead of the curve on that one!

{{cquote|The right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam's regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report's prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.<ref>[http://www.slate.com/id/2093620/entry/2093763/ Four Reasons to Invade Iraq]</ref>}}

This is somewhat contradicted by an earlier column. During the [[Gulf War]], Friedman keened that "the best of all worlds" would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" that would rule Iraq pretty much the same way he did, but with the approval of [[Turkey]] and [[Puppet_state#Puppet_states|their masters in Washington.]]  But for the time being, the Ba'ath party were too entrenched, so the U.S. would have to settle for second-best—namely, leave Saddam in power, so he could continue to rule Iraq with "an iron fist".<ref>Friedman, [http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/07/weekinreview/the-world-a-rising-sense-that-iraq-s-hussein-must-go.html "The World; A Rising Sense That Iraq's Hussein Must Go"], ''[[New York Times]]''. July 7, 1991. Retrieved on 2008-01-13.</ref> (He likes that phrase.<ref>''[https://books.google.com/books?id=lMVSRj_hYm0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA443&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false The Lexus and the Olive Tree]'', (1999), pp. 443-444. '''Friedman''': "The [[Invisible hand|hidden market]] will never work without a hidden fist."</ref>)

===Suck on this!===
About a month after the [[9/11]] attacks, Friedman expressed his confidence in [[Donald Rumsfeld]] and what he perceived as a revival of [[Vietnam]]'s "[[Henry Kissinger#Madman Theory|madman theory]]".<ref group=note>Norman Soloman, [http://fair.org/media-beat-column/how-the-news-media-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-rumsfeld/ "How the Media Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Rumsfeld"], Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. ("He’s just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us, and I’m glad we got some guy on our bench that our quarterback — who’s just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never know what that guy’s going to do, [[Asshole|and I say that’s my guy.]]")</ref> In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2003, Friedman was asked if it was worth it, considering how out of reach peace within Iraq seemed. Friedman responded with a lecture on US society and claimed that there was a "moral bubble" in the United States in the 1990's which involved Americans being "okay" with [[terrorism]] (because [[Al Qaeda]] was ''definitely'' in Iraq). His gibbering tirade ended with:

{{cquote|What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we don't care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? '''Well, suck on this'''! That, Charlie, was what this war was about. [[Gunboat diplomacy|We could've hit]] [[Saudi Arabia]] — it was part of that bubble. Could've hit [[Pakistan]]. We hit Iraq because we care. That's the real truth.<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFaSpca_3Q Thomas Friedman sums up the Iraq war... (5/29/2003)], ''YouTube''</ref><ref group=note>If Friedman had any hand in foreign policy decisions, it's arguable that the [[Middle East]] wouldn't be so splintered anymore. (That's ''not'' a good thing.)</ref>}}

It is not clear to the collective brainpower of [[RationalWiki]] what average Iraqis had to do with the moral failings of Americans nor how bombing (or [[Abu Ghraib|torturing]]) them is showing that we care, but, admittedly, we are simple creatures who cannot comprehend Friedman's wise but mysterious ways.

==Globalization==
Friedman has become the high priest of [[globalization]] apologetics over the past twenty years or so. He rarely seems to find any flaws with the [[free trade]] agreements he speaks in favor of. A salient quote on his stance on trade policy:

{{cquote|We got this [[free market]], and I admit, I was speaking out in [[Minnesota]] — my hometown, in fact — and guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.'<ref>[http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2984 How I Was Wrong About Thomas Friedman]</ref>}}

On his book ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization'', Friedman argued that the post-[[Cold War]] World was struggling to find a balance between seeking prosperity and development, which he symbolized with the Japanese car Lexus, and the desire to retain [[conservatism|some traditions]], symbolized by the olive tree.<ref>{{wpa|The Lexus and the Olive Tree}}</ref> In this book, Friedman developed the "{{wpl|Golden Arches}} theory", the idea that that both countries that have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other. [[irony|A few days]] after the book was published, [[Yugoslav Wars|NATO bombed Yugoslav]].{{efn|Although, as we'll see later, the theory was arguably already outdated before it.}}

==Support For Authoritarians==
Going through Friendman's archives, one of the most startling things about him is how often he praises the authoritarians of the world. Among the highlights:
*Friedman wrote an article praising the one-party autocracy of China.<ref>https://www.businessinsider.com/why-thomas-friedman-wants-china-style-authoritarianism-in-the-us-2009-9</ref>
*He wrote a column praising Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Price of Saudi Arabia, which many compared to state media due to how propagandic it was.<ref>https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/30/mehdi_hasan_rips_thomas_friedmans_nauseating</ref>
*He said Americans need to "keep rootin' for Putin."<ref>https://web.archive.org/web/20120203133309/https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/23/opinion/russia-s-last-line.html</ref>

==His books==

=== ''The World is Flat'' ===
Friedman should only be ingested in column-sized doses; levels of Friedman beyond that are potentially fatal. His books tend to be a melange of the latest buzzwords, orgasms over the newest office tech toys, and a whole bunch of metaphors and similes that pile up to incredibly asinine heights of [[Literature|literary]] incompetence. Should you somehow feel the need to read a Friedman book, make sure it comes with a translation device. A peek at a few of his "insights" from ''The World is Flat'':

{{cquote|As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: 'The playing field is being leveled.' What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!}}

Later on:
{{cquote|And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid<ref group="note">[http://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=ubersteroid&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=djAtUrqQIMXMrQGR-IDgDA This is what you get when you Google "ubersteroid."]  Sorry.</ref> that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.}}

[[George Carlin]] never knew it, but he actually [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6J3OD4Z0UQ composed a poem summarizing] a Friedman book.

[[Matt Taibbi]]'s review offers the definitive takedown of Friedman's longer-form writing:
{{cquote|Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s ... On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model BlackBerry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in [[Kansas]] anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.<ref>[http://rolocroz.com/junk/friedman.html Flathead] by Matt Taibbi</ref><ref group=note>Or: "Friedman treats globalization in the way that a 9-year-old treats Michael Bay movies."</ref>}}

=== ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree'' ===
{{hatnote|{{wpa|Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention#Golden Arches theory}}}}

While his 1999 book ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree'' popularized the concept, Friedman first proposed his Golden Arches theory of conflict in 1996, stating:
{{cquote|No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's. The McDonald's folks confirmed it for me. I feared the exception would be the Falklands war, but [[Argentina]] didn't get its first McDonald's until 1986, four years after that war with Britain.|||Friedman<ref>[http://archive.is/ferS1#selection-2055.0-2055.190 Foreign Affairs Big Mac I] by Thomas L. Friedman (Dec. 8, 1996) 'The New York Times'' (archived from 7 Dec 2016 13:05:48 UTC).</ref>}}

The claim was already false back then if one accepts the 1989 {{wpl|United States invasion of Panama}} as a war.<ref name=kargill/> Besides that, it has also been, unsurprisingly, contradicted on:

* 1999: {{wpl|Kargil War}} {{--}} India and Pakistan
* 2006: Lebanon and Israel
* 2008: {{wpl|2008_South_Ossetia_war|South Ossetia war}} {{--}} Russia and Georgia
* 2014: {{wpl|Crimean crisis}} {{--}} Russia and Ukraine<ref name=slate>http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/04/04/mcdonald_s_pulls_out_of_crimea_will_tom_friedman_be_retroactively_proven.html</ref>
* 2022: {{wpl|2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine|Russian invasion of Ukraine}} {{--}} Russia and Ukraine, again...

However, the argument that the 
observation
 theory was pushing wasn't so crazy:
{{cquote|Friedman was making a basically legitimate point about economic integration decreasing the likelihood of armed conflict between countries, but unfortunately the theory itself was disproved shortly after the book’s publication when NATO started bombing Yugoslavia.|||Joshua Keating<ref name=slate/>}}

A year later, the book received a revised edition, with Friedman commenting on the criticism:

{{cquote|I was both amazed and amused by how much the Golden Arches Theory had gotten around and how intensely certain people wanted to prove it wrong. They were mostly realists and out-of-work Cold Warriors who insisted that politics, and the never-ending struggle between nation-states, were the immutable defining feature of international affairs, and they were professionally and psychologically threatened by the idea that globalization and economic integration might actually influence geopolitics in some very new and fundamental ways.|||Friedman<ref>''The Lexus and the Olive Tree'', 2000 edition. Anchor Books ISBN 0-385-49934-5. p. 251.</ref>}}

==Friedmanisms==
A '''Friedmanism''' is a specific variety of [[Balance fallacy|false equivalence]], in which a pundit criticizes both sides of a conflict on an issue, while espousing the views of one side.<ref>[http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/07/mike_bloomberg_s_gun_control_friedmanism.html "Mike Bloomberg's Gun Control Friedmanism"], ''Slate''</ref>  The phenomenon is so named because of Friedman's frequent urging of the creation of a new political party that would espouse a certain set of views...all of which are actually ''already held'' by [[Democrat]]s. Friedman seems to blame Democrats for the obstructionism of [[Republican]]s.

{{cquote|I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster... Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal. And that is why I still hope [[Michael Bloomberg]] will reconsider running for [[president]] as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs. President [[Barack Obama|Obama]] has significant achievements to his record. He has done a solid job stemming the [[Great Recession|economic crisis]] he inherited and a good job managing national security and initiating important reforms — from [[health care]] to auto mileage standards. But with [[Europe]] in peril, [[China]] and [[America]] wobbling, the [[Arab]] world in turmoil, energy prices spiraling and the [[climate change|climate changing]], we are facing some real storms ahead. We need to weatherproof our American house — and fast — in order to ensure that America remains a rock of stability for the world. To do that, we’ll have to make some big, hard decisions soon — and to do that successfully will require presidential leadership in the next four years of the highest caliber. [[2012 U.S. presidential election|This election]] has to be about those hard choices, smart investments and shared sacrifices — how we set our economy on a clear-cut path of near-term, job-growing improvements in infrastructure and education and on a long-term pathway to serious fiscal, tax and entitlement reform. The next president has to have a mandate to do all of this. But, today, neither party is generating that mandate — talking seriously enough about the [[taxes]] that will have to be raised or the [[welfare|entitlement]] spending that will have to be cut to put us on sustainable footing, let alone offering an inspired vision of American renewal that might motivate such sacrifice. That’s why I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate — like the straight-talking, socially [[moderate]] and fiscally [[conservative]] Bloomberg — who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America’s global leadership before we implode. [[Mitt Romney]] can’t do that because of his ludicrous opposition to any tax hikes. President Obama, who has a plan to cut, tax and invest — albeit insufficiently — could lead, but, for now, he seems preoccupied with some rather uninspiring small ball, preferring proposals like “the Buffett tax” over comprehensive tax reform that would lower all rates, eliminate deductions and raise more revenue.|||Thomas Friedman, April 17, 2012<ref>[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/opinion/friedman-one-for-the-country.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss "One For the Country"]</ref>}}

==See also==
*[[Chinese Dream]]

==External links==
*Some hilarious imitations of Friedman's distinctive style of expression (he sounds much the same speaking as he does writing) can be found [http://www.salon.com/2013/12/16/hack_list_no_9_thomas_friedman/ here] and [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-grenade-of-understanding-winners-of-the-write-like-friedman-challenge-20121115 here].
*[https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/857266317287718912 We have reached Peak Friedman.]
==Notes==
{{reflist|group=note}}
==References==
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[[Category:Jews]]
[[Category:Journalists]]
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[[Category:Neoconservatives]]

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Categories: Authors, Chickenhawks, Declinists, Jews, Journalists, Living people, Right-wing activists, Neoconservatives