Good excuse to repost the greatest Friedman takedown ever, Matt Taibbi's NYPress essay Flathead. "He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius." delong.typepad.com/egregious_mode…
https://twitter.com/EsotericCD/status/1481084157044346880
""Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge."
"Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch"."
"Friedman's book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author's metaphors."
I'm rereading it for the thousandth time and laughing out loud. For the thousandth time. The essay is a work of staggering genius. If it's the only thing Taibbi ever did in his life, it would be enough.
"In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian."
Taibbi ends his Tom Friedman review thus: "Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?"
The closest thing to Taibbi on Friedman we've had since was the great Andy Ferguson on Peter Beinart commentary.org/articles/andre…
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