Tom Friedman, useful idiot
I guess I'm not the only one whose patience with Thomas Friedman snapped when he compared the October fighting in Iraq to the Tet offensive. Lefty columnist Nicholas von Hoffman (Jack Kilpatrick's original foil in those "Point-Counterpoint" segments on 60 Minutes back in the day) takes note of a recent article by Tony Judt in the London Review of Books, naming Friedman among a host of liberal hawks who collectively make up the neocons' "useful idiots:"
These people should be called out for what they did because, as Judt writes, "those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War–the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted 'Off the Island' (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America's drive to war–are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs."
My God! People still not only take Friedman seriously, they kiss the man's fanny wherever he goes. Just the other day he likened the failure of the military's drive to pacify Baghdad to the Viet Cong's Tet offensive in Vietnam, and the next thing you know somebody's asking George Bush about Friedman's latest assessment–and the President seems to be agreeing. It's all nonsense, of course, because however terrible the Iraqi misadventure may be, it bears little similarity to the Vietnam misadventure other than the stink of defeat and deceit. Well, if you give a screeching baboon a column in the New York Times, he will be showered with awards and lucrative speaking engagements.
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