Better two cell phones than a fish in your zipper

Some days you spend hours crafting a coherent chunk of prose, hunting down links for half-remembered articles from 1998, and trying to make it all funny enough that someone will spend the time to read it.  And other days you just crib shamelessly from Matt Taibbi's 2005 vivisection of Thomas Friedman ("Flathead"):

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. 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. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

I'm sure some of you have read this essay before but I'm just as sure others haven't, and you must.  On re-reading it I nearly pissed myself.  Brilliant, every word.

And if that's not enough for you, check out Taibbi's followup from January of this year:

Even better was this gem from one of Friedman’s latest columns: "The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: "Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?" There are many serious questions one could ask about this passage, but the one that leaped out at me was this: In the "title" of that long-running play, is it supposed to be the same person asking all three of those questions? If so, does that person suffer from multiple personality disorder? Because in the first question, he is a neutral/ignorant observer of the Mideast drama; in the second he sympathizes with the Jews; in the third he’s a radical Muslim. Moreover, after you blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque, is the surrounding hotel still there? Why would anyone build a mosque in a half-blown-up hotel?

Stop, my sides, you're killing me.  This isn't quite the masterpiece the first one is, but it's still worth your time, if for nothing more than to give you a reason to spend a few moments of your life contemplating the size of Valerie Bertinelli's ass.  You will be richer for the experience, I promise.

Comments

[KDelphi]

LOL! Worth reading! Someone should throw Friedman out of the WINDOWS of the fallen WALL ...

Although not nearly as funny, I watched a "special" by Friedman a couple years ago about 'why the French hate the US so much" (Yes, I sat thru the whole thing, mostly to see pics of his eating in expensive French restaurants and drooling and hating him ). He took some college students who, supposedly, had "complaints" about US military bases in France and NATO, to lunch at ---you guessed it--McDonalds! He asked them how they thought France could defend itself without US bases there (and, also, , the old,
"well at least you have a job on the base" pisser), and they finally said, "well, we will drive them out like we have others, you have no sense of history" (which didnt really make sense to me either, but these were college kids.....) and he replies, "Oh, like you drove the Nazis out, all alone??" ????!!!!!!!

Friedman skulks away, to make reservations for dinner on the Champs Ellysees, all the while pondering, "why do those kids hate me so much"...

[NomadUK]

So, back from holiday, I check out the site, and am promised the opportunity to contemplate Valerie Bertinelli's ass. Yet, when I click to the linked articles, it is nowhere to be seen. I feel cheated somehow.

[John Caruso]

Here you go. But let me remind you of that old saying about being careful about what you wish for....

KDelphi, I think I saw part of that same special. Y'know, we should count ourselves lucky that a toad like Friedman got some of his karmic payback in this life instead of another, whereas the Cheneys of the world so often get away completely unpunished.

[NomadUK]

Here you go. But let me remind you of that old saying about being careful about what you wish for....

Well, that could have been worse. Middle-age spread hits so many of us, after all.