You know what I want
By
Criticizing Tom Friedman columns is like shooting fish in a barrel (btw what does that even mean? I always pictured a barrel full of water with fish swimming around and somebody blasting away with a revolver, which doesn’t sound easy at all. I guess maybe it means the fish are dead already and filling up a water-free barrel in a general store in the 19th century. Or something. I’m not looking it up).
Anyway . . . Back to the barrel fish shooting. Friedman seems to get all his metaphors and his social analysis straight from his frequent flyer account: LAX strikes him as kind of shabby these days, ergo the U.S. is failing to save and invest, unlike the thrifty and mysterious Chinese.
Then we get one billionaire interviewing another billionaire about whether it would be a good idea to cut taxes on companies run by billionaires. Can you guess the answer? I knew you could . . .
As Yglesias points out, it literally does not even appear to occur to Friedman that the CEO of Intel might be expressing something other than his completely altruistic concern for the welfare of the American people when he gets Tom Friedman to reproduce an Intel press release in the form of a New York Times op-ed column.