America’s laziest op-ed columnist
By This whole spy story has the feel of one of those senior tennis tournaments — John McEnroe against Jimmy Connors, long after their primes — or maybe a rematch between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston in their 60s. You almost want to avert your eyes.
Sonny Liston died (under mysterious circumstances) at the age of 38 to 42. Now this might seem like a trivial, pedantic point, and indeed it is, except in it’s own small way it illustrates a couple of things about Friedman:
(1) He’s a terrible writer.
(2) He’s lazy as hell. He writes the same column over and over, flaunting his faux-expertise on a huge range of topics, and he (or his “research assistant”) can’t be bothered to spend five minutes on teh google to check a 700-word column for factual howlers that reveal he doesn’t know the second thing about the subjects he’s employing for metaphorical fodder, let alone the ones on which he’s opining.