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T. Friedman Lays Out His Hand
Columnist and “talking head” Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT has his fans and his detractors; he turned off a lot of people with his support for the Iraq invasion. The current mess in Afghanistan can be traced in large measure to the bad decision to start a second war in Iraq in 2003. He doesn’t have much credibility regarding defense policy. But Friedman has been consistent in his push for greener energy policies for what they will give the U.S. economically and politically. He’s the guy who a few years ago wrote “Make them fight all of us.” In his blunt analysis of the Af-Pak situation today, he writes:
And we should diminish our dependence on oil so we are less impacted by what happens in Saudi Arabia, so we shrink the funds going to people who hate us and we make economic and political reform a necessity for them, not a hobby.
Read his whole column here, and consider subscribing to the NYT if you appreciate his opinions.
I agree with his “bottom line”.
“Alas, we don’t have the money, manpower or time required to fully transform the most troubled states of this region. It will only happen when they want it to. We do, though, have the technology, necessity and innovators to protect ourselves from them — and to increase the pressure on them to want to change — by developing alternatives to oil. It is time we started that surge. I am tired of being the sucker in this game.”
I do purchase The New York Times, but I don’t subscribe to it.
Regards — Cliff
Matt Taibbi on Tom Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.:
“Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.
“Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.”
http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html