Obama Plans to Get Dumber Over Vacation

CNN has just published the names of five books that the White House claims Obama will be reading during his summer vacation. On the whole, it’s an innocuous list, replete with a couple of undoubtedly boring novels about towns and the people who live in those towns and their broken marriages and other such nonsense, as well as that newish John Adams biography which will presumably be more interesting. But then we find Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the latest volume of childish geopolitical metaphors by Thomas Friedman, himself the most overrated public intellectual in the history of Western civilization with the possible exception of C.S. Lewis.

It is abominable that the president of the United States is going to spend a portion of his valuable time soaking up Friedman, of all people. The longtime New York Times columnist has the highest notoriety-to-failure ratio of any American newspaper columnist active today. A decade ago, he was telling everyone that the Chinese regime would soon face a massive upswing in discontent due to a coming unemployment crisis itself prompted by a sudden influx of American wheat and sugar; nothing of the sort happened. Around the same time, he announced that Colin Powell would have a practical veto on anything the Bush Administration might consider, and would additionally never be fired or allowed to resign in protest; things didn’t quite work out that way. A year later, Friedman called on Americans to “keep rootin’ for Putin,” who was destined to build a more open, transparent Russia. Oops! A few months into the Afghanistan conflict, he noted that he entertained “no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war” and made fun of all the craaaaaaazy liberals for worrying aloud that civilian casaulties might turn Afghans against coalition forces to some degree. And then, there’s Duncan Black’s notorious Friedman Unit.

This is just a small sampling of Friedman’s predictive failures; being in the midst of writing a book that examines Friedman and other, similarly incompetent name-brand columnists, I have ten pages of notes in this same vein. The guy couldn’t  predict a sunrise at sunset. And here’s Obama, happily reading this nonsense. He should be reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

There are, in addition, many valid stylistic objections to be made against Friedman as well. As True/Slant kingpin Matt Taibbi once ranted:

Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

“The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol.

I would simply add that the fellow entitled one of his books Longitudes and Attitudes. Insufferable.