Atrios is celebrating a decade of blogging. And despite a maddening number of typos and grammar errors, he is still a good read. By way of celebration, he has been counting down to worst political pundits in a “Wankers of the Decade” series. Well, the time has come. Today, he posted his The One True Wanker of the Decade. Who is it? I had already figured it out, given that he hadn’t mentioned him in the runners up. He is the guy who all thinking people love to hate: Thomas Friedman—the optimistic “centrist.” You should read the whole article, but here is a taste:
Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false “centrism” which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.
Ha cha cha cha!
