fair enough

As you may know, I have started feeling much more kindly toward Thomas Friedman in the last couple of years.

More kindly would not necessarily be a ringing endorsement, since it marked the difference between "The Lexus and the Olive Tree makes me want to throw up and throw things" and "I no longer find his writing nauseating." But much more kindly is a whole other thing entirely. I don't heartily recommend things to people to read all that often (What's that? I do? OK, yeah, I do, but just imagine how many times I've restrained myself! Really!) but I've recommended Friedman's column, um, this many times. And that's just on my blog.

However. It remains fairly clear that no one thinks more highly of Thomas Friedman than Thomas Friedman, and there are some incongruities in what he says and how he lives his life that are all the more significant because of his seemingly well-meaning diatribes, rather than in spite of them. Not to mention how swiftly he seems to change his mind and position on many a crucial issue. It's good to have other perspectives.

Especially when those perspectives are pretty hilarious.

"Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn't make them up even if you were trying -- and when you tried to actually picture the "illustrative" figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors."

And it just gets better from there (unless you're Thomas Friedman); take a look. I bet you didn't know about the convincing correlation between American pork belly prices and midgets' opinions of Australia.