What to Do About the Brilliant and Foolish NYT Writer Thomas Friedman

Blind Optimism Makes Him a Crazy Person



There may be no other person as perceptive about world economic and social trends as Thomas Friedman who writes opinion columns for the Times.  But Friedman is an optimistic idiot.  His support of the Iraq war, in  which he repeatedly year after year wrote that 'the next six months are critical' spawned a term known as a Friedman.  The term stands for the idea that things are bad, have been bad but will get better in six months.  The six months is a rolling six months.

Now Friedman is writing positively on Al Gore's visit with Trump.

"I don’t expect Trump to abandon his effort to increase oil drilling or to ban coal. But I laud Gore for trying to work with him on this issue, because if Trump was to embrace the science of climate change, it would be game over for the fossilized climate deniers who remain in his own party. (Many Republican lawmakers would be relieved.) It’s also probably his single best peacetime possibility to unite Americans.

A fantasy? Maybe. But it is worth remembering how the last G.O.P. administration evolved. Texas oilman George W. Bush went from shocking the world by announcing a U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto climate treaty to embracing “wind and solar” and calling for Americans “to address the serious challenge of climate change” in his 2007 State of the Union address."

Really, we mean really! How can this highly intelligent man keep getting fooled, keep getting played, keeping looking clueless?