Open thread for night owls: Reading Tom Friedman isn't better'n a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

Tonight's selection in which the razor-tongued driftglass gives Tom "Taxi Driver Told Me" Friedman's latest column a good licking:

When pawing through Mr. Friedman's latest steaming heap of glue-huffing ramble, it is sometimes easy to forget that "writing" is what he gets paid to do. To this towering mediocrity great boons are granted, princely sums are bestowed, unimaginably privileged access to the world's elite is give and all of it is based on their ability to line 800 words up in a row and then subdivide those words with punctuation a couple of times a week.

That's it. That is literally all he does.

If he were a policy wonk or historians or economists or pipe-fitter or thoracic surgeon or paper-maker or cartographer or COBOL programmer or blacksmith or vintage steamer truck restorer who also happened to be an incredibly bad writer, well, that would be another thing entirely. Depressing, perhaps. A statement about the generally sad state of literacy in America, perhaps. But not surprising.

Hell, since I was but a wee driftglass, on almost any gig I have ever had, one of the little side-jobs I invariably ended up with has been fixing up other people's writing.  Because ' from chairman or vice-president or commissioner to research assistant ' one thing that has been a constant (and has been getting consistently worse) at all levels of almost every organization I have ever worked for is the poor quality of the writing.  

My own blog frequently suffers from verbal nail pops and jigsaw cuts that are executed at less than a perfect 45-degree angle. I figured out long ago that my writer's brain (get it out fast!) and my editor's brain (clean it up thoroughly) simply operate on different circuits and cannot work together harmoniously when I am banging stuff out of horseback. I take full responsibility for every jot and tittle of my own errata which, you have my word, would not be there if I allowed myself the luxury of letting my words cool for 3-4 days.

Or if I had, say, the bottomless research and editorial resources of The New York Times at my command.

When you are in the business of putting words in a row, in the end it will always be the quality of those words that counts. The craft with which you lined them up. It does not matter if this year you are revered by fools or next year you are praised by sycophants; eventually all of that sound and fury dies away and your words are left orphaned to stand or fall on their own. And since Mr. Friedman's words so obviously and consistently stink on ice, I can only imagine that the real story behind why America's Newspaper of Record continues to allow such a buffoon to shit all over whatever is left of its international reputation must be one helluva rousing tale.

For another acid dismantling of the same Friedman column, check out Matt Taibbi here.

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