Foreign Policy magazine asks Bill Clinton “Who do you think is the smartest, most penetrating thinker you know (maybe other than your own family)? Are there people who should be on our list?”
The answer:
Paul Krugman — I don’t always agree with him, but he is unfailingly good. David Brooks has been very good. Tom Friedman is our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow and figuring out a clever way to say it that sticks in your mind-like “real men raise the gas tax.” You know what I mean?
Thomas Friedman? Wow, Bill is really off his game here - I've repeatedly described Friedman as being too stupid to breathe without instruction, ever since reading the execresence he was pleased to call a book, 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree', which can be summed up as: "People in poor countries want to be rich, too. But that might not be good for us people in rich countries"*, only in 300 pages.
When they put him on TV as a pundit on - well, any and every topic it seems - I usually wind up turning it off after a couple of minutes as a less-expensive alternative to throwing things at the screen. One of his pearls of wisdom that springs to mind from recently, on the Afghanistan, started with:
"The three alternatives are, massive increase in force in order to smash the bad guys and win the conflict, stay as we are, or withdraw ..." which left me aghast. In what alternative universe do you win a guerrilla war by massive increases in force? And if it were even possible, where exactly would the USA conjure this massive increase in force from? The army and marines are about at the end of their tether with the current small boost in forces in Afghanistan, even a smallish boost in force, say another 100,000, would be completely out of reach on their current state.
Basically I'm just nutting off here: the wall of smug stupidity that encircles the seats of power here seem even more impenetrable than it was in England, hard though that would have been for me to believe before I got here.
*Cant remember who I stole that from, sorry to whoever
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