I suppose all those who choose to read his columns and books are stupid too. Why not just show where he is wrong.

Should I take this as a request for deconstructions?

Yes he has come round on Iraq and that is to be welcomed, because, whatever you might think, he has an influential voice. I don't find what he now says about Iraq stupid, nor what he has to say about climate change - and I'm glad that someone like him, in the pages of the NYT is calling Bush and team "brain dead".

Yes, Friedman is influential. That's precisely the point. I haven't fully figured out why he is influential. I think he has some ability to connect, but that's eeehm, esoteric.

I'm still waiting for some substance, rather than a litany of acerbic opinion, from you.

I try to write substantial pieces most of the time. Dowd doesn't. Now if I'm right about this, I should be able to come up with at least two counterexamples for each substantial piece she's written. I grant that the Feith piece does have some substance. So here's one vapid piece, and here's another. Dowd on the campaign trail is a complete disaster.

If he's a "decent thinker about half the time" how is that - according to you - he's apparently not right about anything?

Is he wrong about this ? Is it just about his own "seriousness"?

I don't mean to say that Cohen is wrong all the time. Just that he's often more concerned about being 'serious' than about being right.

Now Cohen is wrong about the supposed morality of his support for the Iraq war, and his assorted liberal interventionist poses, and he's definitely been embarassingly wrong in writing about that solipsistic metastory. Read this post on that.

All I can say otherwise is that I like or can find enough interesting angles to provide redeeming value in about half of what Cohen writes. YMMV. But he has deep flaws that interfere with his writing.

Ted Welch:

Yes, Friedman has come around on Iraq. He still writes stupid columns at a higher frequency than smart ones. I see no reason to take him seriously. And the NYT has a fair share of very flawed columnists.

I suppose all those who choose to read his columns and books are stupid too. Why not just show where he is wrong.

Yes he has come round on Iraq and that is to be welcomed, because, whatever you might think, he has an influential voice.

Oh no, LOL... Ted, I can't believe you fell for this guy. I myself have an allergic reaction just to his style, all those verbal leaps and twisted allegories that don't really make sense upon closer inspection.

No amount of talk on climate change will alleviate his sins. Those include playing a prophet of neoliberal globalisation (culminating in his infamous Flat Earth-ism), and his choice of such a superficiality as example of action on climate change as Google's decision shows that despite talking about market forces, he is still pre-occupied with his  glorious private start-ups and their shiny toys and corporate propaganda than to think about large-scale (government) policy.

With Friedman there is also the issue that when you'd think he understood something, in another six months you'll scratch your head. It appears to me downthread that you haven't understood what's up with the Friedman unit: it's not a single column, it's several columns over years that always signalled a changing opinion and expectation of a make-or-break soon -- but that soon never came, just another proclamation of an impending watershed.

Finally, Friedman's foreign policy views are thoroughly rotten, it's not just the Iraq War. What he writes on anything connected to the Israeli-Arab conflict is simply disgusting -- I deconstructed once one nasty example. He was also a bloodthirsty promoter of terror bombing Serbia -- when he wrote the infamous line:

"Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance."

The second sentence is said to be his motto, often repeated privately as well as in talk-shows.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}