But Doug, you forget that he needs the money – really, really needs the money.

Maybe Tommy Obvious can become a taxi driver.
Then he can quote himself ever-so-conveniently agreeing with whatever banal point he’s trying to make in his column that week.

Reason number 43 why I will not cry when these guys are gone.

@malraux: How do you have an employee with uncapped travel expenses with no accountability?

Hm, now I wonder if the wife wasn’t secretly footing the bill and letting Tommyboy “make” her money back from the paper so he didn’t feel the need to put TruckNutz on his fleet of cars for beings so unmanly. I can’t imagine a blank check from any news operation, for anyone.

Friedman, Dowd and other low hanging fruit on the Tree of Journalistic Mockery are getting kind of boring. And I think Taibbi’s point is well made. All the huffing and puffing going on in this mastubatory navel gazing exercise now called journalism is just fucking tedious. Everything is a financial consideration in modern journalism. Everything. They are in the business of selling stories, so unless that story has lots of sparkly, shiny things, or can induce the rubber-necking public to stop by and stare for a while, it isn’t fit to print. At least not on the front page.

oh, i don’t know—isn’t that pretty much what every ordinary service man and woman in iraq enjoys right now?

or should i say: thanks for the war, tom!

When Friedman accepted $75,000 — his standard rate — for speaking to a regional government agency in Oakland

because California has so much money to waste already…

Friedman said that there will always be a demand for “quality, branded news that people can trust,”

Wow. Talk about whistling past the graveyard. Friedman has no clue about how people get news, or what they think about “brands.”

And sadly, there is a hard core of people who demand that their news come pre-digested through a particular ideological filter. My workplace is somewhat tolerant of Internet surfing, and I note how one guy (surprisingly a young guy in his 20s) always starts his morning visiting Michelle Malkin’s site.

On the other hand, no one in the office under the age of 40 regularly goes to the NY Times site. And even when someone comes across a story that originated in the Times, it’s viewed as just another “Internet news story.”

... but he believes that the shakeout of news organizations is going to be extreme: “It’s going to be us and the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and not a lot more.”

I almost feel sorry for Friedman here. He really doesn’t have a clue.

But Doug, you forget that he needs the money – really, really needs the money.

Good point. I’d forgotten about the fortunes of his wife’s father’s company.

Friedman is a clueless, cock-sucking sycophant of the highest order… If he had any other job, Friedman would have crashed a plane or made a million dollar accounting error by now.

Perhaps there should be some comfort in the fact that the worst harm he can do as a Serious Public Intellectual is to the wallets of those who hire him and the blood pressures of us sane people. But he’s like a human H1N1 virus—ridiculously simple, a mere parasite, and yet capable of bringing down empires if allowed to breed unchecked.

Exactly. That ‘stache is a separate fully sentient alien life form that took over Friedman’s body sometime in the late 70’s.

We are Borgstache. We will add your cultural and tonsorial distinctiveness to our own. Two shovels are futile.

What will it take to get the Times to kick Friedman to the curb?

Or as he would say, “to toss him in the trash and forget his address before mailing him his pink slip, which in his case would be so pink it would be orange”.

I’m not as good at it as Friedman is, of course.

The next time the Times has to close down a foreign bureau or lay off copy editors, I hope Friedman takes time from painting himself in gold dust to think of them for a moment.

What will it take to get the Times to kick Friedman to the curb?

He deserves a Pulitzer about as much as Joe the Plumber deserves a trip to the international space station.

Hey, if Joe takes the coach seats on the outside of the shuttle to get there…..