It is mind-boggling that he was taken seriously for decades as an economic and foreign policy thinker. He’s a pre-LLM argument for the idea that being able to put any number of sentences together so they scan is not an indication that there’s any intelligence behind the text. He’s a walking wrong answer. He was unerringly backwards about so many things, on such a basic level that even a very casual critical reading could identify the flaws, and no one noticed at what was supposed to be the highest levels of American journalism, save for a handful of heretics who had to shout from the margins and were basically ignored for basically his entire career.

https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html

Enjoy. I started rereading it just now, and it’s just as great as it was back when everyone was reading Judy Miller and Paul Krugman.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.