Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Oh! i should have known. Atrios at Eschaton blog has posted his "Wanker of the Decade," THE ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE, Tom Friedman, he of "Friedman Unit" fame ("give it another six months"):
Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.
Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything. The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right.
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Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.
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For years Friedman spent dithering about the war. Oh gee it wasn't going well, but the light at the end of the tunnel might be around the corner in another critical 6 months, leading me to coin the term Friedman Unit, or the F.U.
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The state of the world is what it is in large part because people in positions of great power think this absurd buffoon of man is a Very Serious Person.
But Atrios, how in God's name did David Brooks not make your list? Atrios responds in Where's BoBo:
Everybody on the list is in part representative of a whole family of wankers. Some who didn't make the list failed to do so because they're dead. And some just...well, didn't seem precisely like wankers to me. I see people like BoBo and Reynolds as more Quiet American types, secretly napalming villages or nuking random cities while discussing Burkean humility over tea with Gail Collins or perusing the latest Sharper Image catalog. There's a word for that, though I'm not sure it's wanker.
How about "irrelevant"?
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