Friedman

If you happen to follow the political mediasphere such that you are exposed to the maddening half-truths of Thomas Friedman, you might have assumed that he was simply another journalist with atrophied analytical powers, drawn together with the rest of the herd to being an Iraq war hawk and boneheaded boosterism for economic globalization. Not so, says Marc Levy of Misanthropicity.

Friedman doesn’t write nonsense; he writes propaganda.

And why is this? Well, it turns out that he's not a journalist, if by “journalist” you mean someone who makes their living doing journalism. He's something else.

What he is, it turns out, is an extraordinarily wealthy man — living in a $9.3 million home, married into a family with an estimated worth of $2.7 billion — essentially working undercover as a shill, a beard, a stalking horse for his class, nine times out of 10 espousing cynically self-serving ideas in the guise of globalized idealist.

I find that this clarifies my reading of his work enormously.