GM and the New York Times

Is there a class of workers less liable for sloppiness and incompetence than New York Times columnists? Between Paul Krugman's errors (you know, the ones that require four waves of back-and-forth before either a grudging, "Yes, I was wrong, but why haggle on such a small point?", or else a "Gee, I thought even a moron would know what I really meant" on Krugman's part) to Maureen Dowd's re-statements of the most glaring media myths (no, George W. Bush did not put arsenic back in the water) and now to Tom Friedman. Leaving aside his latest treatise, The World is Flat, which does not even work as metaphor, there is this regarding General Motors. Donald Luskin, at The Conspiracy to Make You Poor and Stupid, has the details.

Update: Went looking 'round for Matt Taibbi's review of Friedman's book, one of the most savage non-John Simon reviews I have ever read. A sampling:

The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

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.

The language from there gets a little coarse, but beyond that, this deserves some special award for hilarious viciousness.