Thomas Friedman, mustachioed windbag and American foreign policy apologist extraordinaire, is coming to speak at Pop and Politics host-university USC this coming Monday evening. To what do we owe this pleasure? It seems we are yet another stop on his seemingly endless campaign of pimping his bestselling ode to globalization, ‘The World Is Flat’ – the title of the speech? Yes…’The World Is Flat.’ Check out a hilarious savaging of his book by Matt Taibbi here.

Why, you ask, do I hold such dislike for Friedman? Well, there are a number of reasons, a couple of which I will elaborate for you.

First, in all of the hubbub to praise Friedman’s extremely dubious genius, we have been remiss in finding any substance to those claims. Recall this prediction?

“The president’s view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become ’self-legitimating’ when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out.” Friedman in The New York Times, March 2003

Oops! One would think that a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, whose bread and butter is reporting on the Middle East (along with falling over himself to glad-hand the rich and powerful free-traders and the vicious inequality they leave in their wake) would know better than this. Alas, he did not!

Well… I was going to make a list of other reasons I dislike him, but I think it could be best summed up as follows—also, taking such enthusiastic swigs of Haterade exhausts me: Friedman is guilty, most of all, of uncritical adulation of those in power—whether these figures or institutions be economic, political, or social, one can almost always find his feet planted firmly on the side of the powerful. Perhaps that’s what irks me about him so much—I am attracted to journalism’s potential to exist as a ‘voice for the voiceless,’ as cliche as that sounds. And Friedman is the exact opposite of that, and I think that if the last six years or so teach us anything, it should be that unreserved cheerleading for the powerful gets us nowhere (unless, of course, you count kicking off and becoming mired in a civil war somewhere). I have taken the liberty of linking to an article or two you can peruse that are much more eloquent and informative in their criticisms of Friedman, and I urge you to read them, whether you’re attending the speech tomorrow night or not. And, if you are attending the speech, take his pearls of wisdom (I use this term as loosely as possible) with a massive boulder of salt—we all know by now what journalists getting too cozy with the assorted movers and shakers in Washington can get us, right?

Hilarious photo courtesy of Wikipedia.