Thomas Friedman

Thomas Lauren Friedman (born July 20, 1953) is an American journalist and columnist.

Sourced

• The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. […] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.
  • "The Golden Straitjacket". The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1st edition ed.). Anchor. May 2, 2000. ISBN 0-3854-9934-5. 

• The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.
  • "The Golden Straitjacket". The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1st edition ed.). Anchor. May 2, 2000. ISBN 0-3854-9934-5. 

• Now we've entered Globalization 3.0, and it is shrinking the world from size small to a size tiny.
  • "Small and Smaller". New York Times. March 4, 2004. Retrieved on 2007-11-13. 

• What I absolutely don't understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of — I know a lot of these guys — reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it's over. I don't get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what's the rush? Can we let this play out, please?
  • Fresh Air, June 3, 2004

• What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.
  • Face the Nation, October 3, 2004

• I think we're in the end game now…. I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election — that's my own feeling — let alone the presidential one.
  • Meet the Press, September 25, 2005

• We've teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it's going to come together.
  • Face the Nation, December 18, 2005

• We're at the beginning of I think the decisive I would say six months in Iraq, OK, because I feel like this election — you know, I felt from the beginning Iraq was going to be ultimately, Charlie, what Iraqis make of it.
  • Charlie Rose, December 20, 2005

• I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool's errand.
  • The Oprah Winfrey Show, January 23, 2006

• I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq.
  • Today, March 2, 2006

• Well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months — probably sooner — whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we're going to have to just let this play out.
  • Hardball with Chris Matthews, May 11, 2006

About Friedman

• He won two Pulitzer prizes. He won for balanced and informed coverage. You may have noticed that it was announced on April Fools' Day, which was not by accident. For years the guy has been covering up for Israel, falsifying facts. When the Israeli press comes out with headlines saying "Arafat Calls for Negotiations, Peres Refuses", as they did in December of 1986, Tom Friedman will choose that occasion to write one of his many articles saying that Peace Now is losing credibility because there is no counterpart in the Arab World.
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Levine, Burton (May 1988). "On Trip to Middle East: Noam Chomsky interviewed by Burton Levine". Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought (20): pp. 24-32. ISSN 0885-8659.

• Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] 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.
  • Matt Taibbi, review of The World Is Flat, April 20, 2005
  • Taibbi, Matt. "Flathead: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman". New York Press. Retrieved on 2007-11-13. 

Unsourced

• Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions would force Mr. Hussein's generals to bring him down, and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, July 7, 1991

• The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, March 28, 1999

• That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.
• We need to send the message that anyone who orders suicide bombings against Americans, or protects those who do, commits suicide himself. And U.S. marines will search every cave in Afghanistan to make that principle stick. You order, you die — absolutely, positively, you die.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, January 6, 2002

• You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept. The concept I'd argue for is 'neoliberalism.' More Americans today are natural neolibs, than neocons. Neoliberals believe in a muscular foreign policy and a credible defense budget, but also a prudent fiscal policy that balances taxes, deficit reduction and government services.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, June 11, 2003

• Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, November 28, 2004

• The next six months in Iraq — which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there — are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, November 30, 2003

• Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, September 28, 2005

• The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it — and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful.
  • Unidentified author, unidentified article, New York Times, December 21, 2005

• I think we're in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob. We've got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they're going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they're not, in which case I think the bottom's going to fall out.
  • Unidentified CBS program, January 31, 2006

• Can Iraqis get this government together? If they do, I think the American public will continue to want to support the effort there to try to produce a decent, stable Iraq. But if they don't, then I think the bottom is going to fall out of public support here for the whole Iraq endeavor. So one way or another, I think we're in the end game in the sense it's going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us.
  • Unidentified CNN program, April 23, 2006

• Reading Europe's press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush's formulation that an "axis of evil" threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. President Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it's Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice.