It wasn’t too long ago that George Bush made a widely-mocked reference to the novel The Quiet American, but Thomas Friedman appears not to have noticed. From this morning’s column:
It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q†— the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.
Via Yglesias, where a commenter reminds us of Matt Taibbi’s classic take on Friedman:
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.
Related cartoon here.