Tom Friedman Broods

Tom Friedman is like the kid in grade school who eggs on his classmates to engage in some type of naughtiness, tells the teacher when they do, and then beams with pride while she pats his head.

These days he's not so much scolding everyone about the Iraq War (for which he was a principal cheerleader) as he is about the unintended consequences of another of his glorious visions, globalization, and the havoc it has wrought on the world financial system. A commentator to his latest column says shame on him:

But... but... but... The World is Flat! These are the financial geniuses who were beating our olive trees into Lexuses! A wise man wrote books about how financial engineering was making it a brave new world, and anyone who clung to stodgy concepts like regulation and protecting workers was for fools. But maybe the guy who wrote those books was the fool, eh? I don't think we'll see him admit it, though.

— Bukko in Australia, Melbourne, Victoria