Thomas Friedman's latest New York Times column contains some ridiculous statements. For example, the first paragraph:
I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story.
Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9/11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked ? for the very best of reasons ? people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.
Imagination is on my mind a lot these days, because it seems to me that the only people with imagination in the world right now are the bad guys. As my friend, the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen, says, "That is the characteristic of our time � all the imagination is in the hands of the evildoers."
I have this routine. I get up every morning around 6 a.m., fire up my computer, call up AOL's news page and then hold my breath to see what outrage has happened in the world overnight. A massive bombing in Iraq or Madrid? More murderous violence in Israel? A hotel going up in flames in Bali or a synagogue in Istanbul? More U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq?
The rest of the article contains implausible wishes about renewable energy (so we can get rid of those troublesome Arab allies), the situation in Israel and Palestine, and Mel Gibson. But the last paragraph does not fail to meet our expectations:
Most of all, I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked John McCain to be his vice president, because if Mr. Kerry wins he intends not to waste his four years avoiding America's hardest problems ? health care, deficits, energy, education ? but to tackle them, and that can only be done with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team.