Tom Friedman’s amazing facility for unembarrassedly stating the obvious and spouting globaloney in the pages of the New York Times and between the covers of bestselling books-What? Are we running out of Sleep Ease?-has generated enough hot air over the years to put a dent in the polar ice cap. Apparently he is none too embarrassed to accept gigantic speaking fees for passing all that gas, either. Last week, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District paid him $75,000 for the privilege of having him discourse on the green revolution (“green is geopolitical, geostrategic, geo-economic, capitalistic, innovative, and patriotic. Green is the new red, white and blue”); Al Gore (“a hero of mine”); the melting, the melting, the melting (“all the sea ice in the North Pole could be melted in July as early as 2015”); and other babble, babble, babble (“megatrends,” “biodiversity loss” “Later, friends, is over”). Yo, Justice Department, listen up! Sitting through this stuff is bad enough. Doesn’t paying for it–especially when, the Chronicle says, you can get it for free on the Internet–constitute torture?
