Posted 12:04 PM by Robert

A Recent Eschaton Post

Here it is:

Tom Friedman, Anti-Semite

No, of course not, but if this paragraph were judged by the "Krugman standard" he would be called one.

What is the supposed Krugman-Friedman similarity? Mr. Friedman writes:

Mahathir Mohamad['s] ... speech was a brutally frank look into the causes of the Muslim world's decline. Though it was also laced with shameful anti-Jewish slurs, it was still revealing.

The reader is invited to read the Friedman column and make her own judgment. But in the opinion of the Man Without Qualities, not one word in Mr. Friedman's column attempts to "explain away" the anti-Semitism in the Mahathir Mohamad speech - as the ADL correctly points out Paul Krugman did.

Further, Atrios' suggestion that Paul Krugman was denounced as himself being an anti-Semite by Herr Doktorprofessor's most pointed and prominent critics is willfully inaccurate. Others might justifiably choose stronger language.

So it comes to this:

The Friedman and Krugman items are not similar. Krugman was not denounced as personally being an "anti-Semite" by any of his most prominent critics. [A "useful, overeducated, seduced, willfully blind idiot" is closer to it.] And Mr. Friedman's column cannot be condemned by the same standards correctly used to castigate Herr Doktorprofessor.

It was only a short, flabby Eschaton post. Is Atrios going for some kind of record in the serious-conceptual-errors-per-pixel measure?