Man, you can’t say anything nowadays without people actually remembering it.
Take Tom Friedman. New York Times wise man. The go-to guy for pithy analysis of a complex world. The person for whom “six months from now” never arrives:
On a recent episode of MSNBC’s Hardball (5/11/06), for example, Friedman boiled down the intricacies of the Iraq situation into a make-or-break deadline: “Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.”
That confident prediction would seem a lot more insightful, however, if Friedman hadn’t been making essentially the same forecast almost since the beginning of the Iraq War. A review of Friedman’s punditry reveals a long series of similar do-or-die dates that never seem to get any closer.
So says Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, which then appends fourteen citations of Friedman’s calendrical stasis.
I don’t know if the world is flat, but I can think of something else that might be.
