BASH THE TEACHERS: Tom Friedman Edition

Before I get to my review of Tom Friedman's column on teaching from today's Times, I'd like to remind my readers of a few things regarding Mister Friedman.

First, I'd like to remind everybody how wrong Tom Friedman was on the Iraq war:



Then I'd like to remind everybody how Tom Friedman likes to lecture Americans to be environmentally-prudent while he lives here:




Finally I'd like to point out that Friedman likes to write about the financially irresponsible Wall Street bankers and CEO class who created the housing mess while his wife, heir to General Growth Properties, the nation's second largest mall operator, filed the largest real estate bankruptcy ever.

GGP kept taking out loans, opening new malls, taking out new loans, opening even newer malls - hmm...doesn't that sound like a real estate bubble?

It does to me, and just like with residential housing, GGP's real estate story ended up in the red.

So when it comes to accountability and Tom Friedman, they just don't mix, you know?

Now today Little Tommy shills for education reform, parroting the crap we heard this week from Bill Gates and Arne Duncan about how teachers make too much money and ought to have their pay cut and tied only to test scores and performance-based data.

Given that Tom Friedman has been a hypocrite on his cheerleading for the Iraq war, a hypocrite in his call for all of us (except for himself, of course) to be environmentally conscious, and a hypocrite when he criticized Wall Street for the same unscrupulous business strategies that his wife's company pursued before going bankrupt, I'm going to say something to Little Tommy.

Hey, Tommy, Johnny Cash has something he wants to say to you: