"A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week..." Oh, i posted this picture. I thought it was funny. He seems struggling to appear like a thinker. For Thomas Friedman to appear like a thinker is like Bill Clinton posing to appear truthful, or for Muhammad Dahlan to appear patriotic. But this got my attention: in every article, including those he writes from far away places, he always has at least one reference to "my friends in Lebanon" or "my friends in China" or my friend in Oklahoma. All that is part of his attempt to appear folksy and widely connected. If someone were to count the friends that were identified in his columns, it would be that Friedman must have thousands of friends, which proves that he has no real friends at all. I met this guy once and in the conversation with him (in the 1990s) he managed to tell me that he was playing tennis with Jim Baker the other day. Forget about politics and his superficiality, the man is first and foremost annoying.