Lions and Baboons and Fish Eagles--oh my!

Thomas Friedman's column today contains a particularly annoying passage that sounds as if it were crafted by a sixth grader in creative writing class:

Yes, Dorothy, somewhere over the rainbow, there is still a “Land of No Service” — where the only “webs” are made by spiders, where the only “net” is the one wrapped around your bed to keep out mosquitoes, where the only “ring tones” at dawn are the scream of African fish eagles and the bark of baboons, where the only GPS belongs to the lioness instinctively measuring the distance between herself and the antelope she hopes will be her next meal, and where “connectivity” refers only to the intricate food chain linking predators and prey that sustains this remarkable ecosystem.

...and where "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" is a term for the sweltering jungle basin, not my shitty book! An editor really should have stopped him at "African fish eagles."

What kind of money is the Times dropping every year to supply us with such fascinating writing? Friedman seems to file each of his columns from a different continent. Yet we never really gain much insight from having his loafers on the ground in various regions of strife and eco-capitolismo. (That last phrase is mine Friedman--don't steal it!)

I'd love to fire him and his mustache and use that budget to hire a rotating pool of cartoonists, a few reporters and a shiny new fact checker for the paper. There would still be millions of dollars left, which would be distributed to Times readers as reparations for this ongoing Op-Ed atrocity.