My Deep Philosophical Problem With Today's Martin Peretz Article

AS long time readers of this blog will know (all four of you), I really don't like Martin Peretz. It's mostly a philosophical and political problem, in that I personally believe that Arabs are also members of the human race. But hey, we all have our differences. The one thing I can certainly say about his articles is that they leave me something to say. Against them, generally. But today, I have an issue.


In an article discussing the possibility of a third party presidential candidate running in 2012, Peretz explicitly, from the top, calls out Thomas Friedman. Friedman angers me greatly, and here the issue is personal. It makes me angry that someone that stupid, with a spot already reserved in the lowest level of writer's hell, has a job at the New York Times and I don't. Here's a man whose Grand Theory of international politics boiled down to: no two nations with McDonalds will ever go to war. Besides the fact that the theory is stunningly idiotic, it's also been explicitly proven wrong (See: Georgia vs. Russia, or Matt Taibi's epic takedowns of the mustachioed turtleneck wearer). So any man that will use his or her space on the internet to take him on is good in my book.
Until this sentence:

Then, in 1990, there was Ross Perot who, despite winning 19 percent of the ballot count—split between voters who would have otherwise cast their ballots evenly between Vice President George Bush and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

Oy vey, this man is such a putz.