Tom Friedman is Back and He is Better then Ever

After a brief hiatus of five months, Tom Friedman is back as an Op-Ed Columnist for The New York Times. In his most recent Op-Ed Tom talks about how America is falling behind Asia and Europe in Research and Development, how the infrastructure of this country which used to be the best is now outclassed by Europe and Asia and how we are borrowing beyond our means. But nothing sums up the column more then these these few sentences.
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Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.
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