Regular readers of the blog know that there is a small gallery of Washington pundits that I simply cannot abide; not because I disagree with their views, but because I despise the predictability of their positions, the ballast of their prose, and the intellectual laziness of their work.<\/p>\n
That’s a group that includes Tom Friedman<\/a>, Joe Klein<\/a>, and E.J. Dionne<\/a>, amongst others. But there’s a special place in pundit hell for the professional joiner: the columnist who always has to march in lockstep with Beltway fashion. That’s why it’s so delightful to see the once-respectable Fareed Zakaria<\/a> get noted in the New Republic’s list of over-rated DC thinkers<\/a>. The pr\u00e9cis is priceless:<\/p>\n Fareed Zakaria<\/span> is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous \u201cdeclining American power\u201d chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (\u201cT<\/span><\/span>hey May Not Want the Bomb<\/span>,\u201d was a story he did for <\/span>Newsweek<\/em><\/span>); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There\u2019s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Indeed. Fareed Zakaria is a man who writes Gallup polls in paragraph form. Nice to see the media take notice. Regular readers of the blog know that there is a small gallery of Washington pundits that I simply cannot abide; not because I disagree with their views, but because I despise the predictability of their positions, the ballast of their prose, and the intellectual laziness of their work. That’s a group that includes Tom Friedman, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,517,1647,130,1003,355,2182,457],"class_list":["post-11706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-e-j-dionne","tag-fareed-zakaria","tag-iran","tag-iraq-war","tag-joe-klein","tag-the-new-republic","tag-tom-friedman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11706"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11718,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11706\/revisions\/11718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"