Tom Friedman is Charlie Rose's Most Frequent Guest

Amazingly, Charlie Rose's TV show is one of the most influential shows in existence. It is difficult to square that with a recent (Oct 12) Fortune article, which says that Tom Friedman is Charlie Rose's most frequent guest, with 65 appearances.

Tom says, "It isn't that he doesn't ask hard questions [he most assuredly does not], but he does it in a way that is designed to give you the best chance to make your case for your point of view." (That's the definition of a softball question.)

Tom needs a softball forum like Rose's show because his writing and ideas are so weak. That's why Matt Taibbi is able to skewer Tom every which way. What I don't understand is why Rose needs a blowhard like Friedman as a regular on the show.

As Taibbi says, Tom "has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius."

And also: "I wish I had the balls to first spend six long years madly cheering on an Iraq war that not only reintroduced Sharia law to the streets of Baghdad, but radicalized the entire Islamic world against American influence—and then write a book blaming the spread of fundamentalist Islam on the ignorant consumers of the middle American heartland, who bought too many Hummers and spent too much time shopping for iPods in my wife’s giganto-malls."

But, as the New York Times said, "No ego is so bloated that Mr. Rose cannot puff it up further."