Behold your nation's op-ed columnists. Here's Tom Friedman confiding his secret authorial techniques to Tim Russert:
“We got this free market, and I admit, I was speaking out in Minnesota–my hometown, in fact, and guy stood up in the audience, said, `Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you'd oppose?' I said, `No, absolutely not.' I said, `You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”
I'm tempted to wonder if Friedman isn't making a complicated philosophical point, trying to clumsily demonstrate semantic externalism by playing a moron. If the contents of Tom Friedman's brain are insufficient to understand that "free trade" does not mean the same thing in all contexts, then you can much better understand the Friedman ouvre, which proceeds from some initial judgment that some concept X is both good and an example of "free trade," and thus all examples of apparent free trade are good. You can't blame him for the mistake, but you would learn that Tom Friedman's judgments are not, in and of themselves, sufficient information with which to inform yourself.
As I said, I'm tempted, but Friedman is far too egotistical to play the moron in pursuit of some educational bit of performance art that would assumedly be revealed in Friedman's twelfth and final book: The World isn't Flat, My Metaphors Don't Make Sense, And You People Should Be More Discerning In Who You Listen To.
Instead, Friedman's comments should trigger a conversation with his editors in which being fired hangs as a distinct possibility: If Tom Friedman is indeed writing about legislation based on his gut reactions to words in their titles, he's probably not the sort of guy the New York Times wants to hand an op-ed page slot to. If he's just lying about the stratagem in order to prove how fully he's bought into the elite consensus on free trade, he should be given paid leave and sent to a psychologist until his self esteem is no longer so low that he's obsessed with being the most enthusiastic lemming in the line. In any case, this is a very stupid statement by someone who's career is predicated on the belief that he's not a very stupid man. Friedman has some 'splainin' to do.