Friedman Units

is what the progressive bloggers began calling six-month periods of time, snarkily alluding to NYT columnist, social gadfly and self-proclaimed know-it-all Tom Friedman's record of being consistently wrong about the Iraq war. He was prone to repeating every six months or so that it would be just another six months and everything would turn around.
He's been wrong about more than that and is a blatant hypicrite, as so many pundits are.
Which is why I resisted vociferously a friend's urgent call to read his new book.
Now Matt Taibbi puts it in eloquent perspective (although I have no idea what porn-stached means.)

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.