TOM FRIEDMAN: Getting violent for peace? That’s what this report says, but here’s the passage that struck me:

[R]unning to the blogosphere is in many ways a reaction to the horrible jobs being done by Friedman and colleagues like Maureen Dowd. It’s ironic that Friedman touts the power of the Internet in his performance — “If you’re in government, watch out. The people are a superpower,” he says, and again the irony is lost on him. The man doesn’t understand that Web blogs are swallowing him alive.

A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but not entirely. For more on Friedman’s apparent problems with the actual practice of nonviolence, here’s a report from the New York Sun on the same incident. However, while Friedman may have trouble restraining his temper, I wouldn’t put him in the same writerly category as Maureen Dowd.

Here’s an odd bit from the Sun story, though:

“Tom doesn’t usually respond to those kind of inquires,”his assistant at the New YorkTimes’s Washington bureau said.

Does this mean that Friedman gets this sort of question regularly enough to have a policy on it? Surely not.