Tom Friedman has a point.

The New York Times columnist and author of the best-selling book “The World Is Flat” created a big ruckus with a recent column in which he took General Motors Corp. to task for a marketing program that insulates some buyers from rising gas prices.

GM’s “fuel price protection program” caps the price of gasoline at $1.99 a gallon for Florida and California buyers of certain vehicles, including Hummers, full-size Chevy and GMC SUVs, and several passenger car models.

Buyers must take delivery by July 5. GM will rebate the cost of fuel above $1.99 a gallon for a year.

Friedman says this marketing campaign is outrageously wrong at a time when America is addicted to unstable supplies of foreign oil and is financially supporting terrorists through imports of Middle East petroleum.

“Is there a company more dangerous to America’s future than General Motors?” Friedman says in the first paragraph of his May 31 column. “Surely, the sooner this company gets taken over by Toyota, the better off our country will be.”

Friedman said GM is like “a crack dealer looking to keep his addicts on a tight leash” by artificially easing the pain at the pump for owners of gas guzzlers.

Detroit’s reaction was swift and nearly as apoplectic as Friedman’s prose.

GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said Friedman’s column was “so over the top that it borders on psychosis.”

A Detroit News editorial suggested Friedman take a walk off the edge of his flat world.

Steve Harris, GM’s vice president of global communications, called Friedman’s column “a defamatory, uninformed opinion.”

I agree that it’s absurd to think we’d all be better off if Toyota were to buy GM. As if that’s going to happen.

Toyota is no more ethically pure than GM. Like GM, Toyota offers a full range of vehicles. And I’ll bet it would be happy if it could sell more big SUVs than market-leader GM.

And Toyota’s top North American executive, Hideaki Otaka, recently resigned over a sexual harassment charge that prompted the company to launch an investigation of its employee policies against harassment and discrimination.

But GM set itself up for attack with a too-clever marketing campaign that, however inadvertently, tells consumers they can cruise around in gas guzzlers for a year without concern for rising fuel prices.

You can almost hear Bobby McFerrin singing, “Don’t worry, drive happy.”

GM has a good story to tell about the fuel efficiency of its products. It offers more models that get 30 or more miles to the gallon than any other automaker. It has stepped up efforts to produce more hybrid vehicles, as well as more cars and trucks that can run on ethanol.

And GM continues its work on clean-burning fuel cells. Yet GM Chairman Rick Wagoner often complains that the company fails to effectively communicate its message about how the automaker boosted the fuel efficiency of its cars and trucks.

It doesn’t help when GM pushes gas guzzlers by artificially fixing the price of fuel for a time to lure buyers. Crack dealers must be impressed with that marketing strategy, though.