Impactfully yours, Thomas Friedman.

He's here to tell you that the Tea Party movement you see out there is actually the Tea Kettle movement "because all it’s doing is letting off steam" — and the real Tea Party movement is... well, guys like him:

The important Tea Party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level...

This = "our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship to the point of paralysis."

... and is looking for a leader with three characteristics. First, a patriot...

A patriot isn't a characteristic. It's a type of person.

Second, a leader who persuades Americans that he or she actually has a plan not just to cut taxes or pump stimulus, but to do something much larger — to make America successful, thriving and respected again.

A leader isn't a characteristic.

And third, someone with the ability to lead in the face of uncertainty and not simply whine about how tough things are — a leader who believes his job is not to read the polls but to change the polls.

Someone isn't a characteristic.

Convert those 3 items to characteristics: patriotism, leadership, and... uh... leadership. That's what the real tea partiers know and the kettlefolk can't get through their steam-puffed noggins.

Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg told me that when he does focus groups today this is what he hears: “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t....”

Here it comes. The part of the Friedman column where we find out that China does it better. This time, a pollster is rolled out to mouth what I presume is the thesis of Friedman's new best seller.

And supposedly, Friedman has told us what the "real Tea Party" is. As for the Tea Party movement that he says is fake and would like to disparage as "Tea Kettle":

That is not to say that the energy behind it is not authentic (it clearly is) or that it won’t be electorally impactful (it clearly might be)....

Impactfully yours, Thomas Friedman.

"There are several reasons why I don’t object to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site, but the key reason is my affection for Broadway show tunes."

Thomas Friedman's opening line.

I am...
	... intrigued and amused.
	... outraged and disgusted.
	... amused to think of how others must be outraged.
	... disgusted to think of NYT readers who are amused thinking of people like me getting outraged.
	... so tired of Thomas Friedman's self-loving cuteness.
pollcode.com free polls

I have now read beyond the first sentence of the column, and in case you found yourself unable to proceed, I'm here to tell you that Thomas Friedman wants us to know that he and his wife got to attend "A Broadway Celebration: In Performance at the White House," and he would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Feeling the pulsating energy of this performance was such a vivid reminder of America’s most important competitive advantage: the sheer creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together.

Some people get to experience "A Broadway Celebration: In Performance at the White House," and some people get to experience a mosque built near 9/11. Get it? If that doesn't cohere for you, remember the all-purpose glue: Diversity. When you're trying to fit things together that are completely unrelated, but, hell, you went to a White House concert and you're still pretty jazzed up by it, remember you can stick most anything together with goopy diversity.

Please be creative and express yourself with diverse pulsating energy in the comments.

ADDED: 1. The poll seems to be malfunctioning. [AND: Looks okay now.] 2. "built near 9/11" isn't really the right way to say built near the WTC site, but something made me say it that way, and I will leave it as is.

"No one ever said it better than Osama bin Laden."

When people see a column by Thomas Friedman and a humor piece in The New Yorker, by nature they will....

By nature they would... what?
	Go buy the latest Thomas Friedman bestseller.
	Subscribe to The New Yorker.
	Increase their devotion to the Republican Party.
	Breathe a sigh of relief that Barack Obama is President.
	Bitch and snark about it all in the Althouse comments section.
pollcode.com free polls

"[W]hat if we could just be China for a day?... You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions...."

"... and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment.  I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness.  But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions."

So said Thomas Friedman on "Meet the Press" today. And the funniest part of him saying that wasn't the horrible vision of America as a dictatorship.... though it must be hilarious to think of America as a dictatorship, because famous funnyman Woody Allen said it too: "It would be good… if [President Obama] could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly." Nor was it the fact that he said it and at the same time tried to deny that he was saying it with all that "I don't want to be China for a second, OK" business.

No, the funniest part was that he said it right after he deplored the way the political center has been "decimated" in part by the "an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going." He's reminding us Internet folk of our lynch-mob powers and then throws us the rope to hang him with that wish that "we could just be China for a day." Come on, everybody, let's destroy Thomas Friedman for saying he knows all the "right solutions" and wishes — or would wish if he could get away with it — that we could have a dictatorship to get it done. 

A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer. There's this idea that the right answers are known and the people are just too deluded and distorted to see what they are and to vote for them. And Friedman openly deplores the internet, which decimates moderation because there are people like me who who persecute elite truthbearers like him. Ooh! It's a lynch mob. Ha. Sorry. I don't want the rope. I just want to laugh at you.

It's late now. Let me sign off with a crazy old song that supposed to be beautiful but that's really dreadful, the way Friedman's lament is dreadful:

If I ruled the world, every man would be as free as a bird,
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
If I ruled the world every man would say the world was his friend
There'd be happiness that no man could end
No my friend, not if I ruled the world
Every head would be held up high
There'd be sunshine in everyone's sky
If the day ever dawned when I ruled the world

Nighty-night.

Thomas Friedman is puzzled: Obama "speaks so well" yet he "can’t come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics."

Look out. Here it is again: the "he speaks well" compliment that white people bestow on black people. It was embarrassing and hackneyed 40 years ago. But still it lives.

Saying "hope" and "change" in a campaign speech isn't much like selling specific policies. Friedman blurs the difference with the notion of "explain[ing]...  politics" with "a clear, simple, repeatable narrative." (By the way, I loathe that word "narrative." It's a synonym for "story" that sounds fancier and has the advantage of not also being a synonym for "lie.")

Friedman muses over the puzzle he's constructed for himself — why Obama hasn't found the right words to grease our gullets so we'll accept what he'd like to ram down:

[I]nstead of making nation-building in America...

That's one of Friedman's phrases: nation-building in America. It implies that we haven't yet built a nation. Think of the depth of the disrespect to the Framers of the Constitution and all who have worked on their construction.

[I]nstead of making nation-building in America his overarching narrative and then fitting health care, energy, educational reform, infrastructure, competitiveness and deficit reduction under that rubric, the president has pursued each separately. This made each initiative appear to be just some stand-alone liberal obsession to pay off a Democratic constituency — not an essential ingredient of a nation-building strategy — and, therefore, they have proved to be easily obstructed, picked off or delegitimized by opponents and lobbyists.

So “Obamism” feels at worst like a hodgepodge, at best like a to-do list... and not the least like a big, aspirational project that can bring out America’s still vast potential for greatness.

Now, why would we let him do that? We would be imbeciles to accept some big abstraction and not pay attention to the details.  Friedman is talking about what Obama should have done to retain the support of voters like me who don't automatically vote for Democrats, but who thought Obama was more likely than McCain to deal with the various problems we faced in the next 4 years.

I can tell you that I am not distracted by the feeling of having "a big, aspirational project." It wouldn't lull me. It would alarm me. I don't care about the labels and generalities. I voted for Obama the Pragmatist, not Obama the Ideologue or Obama the Lefty.

You know, what Friedman calls "a hodgepodge" or "a to-do list" would be perfectly fine with me. Just make the items on the list — or in the pot — good ones.

ADDED: In the comments  american girl in italy said:

You are kidding [about "he speaks so well"], aren't you? You think this was a racist slam? Everyone in the free world has proclaimed Obama to be the world's best speaker. How many times have we heard he is the master of oratory, the world's best speaker.

Let me call in Chris Rock for some backup. (NSFW audio)("'He speaks so well! He's so well spoken. I mean he really speaks so well!' Like that's a compliment. 'He speaks so well' is not a compliment, okay? 'He speaks so well' is some sh*t you say about ret**ded people that can talk," etc.)

"Avoid the term 'global warming'," Thomas Friedman says. "I prefer the term global weirding.'”

Because, apparently, then anything that happens can be evidence of the thing you need to be true so you can have the policy changes you wanted anyway, but for reasons people wouldn't support because they weren't scary enough. And "weirding" sounds scary.

Friedman is quite absurd. He begins his column by mocking people who are saying "because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes."

But then he turns around and says "The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever."

So weather is not climate — which, duh — but he still wants to use weather as climate. And he even gets to say that cold is evidence of heat, because we shouldn't be saying heat anymore, we should be talking about weirdness.

Come on, that's really weird.

***

I see the analogy between global warming and the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the Iraq war. Those who planned the war believed there were other good reasons to go to war with Iraq, but they made a decision to use weapons of mass destruction as the reason to go to war, because they thought people could understand this reason and unite behind the war effort. But then, when the WMD were not found, the war looked like a big mistake.

Now, think about the analogy. Think about how people support the policies that are supposed to deal with global warming — renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc. — and what other reasons they have for wanting those policies. Think about why they would decide to rely on the global warming prediction rather than those other reasons, and how they will need to scramble if the global warming theory proves untrue or is no longer believed.

If global warming were the only reason for doing the things that are needed to deal with global warming, then no scrambling is required. We can simply be happy about it. But the scrambling... that's what shows that people wanted the policies anyway.  And maybe they are right! Maybe going to war in Iraq was right even without WMD.

So why not stress the other arguments for renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc.? Because it's not scary enough! Running low on traditional fossil fuel — the old energy crisis — just isn't crazy-making enough to get the public to accept great sacrifice and pain.

"President Obama is so much better when he takes a heated, knotty issue... and talks to the country like adults."

"He is so much better at making us smarter than angrier. Going to war with the banks for a quick political sugar high after an electoral loss will just work against him and us. It will spook the banks into lending even less and slow the recovery even more."

Thomas Friedman said, making me struggle — dumbly — to remember when Obama made me smarter.

"I feel like we're like an unemployed couple who just went out and decided to adopt a special needs baby."

"You know, I mean, that's really kind of what we're doing. And that's like, whoa, y'know, that terrifies me."

Special-needs columnist Thomas Friedman attempts to say something about Afghanistan.

ADDED: From March 2008, another Friedmanism:

What's so bad about hypocrisy?

"Does it matter how much salt Mayor Bloomberg puts on his food?... It reminds me of how people love to point out that Al Gore and Thomas Friedman don't do the best job of minimizing their own carbon emissions."

The books Obama is supposedly reading on his vacation.

The list:

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

I never believe Presidents are actually reading the books their people tell us they're reading, so, for me, the only question is what they thought they were saying with these titles and why they thought it was a good idea to say that.

If you could pick a book for Obama to read — actually read — what book would you pick? If he could make you read a book of his choice, what do you think it would be? If you picked political books or history books or economics books, please pick again and be more out there so this late night discussion isn't too boring.

***

I'm just noticing that all Obama's books are written by men. Maybe these really are the books he's reading. If it's PR, his PR people have a big blind spot.

ADDED: Didn't everyone who wanted to read that bloated John Adams book already read it? And wasn't Obama supposed to be reading that Tom Friedman book last year?

Friedman’s dumb books full of “I went golfing somewhere in India, reminding me of the Asian pizza I ate at the airport in Dubai” globalization-fellating idiocy are Required Reading in certain middlebrow circles....

[O]nce “going green” became so safely uncontroversial that motherfucking Garfield was eating solar-powered lasagna, it was time for Tom Friedman to incoherently rebuke everything he ever wrote before — about Earth and how for some insane reason he thinks saying it’s “flat” is some deep enigmatic statement of the times rather than, really, just an idiot trying to make up a catch phrase. So, once the carbon-farting global golfer hitched his tortured prose to the Green bandwagon, everybody in every management situation had to act like they read this awful book.

But they didn’t. Nobody read the whole thing. Of course it’s still on Barack Obama’s fake reading list. And there it will stay, year after year, just like back in the 1990s when Dan Quayle comically claimed that he tried (and failed) to read Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince each summer, because that seemed — to Dan Quayle, anyway — like the kind of thing a politician maybe should’ve know about, 20 years ago.