Thomas Friedman of The New York Times writes a despicable and embarrassing column today. Jonah Goldberg rightly calls him a Liberal Fascist.
Here’s Mr. Friedman’s opener (emphasis mine) and the article is here:
Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Let that sink in for a moment…. Now pull your fists out of the wall. Consider the immorality of that paragraph. If only we were more like China Obama could get things done. (I take this opportunity to re-recommend Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism). Of course Friedman’s China-love reminds me of this:
China bulldozed and relocated millions of people to build their Swim Cube. No asking no “just compensation” or “Due Process” just “Taking”. And no thank you either.
Back to Friedman:
“Just because Obama is on a path to give America the Romney health plan with McCain-style financing, does not mean the Republicans will embrace it — if it seems politically more attractive to scream ‘socialist,’ ” said Miller (ed.:Matt Miller, a former Clinton budget official and author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.
The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.
Of course there’s no mention that the “Romney plan” is tanking in Massachusetts under the weight of its own costliness. If only those nasty old Republicans would give up their principles and follow Mr. Obama — the strongman that is Viagra to Friedman’s vision of a “competitive” America. In Friedman’s America I guess we break as many eggs as the Chinese to make a better omelet. We are neither Confucian nor Communist. We, the United States of America are the zenith of human liberty in this world — in its history. We are at a crossroads… people like Thomas Friedman and apparently Mr. Friedman himself, who will see no resulting drop in their standard of living will countenance a drop in the rest of ours. The article is a disgusting display for which Friedman and The New York Times should be ashamed.
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China is committed to clean energy?!?! For the love of God – how can one person be that big of a friggin’ idiot?!?!
I’ll tell you about China, the China that is building an average of one coal-fired power plant per week. China builds those plants with pollution control equipment (just like we do in the states) so they can claim to be clean. Then, because the “enlightened state” doesn’t want any parasitic load (ie, using some of the plants power to run the pollution control equipment) they don’t run it. Orders are: push all the power onto the grid that you can. One exception of course, during the Olympics they ran their controls – in the plants that were UPWIND of Beijing.
Electric cars? Rrrrright. They are coal powered cars kids – think about that.
The Chinese make noise about reducing greenhouse gases, but it’s just that – so much noise. They are laughing all the way to the bank, as we goof around with “green energy”, making production ever more expensive and they get the benefit. Crap and trade would do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases – it would just move their origin halfway across the globe.
I need to punch something…
Yup, the laughter just starting to die from the “clean energy” bit. One line in a column just filled with so much crap of bull, but that was my favorite doozy, judge.
I finished reading this and sat there wil my jaw in my lap. I don’t friggin’ believe that this idiot not only has a job, but has a job on a major journalism outlet.
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Stalin’s butchery of the people was “historically inevitable”. That’s as cold and calculating – and removed from any sense of reality – as is “final solution”. WTF gives these people the right to declare themselves superior to us, and can do whatever they want to us?
The guy must have a theoretical life.
And he conveniently leaves out any mention of the culture and practice of Chinese gov’t. atrocities against it’s own citizenry. “Political” prisoners in the form of dissidents, Christians, etc.
My niece spent a year teaching in China. She meant to stay 3 years, but the air in her city was so awful she got sick and had to come home to the nasty, polluting, un-Green U.S.
Just wow. Does anyone notice the wackos are really not dancing around anymore and are just coming out asking for Communism? Can we officially refer to the whole concept of Leftism as an anti-American ideal?
I’m typing this with one hand because my fist is still in the wall…
How infuriating! Mr. Sideous took the words right out of my fingers.
How the f*ck do these geniuses think we got here?! How could a country so poorly organized develop into the world power that we are? Did Mr. Friedman ever stop to ask himself that question?! Any debate about what politics will work best for the future is speculation. Mr. Friedman and his buddies at the NYT can stand around the water cooler and talk about the Red Chinese and their wonderful political structure all afternoon long but which country and which political system is it that has weathered all the technological and global changes that occurred between 1776 and 2009 to dominate the world?
Mr. Friedman? Do you think there’s something coming down the pike more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution? More disruptive than Hitler’s “final solution?” More disruptive than Samuel Morse or Alexander Bell’s inventions? More disruptive than the Civil War? More disruptive than the Great Depression? Which country weathered all of that change and came out on the other side kicking the world’s *ss? Every time?!
Do these people think that was all just an accident? How can somebody be so well educated, and so well spoken, yet be so utterly lacking in common sense and reason?
“clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry”
What an idiotic statement! Has this mental giant ever worked in a factory? Has he ever heard the words “continuous improvement?” Every reasonable sized company in the U.S. has teams of people focused on improving every process that company does; from making widgets to filing memos and sending e-mails. Every year those companies get more and more efficient. Pollution is waste. Waste is not profitable. Whether an employee is a brilliant light worker, like Mr. Friedman, or a heartless, soulless Republican, that employee wants to reduce waste. Less waste means more money.
Millions of Americans go to work every morning focused on reducing, re-using and recycling. It’s how business has always worked. Look at what Henry Ford’s assembly line did for the environment. Prior to Henry Ford the raw materials that went into a car were moved many more times, over many, many more inches, feet, yards and miles. Lots and lots of waste. The more efficient, the less waste. The less waste, the less pollution.
It is literally the freakin’ definition of Capitalism!! As Rich so intelligently points out in his comment, if the Red Chinese decide to dump toxins in a lake for a decade, they’ll do it. That’s the power one party rule with no competition has, and that’s what they’ll do. Those situations will not, cannot, exist for long in a free, Capitalist society. Residents will sue. Competitors will find a better way. The perpetrator won’t want to waste the resources and raw materials.
AAAAAaaaaaaaaagghhhhhh!!!!!! I am so mad I could spit! How can these people be this dumb? I literally cannot comprehend it.
This guy actually believes a centralized government ruled by only one party will be more innovative and more efficient than a de-centralized system with free input from all.
Thomas Friedman literally thinks that… and he gets paid to write about politics and history…. and he relly believes that?! I think I was about 13 the last time that sounded like a good idea to me, and then I grew up and started reading history and got a job in a factory.
Is today April 1st? I am at a complete loss to explain this article.
I’m thinking we’re going to read and hear more of this. They believe that since they’re guy is in the white house, and they have this window of opportunity, they can just decloak and say whats really been on their tiny minds for the last 25 years.
“…they can just decloak and say whats really been on their tiny minds for the last 25 years.”
Spot on. Now we just need to get Stat back into The Enterprise to blow the bastards into next week.
they’re= their oops
I’m all kinds of worked up.
Back in the ’30s, the chattering classes thought it was cool and hip to state how Americans would be so much better off in the Soviet Union enjoying the benefits of communism. Of course, they had an excuse for such ignorance. This was a time before the information age, and little did the West hear of the horrors of Uncle Joe’s paradise. What little that did get out was sanitized and the few reporters allowed in like the New York Times’ Walter Duranty was in the tank for Stalin. Well, flash forward seventy years, and another famous New York Times employee has declared that tyranny for our age is a good thing. However, there is no excuse for Mr. Friedman’s ignorance. Despite China’s “enlightened” censorship of the internet and the press, we know very well what goes on there. Forced abortions, labor camps, political prisoners, mass executions and no freedom of speech. But who cares about political terror and oppression when the Chinese are using paper bags and fluorescent light bulbs, right Mr. Freidman? This, my friends, is why people show up at Tea Party events and raise hell at townhalls.
How big must the echo chamber at the NYT be to keep this guy this clueless?
This is pretty par for the course. I have heard family members not saying which one saying this kind of crap. Its not only un American, its not even humane. Where in all the gloriousness of Western Culture from the first Stick Man Drawing on a cave in Germany to the magnificence of the Renaissiance does this kind of crap fit? I’ll tell you, it is because the Enlightenment. Sorry to burst agnostic bubbles but when you sacrifice the indivudual for the collective and the Enlightenment was hand in hand with these devils you get Fascism of this sort. There is no coincidence that Darwin and Marx were born of the same century.
Question: How come we cannot have so called Rationality and Faith together in one place? Tell me oh leftists monks why can’t you people get the point that you are wrong. You are all Amoral and you know it and yet you keep doing what you are doing. Why?
Stephanie,
I can’t prove, nor disprove your theory, but I think this kind of reasoning leads to the other side citing all the travesties the Church did prior to the Enlightenment, and then it quickly dissolves to a meaningless debate with one side complaining about the Crusades and the other about the Killing Fields. At the end of the day, we’ve got the history we’ve got, and we’ve got the today we’ve got. We can’t change what came before, but we can learn from it.
I agree wholeheartedly with your belief that placing the individual above the collective leads to a productive, safe and free society and that’s a message we need to keep reiterating. The one argument they can never refute is how immensely successful the U.S. is. If it’s such a failed system how has it produced so much? What major world government has withstood WWI, WWII, the Industrial revolution, the Communication age, the Space age, nuclear weaponry… and dominated throughout? Only one. Even though the U.S. is young, it’s pretty old compared to most industrialized nations; Germany, Japan, China, Russia, France… How did we get so old? How did we succeed so often? So well? Make them defend their statements. They don’t hold up.
well yeah for every Shakespearian Masterpiece for every snippet we have of Aristolian logic we have a few idiots running around. However the Crusades is a poor example. Why? The Crusades were a counter attack against a growing Islamic Menace. We have sadly been led to believe somehow fighting back the insane armies of Mohammed was a bad thing. Had we been able to have a decent colony in Jerusalem we might have a different world. However, no one wanted to live in that area. Go, be a pilgrim and then go back to your castle in Scotland or Germany. Our ultimate problem was that we couldn’t man a force with the logistics to keep Jerusalem once we had it. Do I feel bad about the muslims beheaded, no. Why? Thats war.
Stephanie,
I don’t disagree, but, as you’ve probably seen with your liberal family members, they’ll take any excuse they can to trash Western culture. Any debate that focuses on a list of atrocities in human history and attempting to pin an ideology to it is a wormhole for folks who are not clear, logical thinkers. A lot of those folks just don’t have the focus.
So, concede the Crusades to them, the Inquisition… Who cares? Don’t let them trap you into an endless case of trying to defend your version of history, MAKE THEM DEFEND THEIRS. “Mr. Friedman, how do you explain the unparalleled success of the United States in the past 233 years? All the countries of the world faced similar difficulties during the same period yet the U.S, with its unplanned, decentralized structure came out ahead in every single case. How did that happen? Why did that happen?”
Think of it like your beloved Packers. If someone makes some stupid statement about football dynasties that goes against Lombardi you’d point to Vince’s victories. They are proof his methods were successful. You can’t argue with success. All the countries and governments of the world tried to progress in the last 233 years. Which nation did it best? Not perfect, but best.
Maybe this is what he meant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGJoaHr2QdM
Well, they do have a solution to the long organ donor waiting lists. Just harvest the organs from the people you execute (murder).
Excuse me if someone has already made this point (I read most, but not all of the above), but all you need to know about Friedman’s column is the phrase below:
“…when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people…”
Translated from the original Chinese, what Friedman means by that phrase is “when led by people like me, and preferably by me myself and my like-minded friends”.
Got it, peons – now bend over.
It’s like Friedman’s saying, “Who died and made the people the boss?
Iowahawk got this one out quickly:
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y95/jeffboulton/demotivate/efficiency.jpg