A. "Yes?"
Q. "You have been found guilty of treason, how do you plead?"
A. "Progressive!"
Q. "Do you want a blindfold?"
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 09/09/2009 3:24:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman again showed a disturbing affection for China's dictatorship in his Wednesday column attacking Republican stubbornness on health care and climate change legislation ("Our One-Party Democracy"). Friedman pleaded for "enlightened" autocrats, able to get things accomplished against the will of the people, for their own good.
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.
As a bonus delusion, Friedman calls the big-spending, "czar"-crazy Barack Obama a centrist.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.
Friedman has praised Communist China's power to get things done before. In an August 27, 2008 column during the Summer Olympics, hosted by Beijing, he praised the "concentrated state power" of China.
China did not build the magnificent $43 billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work.
That "national mobilization" included displacing over a million of its citizens to make way for Olympic pageantry, something Friedman didn't bother mentioning -- making his paeans to China's "concentrated state power" rather sinister.
My MRC colleague Tim Graham also caught Friedman wishing that America could be "China for a day" on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central in November 2008, as a way of pushing his green agenda through.
Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online, author of "Liberal Fascism," sees Friedman's column today as a perfectly horrible example of such a worldview:
So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks" to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these "drawbacks" pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.
I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it's the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today).
—Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times.
The Chicoms know how to deal with “Townhalls”.
Thomas Freidman married Anne Bucksbaum, whose family owns billions in real estate. He can afford to be a Communist.
A. "Yes?"
Q. "You have been found guilty of treason, how do you plead?"
A. "Progressive!"
Q. "Do you want a blindfold?"
I was reading recently that they've been brutalized in this latest downturn. I'm not sure they're even worth an even billion anymore, FWIW.
Incidentally, you should Google for a picture of his Potomac, MD home. It's obscenely enormous, with a "carbon footprint" of a large African village(s). Friedman is another one of the "do as I say, not as I do" crowd.
“Enlightened” autocrats — now there’s an oxymoron!
In China, the trains run on time. Or else.
As Glenn Beck said recently, when did it become ok to talk about, be involved with, praise and promote communism, Marxism? As a soldier of the cold war this is unbelievable it’s like a badge of honor on the left. When is America going to wake the F...k up. It’s bad enough we are now losing the WOT, OOPS, overseas contingency operation, now communism is again rearing it’s ugly head right here in what use to be the bastion of the free world. Freedom is under serious attack and we may need to do more than tea parties and town halls, but NOTHING violent please..
We never start the violence.
However, we will not turn the other cheek when are neighbors are attacked.
Never again.
arg, are=our (was going to say “when we are attacked”)
I wonder if this enlightened man has ever been to a Chinese hospital or clinic, where the people wait for hours to see a doctor, and where relatives do the nursing work if the patient is admitted, and where only the rich or foreigners get the best care. Or, how about a Chinese orphanage, where children with correctable special needs are not treated, except when foreign charities step up to take care of it. Communist China works great for the powerful, not so great for the weak.
I hear you, we don’t start it but we will damn sure finish it.
No matter how it starts we will be blamed,
The Comedian to SeekAndFind
Q. “Thomas Friedman?”
A. “Yes?”
Q. “You have been found guilty of treason, how do you plead?”
A. “Progressive!”
Q. “Do you want a blindfold?”
= = =
LOVE IT.
“Enlightened” autocrats — now there’s an oxymoron!”
I know what you mean. But not according to the “truly enlightened”. Roosevelt and all the other enlightened autocrats of his day were great admirers of Mussolini. Right up until he threw in with Hitler.
The truly enlightened (Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, and other revered figures) were all for eugenics and forced sterilization of the unfit, as well as the “lower races” like Jews, Italians, Negroes, Irish Catholics, Australian Aborigines etc, depending on whatever all knowing celebrity you listened to. But that also went out of style after Hitler stunk up the place.
Remember when most of the world’s population were going to die from starvation before 1986? Or when the truly enlightened actually got their way and banned DDT. We still have brown pelicans, but malaria, which DDT wiped out, returned with a vengeance and killed more than a hundred millions of people. Way more than Hitler and Stalin put together.
You just can’t find people who believe in stuff like that any more. I mean you can, but you would have to look for Obama’s cabinet members.
That’s what I meant. Autocracy is the first stage of totalitarianism. I don’t think of totalitarians as “enlightened.” But I know what you have in mind.
I know that’s what you meant. I was just taking your idea and running with it. Like all of the “enlightened” think they are “truly enlightened”, because they go to the right cocktail parties. So if a “truly enlightened” autocrat had read your post, he would assume (wrongly) that that your “Enlightened” autocrats remark doesn’t apply to him.
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