Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Thomas Friedman, "Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?": And the Name of the Mysterious Third Party Candidate?

Thomas Friedman has outdone himself in his most recent New York Times op-ed entitled "Are We Going to Roll Up Our Sleeves or Limp On?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/opinion/friedman-are-we-going-to-roll-up-our-sleeves-or-limp-on.html?hp), in which he savages Republicans and Obama, and again suggests the alternative of a mysterious third party challenge:

"We can either roll up our sleeves and do what’s needed to overcome our post-cold war excesses and adapt to the demands of the 21st century or we can just keep limping into the future.

Given those stark choices, one would hope that our politicians would rise to the challenge by putting forth fair and credible recovery proposals that match the scale of our debt problem and contain the three elements that any serious plan must have: spending cuts, increases in revenues and investments in the sources of our strength. But that, alas, is not what we’re getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent Third Party candidate in the 2012 campaign.

The Republicans have come nowhere near rising to our three-part challenge because the G.O.P. is no longer a 'conservative' party, offering a conservative formula for American renewal. The G.O.P. has been captured by a radical antitax wing, and the party’s leaders are too afraid to challenge it. What would real conservatives be offering now?"

Three questions for Tom:

- I don't think that I'm a "real conservative," notwithstanding the claims of my detractors who have positioned me a notch to the right of Genghis Khan, and I'm puzzled by what a "real conservative" looks like. Does he look anything akin to a "real newspaper columnist"?

- Tom tells us, "The Republicans have come nowhere near rising to our three-part challenge." Our three-part challenge? Who is this we?

- Tom would have us know that there remains an opening for an independent third party candidate in 2012, but who is this masked man or woman?

Maybe Friedman is saving the surprise identity of the third party hero or heroine for a future column, but might the first name of this omniscient master of economics and foreign policy, who has come to save not just the day but the century, begin with the letter "T"?

I await this revelation with bated breath . . . not.

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