The Corner - National Review Online
He Can't Stop Himself! [Jonah Goldberg via NRO]
I didn't watch "Meet the Press" this morning, and apparently very few NRO readers did either. It took someone essentially paid to watch the show, Mark Finklestein of Newsbusters, to let me know that Tom Friedman still loves to preen about his thumbless grasp of democracy, China and political decency:
TOM BROKAW: Tom, are we at a kind of turning point in America in terms of being able to make this a functioning country again, or are we dysfunctional?
TOM FRIEDMAN: Well this is what worries me. I've been saying for awhile Tom, there's only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, the Chinese form of government, and that's one-party democracy. In China, if the leadership can get around to an enlightened decision it can order it from the top down, OK. Here when you have one-party democracy, one party ruling, basically the other party just saying no, every solution is sub-optimal. And when your chief competitor in the world can order optimal and you can only produce sub-optimal? Because what happens, whether it's health care or the energy bill, votes one-through-fifty cost you a lot. Fifty to fifty-nine cost you a fortune. And vote sixty: his name's Ben Nelson! And by the time you've made all those compromises, you end up with the description David [Brooks] had of the health care bill, which is this Rube Goldberg contraption. I really hope, I hope personally it passes. I hope it works. But I can't tell you I think it's optimal.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWQwNDhiYzhhMjA2YTQwZjY3MmJjYzMzYzliNGI0N2Y=
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