Maybe If We Gave The GOP Six More Months?

It turned out all that Tom Friedman needed to get him to notice the fact that the GOP has lost its damn mind was for reality to punch him in the face...

...over and over again...

...long past time when, if it was a fight, the ref would have called it.

...
The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub. 

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions. I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.
...

If this progression of fiercely defended obtuseness followed by mangled, grudging awareness being pried out of Mr. Friedman's stiff, clutching fingers (without, of course, the slightest acknowledgement that the Left has been right all along [or, as one wag put it, "Repeating as epiphany stuff thoughtful liberals have been saying for the last 30 years"]) seems familiar, that's because it is.  It exactly parallels Mr. Friedman's spectacular failure on subject Iraq, and also parallels the overall career arcs of the likes of David Brooks, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan:

So how now Tom Friedman has spectacularly and publicly shit the bed on the two most important stories in recent American history -- the war in Iraq and the catastrophic devolution of the GOP into a mob of imbeciles, bigots and anti-science Leviticans -- what do you suppose will happen to his career and reputation as a journalist and



Pulitzer Prize committee macher?

Well, if you are late to the party and still cling to the Capraesque belief that success in American journalism is based on merit, you could be forgive for believing that Mr. Friedman's career would now be in tatters.  That he would have to Lord Jim it on some obscure local paper until he had lost his sloppy, incompetent work habits and had learned to write a fucking sentence without sounding like he was trying to write greeting card verse while his brain was dying of oxygen starvation.    After which he would return, rehabilitated and chastened at begin such and fucking inept goof for so long.

But if you have followed the news for more than ten minutes you will know that nothing like that will happen to Mr. Friedman.

In fact, nothing at all will happen to him.

This column is just a ship in a bottle.  An oddity, which his fellow goof will politely ignore, and when the wind shifts slightly and the stink of CPAC madness is less fresh in his nostrels, Mr. Friedman will re-reverse himself and go right back to writing horrible columns about Centrism and "Both Sides Doing It"-ism.

And when that happens -- when Mr. Friedman goes back to lying about Centrism -- no one but a few crazy, Liberal bloggers will say a fucking word about it because like Messers Brooks, Frum, Gregory, Halperin, Sullivan, etc ad nauseum, Mr. Friedman is a member of The Club.

And America's Confederacy of Journalistic Dunces

protects their own.