One of the More Startling Uglinesses the Trump Administration Has Revealed...

...is the The New York Times is still paying The Mustache of Understanding actual money to poop words out onto its op-ed page.

Dems, You Can Defeat Trump in a Landslide
You can promise voters something our narrow-minded president won’t.

Wow!  That's great news Tom.  How exactly will Democrats accomplish this impossible thing?

What would this super ticket look like? Well, I suggest Sanders — and Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be his most viable long-term challenger — lay it out this way:

“I want people to know that if I am the Democratic nominee these will be my cabinet choices — my team of rivals. I want Amy Klobuchar as my vice president. Her decency, experience and moderation will be greatly appreciated across America and particularly in the Midwest. I want Mike Bloomberg (or Bernie Sanders) as my secretary of the Treasury. Our plans for addressing income inequality are actually not that far apart, and if we can blend them together it will be great for the country and reassure markets. I want Joe Biden as my secretary of state. No one in our party knows the world better or has more credibility with our allies than Joe. I will ask Elizabeth Warren to serve as health and human services secretary. No one could bring more energy and intellect to the task of expanding health care for more Americans than Senator Warren...

It goes on like that.  And on.  And on.  And on.  And just when you think this very bad acid flashback has peaked and you're coming in for a landing...

I am asking Mitt Romney to be my commerce secretary. He is the best person to promote American business and technology abroad — and it is vital that the public understands that my government will be representing all Americans, including Republicans.

On one beat or another, Tom Friedman has been drawing a paycheck from the Sulzberger family for 28 years.

28 years.

And for the last decade on that teat, he has returned over and over again to his creepy fetish for a Sensible Center Frankenparty stitched together out of his favorite bits of various humans who have momentarily captured his attention.  This is from a Columbia Journalism Review's article from 2011:

Over the weekend, The New York Times op-ed page published one of Tom Friedman’s periodic columns about the need for a uprising of the “radical center.” It was, unsurprisingly, terrible. Though the details of these columns change with each iteration—this one relied heavily on a new initiative called Americans Elect, which brings together two of Friedman’s favorite things, wealthy people and the Internet—the basic wrongheadedness does not.

Friedman’s idea seems to be that if only we can find some reform that will allow us to “break the oligopoly of the two-party system,” it might, someday, be possible for someone who holds 90 percent of Barack Obama’s stated policy positions—plus support for a carbon tax—to assume a position of power. Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—maybe because some fantasy vice president (Michael Bloomberg?) applies some of his “pragmatic independent” pixie dust?—political dysfunction disappears, and a magical new era of “superconsensus” to solve our “superhard” problems is ushered in. Startlingly, this consensus seems to closely reflect many of Friedman’s personal policy preferences.

Friedman has been engaged in third-party wishcasting for at least five years now; Brendan Nyhan’s excellent, running blog post on third-party media hype records that back in the 2006 election cycle, Friedman longed for a “Geo-Green Party.” His “radical center” phase, though, seems to be inspired by the Tea Party era. Friedman has devoted columns to this mythical middle at least three times since spring 2010. They’re as predictable as the tides, or a hackneyed lede about a conversation with a taxi driver or tech entrepreneur.

...

At this point, there is no reason to attribute anything other that the worst possible motives to the Sulzberger family for keeping hacks like Ffriedman on the payroll decades after they've rocketed past their sell-by day.

I Want Just Enough Socialism To Make Charlie Sykes Weep Tears of Blood