...In Which We Find Thomas L. Friedman

Passed out face-first in his own Centrist vomit.

Mumbling.

Again.

Some of the chunkier bits...

"If [Barack Obama] spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go."

There is no evidence for this.

At. All.

Barack Obama had just such a mandate.

In 2008.

And the Republican Party decided that, instead of honoring the will of the voters and help to bind up the nation's many wounds, their best move was stand on the overpass of history and lob cinder-blocks into traffic.

And to the astonishment and anger of those Liberals who had given him that mandate, Barack Obama decided it was his best move to clothesline those very same Liberals and spend a staggering amount of his political capital trying to appease those very same Republicans.

"Obama aides argue that so many G.O.P. lawmakers are committed to making his presidency fail, or have signed pledges to an antitax cult, that they would never buy into any grand bargain. I think that is true for a lot of Republicans in Congress. But I have some questions: Why are the Republicans getting away with this? Why are so many independents and even Democrats who voted for Obama sitting on their hands?"

Because "Independents" tend to be cowards or dopes who can't bear the existential weight of having to make up their fucking minds, and so gravitate to hucksters like Friedman who make up ever more elaborate fairy tales about how awful both sides are.

"I think America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But when they look at Obama on the deficit, they feel something is missing."

There is no "broad center". Seriously, Tom, give us the coordinates of the planet from which you are reporting and we will send help.

What would it look like if the president was offering such leadership? First, he’d be proposing a deficit-cutting plan that matches the scale of our problem — one with substantial tax reform and revenue increases, a gasoline tax, deep defense cuts and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare.

So now that the GOP has finally dropped all pretense of civility in favor of its blood-oath to kneecap any initiative (no matter how modest) proposed by any Democratic administration (no matter how accommodating) by any means necessary (no matter how ruinous)...Barack Obama's best possible move is to should mimic the same strategy as pioneered President Mondale.

My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

Of course, Tom Friedman's "gut" has been notoriously and spectacularly wrong about virtually everything important for as long as anyone can remember, so I guess its a good thing he's as rich as Croesus. And that his rich pals let him use their media empires as his personal ideological bidet where it never matters how many times Friedman's bullshits gets debunked, disproven and generally, humiliating slammed to atoms.

Because if he had to make it on the merits, the clueless fuck would be dancing for nickels on Michigan Avenue.