<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;"><DIV><A href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion</A></DIV>
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<DIV>The subject reference is to a movie about an accused child molester. Thomas Friedman is a pompous, pretentious, self-absorbed gasbag. But what he says indicates how (liberal) people who own the country think. Today's columan is important for a number of reasons: the promotion of a frightening "radical center" (analagous to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s promotion 60 years ago of a "vital center" to favor the invasion of Korea, etc); and the specter of the cooperation of that proto-fascist, establishment "radical center" with whatever aspect of the Tea Party movement is more authentically fascist--i.e., TP leaders and publicists, rather than the inchoate populism of many of its adherents (with nowhere else to go). And Friedman's posturing that equates the "far left" with the "far right," without mentioning their common opposition to war. Unlike pundits like Walter Lippmann of an earlier era, Friedman has no measured conception of the use of our
military--Lippmann actually opposed the Vietnam War as inconsistent with "containment", and was punished with obscurity late in his life for doing so. Friedman would not allow this to happen; thus he will support a Hindenburg cutting a deal with a Hitler, and will volunteer to write a book justifying it, which will be better than anything Goebbels could have come up with.</DIV>
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<DIV>DG</DIV>
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