Shockingly Enough, Tom Friedman Is No Fan of the Tea Party

Some guy named DrewM. writing over at the New Ledger.

Here's Friedman:

[W]hat is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.

Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world — and create good jobs here in the process. Without that, we can’t afford the health care or defense we need.

This is the plan the real Tea Party wants from its president. To implement it would require us to actually raise some taxes — on, say, gasoline — and cut others — like payroll taxes and corporate taxes. It would require us to overhaul our immigration laws so we can better control our borders, let in more knowledge workers and retain those skilled foreigners going to college here. And it would require us to reduce some services — like Social Security — while expanding others, like education and research for a 21st-century economy.

By "Real Tea Party" he means liberals such as himself who want higher taxes and an economy planned by people who went to good schools.

Drew's response:

Memo to Tom: the tea party movement in general terms isn’t about government plans, unless it’s a plan to shrink government.

...

I just love how Friedman absolutely inverts the fundamental principles of the tea party and then has the audacity to say to them,’ this new set of values, completely contrary to your own, is what you really want’.

David Frum used to knock the conservative base as the "Say It Louder" brigade -- that is, confronted with setback, our response was just to say, "Say it even louder this time."

What is Friedman doing apart from that (or any liberal, for that matter)? Confronted with a serious-minded political movement that's insisting on genuine change, what does Friedman do? What do any of them do? They say it louder.
And think they can convince us that the "Real Tea Party" should be supporting statism and even China-style corporate communism. (I mention the latter because we know what a fan of the Chinese dictatorship Friedman is.)

This is their idea of accommodating new ideas: Rejecting them entirely and just trotting out the same old tired failed policies of the past four years of Democratic rule.

posted by Ace at 03:14 PM

| Access Comments