In Which Tom Friedman Becomes His Own Sassy Black Friend

Tom Friedman's latest ode to America's suspiciously Tom-Friedman-esque "independents and centrists" has been rightly mocked, mostly for lines like this:

That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.

As valid as those criticisms are -- and I mean, here's Tom Friedman wishing aloud for a political movement that simultaneously represented the majority of the American public and also wanted to enact all of Tom's policy preferences, which is just about the saddest bout of narcissism committed to page ... and poor Tom can't even describe his fantasy majority party without being completely incoherent -- I submit that the line is even more spectacular in context:

That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.

Say what?

That's right, Tom Friedman just imagined you, the reader, as an ethnic supporting character on a mid-90's sitcom who was just BLOWN AWAY by the off-the-wall craziness of Friedman's vision.

"What's that, Tom Friedman? A party for extremist moderates? You better chiggity-check yourself before you wreck yourself!"

Debating Debates Debated

From the department of shooting redundant fish in a barrel department:

“I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture,” Mr. Goldberg of the National Review wrote last week, but if the figures are true, “then I think the threshold has been met.”

He added: “Debating whether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts.”

I mean, when Sarah Palin mangles a thought this badly, she's usually speaking extemporaneously and gets lost somewhere between the verb and the object. Given that this is prose, we'll just have to assume that Jonah Goldberg actually meant that there's an open debate, subject to the facts, on whether we should even be debating whether the activity which Jonah Goldberg thinks might be torture was worth it.

Seemingly.

Ugh.