Off Their Meds, Installment 6,432.

Tommy Friedman was allowed out without supervision again and managed to produce and another stunningly oblivious assessment of the world as he perceives it to be outside of the Manhattan Media Bubble.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

The only logical place to go from there is to indict the one party in a Democracy that’s got too much power, right?

Logical…New York Times…you see the problem.

As if paying attention to nothing he writes even while he’s writing it, Friedman immediately reveals his fondest wish.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

So, if we could only get rid of this pesky representative republic bullshit and had some “reasonably enlightened” communists in charge we could finally get some serious work done on the Democratic platform.

And I catch grief if I impugn their motives and say the word “socialist”.

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste.

Here’s where Friedman goes way off the rails. The current version of the Republican Party in Washington is far too busy making sure it fails itself. It really doesn’t have the time to focus on President Obama.

Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

President Obama may not be a socialist (there are some tendencies there, however) but he is most certainly not a centrist to anyone with a clear frame of reference.

Clear frame of reference…New York Times…

This president is no more a centrist than I am a likely candidate to start at outside linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Barack Obama was the wet dream candidate of American progressives last year. What Friedman fails to understand is that hot-button issues like cap and trade and health care reform with a public option are the darlings of the progressives’ “To-Do” list, not the centrists’. That’s why the Democrats had to kick John Dingell out of the Energy and Commerce committee chair and replace him with Henry Waxman to get the Obama party started. Dingell has more seniority than anyone in the House and he couldn’t hang onto his chairmanship because he wasn’t far enough to the left to do what the new president wanted to do.

In what I’m sure was an unintended moment of veracity, Friedman got to the real problem when he said that the Democrats face problems with the different factions within the party. They’ve got the numbers, they just don’t have the unity.

Hmm, where have I read that before?

Friedman is upset that more Republicans won’t vote for policies that are adored by the far left Democrats. Like many these days, he doesn’t understand that bipartisanship doesn’t mean jumping on board with everything just so things will be less tense at the company picnic.

There is an arrogance exhibited by progressives when it comes to their pet causes that’s easy to understand when you consider how they operate. Their views are largely informed by an echo chamber reinforcement that the world will be as they want it simply because they want it to be that way. There’s a lot of naive 60′s idealism and precious little observance of what’s actually happening outside the front door. That’s how they’re able to ignore Al Gore’s relentless carbon footprint hypocrisy and the effects of cap and trade in places it’s already been forced upon the people. It’s definitely the only way to believe that more federal intervention leads to reduced costs and greater business efficiency.

Theirs is a politics of passionate emotion. As such, it’s unthinkable to them that others could have different priorities. After all, they just want to save the world and make it perfect, right?

It’s like falling in love with someone your parents and friends hate. You simply cannot understand why they don’t see what you see.

Until years later when you are left to deal with the aftermath of a nasty divorce because you eloped rather than listen to everyone else.