Every good big does fine

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Miraculi (Mustache of Wonder), is a Liberal (i.e. a worshiper in the cult of Father Liber and his consort Libera whose feast the Romans celebrated on the future St. Patrick's Day and in similar fashion except without dyeing the beer; then again it did feature a very large phallus image held aloft through a street parade, garlanded at the end by a virtuous matron), and therefore attached to certain ideas that you and I do not necessarily oppose, in spite of the [jump]

Liber and Libera. Drawing by Georg Friedric Creuzer (1771-1858) cited in The Pictorial Language of Hieronymus Bosch by Clement A. Wertheim Aymes (via hub pages)

infelicities of his infra-Kipling style; when he's hot on one of these you might feel it's best to just leave him alone to maybe convert two or three of his Sunday-show admirers, and this is the case today where he's pushing a grand carbon tax as a solution to three or four unrelated problems.

But there's some useful insight that he's hiding from in his last paragraph:

“Margaret Thatcher’s big ideas set the context for the creation of New Labour,” said Don Baer, the former Clinton administration communications chief. “Ronald Reagan’s big ideas did the same for the New Democrats.” Maybe only big ideas from President Obama can give birth to New Republicans — and the revival of the country. Competition works. But if we treat every good big idea as “dead on arrival” then so are we.

The "competition works" sentence there looks like a bow to the market-cultist argument against carbon taxes, which the Mystax has forgotten to mention up to this point: translated from talking-points form into English, it means, "Of course, like every other Serious person, I accept that these decisions are best left to the Numina that always straighten everything out with their invisible hands, but then I also believe in government intervention when I can figure out how it's supposed to work" (because Friedman is a true believer in Fitzgerald's Axiom on the first-rate intelligence).

What it's about is that one of the problems he wants to solve is that of the demise of the Republican party (yes, that's a problem, if you believe, unlike George Washington*, that bipartisanship is a value in its own right above and beyond whether your parties have anything to say or not); he figures that some of that carbon tax could offset some of those billionaires' taxes and death taxes** and the like and therefore be something Mr. Boehner could organize a "yes" around, which I'm not holding my breath for.

But since we know Friedman is one of the fonts of wisdom President Obama goes to for good ideas on the left (including good big ideas, I'm guessing), there's at least some entertainment value in wondering how the president might go about implementing this one for turning the Party of Rabies into nice Republicans who will lie on their back and allow their tummies to be tickled.

How would you go about emulating Thatcher's and Reagan's successes in creating a docile opposition devoted to preserving your legacy, only in the other direction on the ideological compass? I guess you could dredge the swamps for some of your party's most beloved ideas, offer to implement them, but then do it in a deeply compromised fashion so that it would not actually have much effect on the economic situation; then shop around for small-scale, low-mortality wars to give the jingo public something to howl about; and then finally run around boasting about how you had brought on a permanent revolution and destroyed your namby-pamby enemies forever and ever, amen.

Oh, wait... The Keynesian helicopter drop (not quite), universal health care (not quiter), redistribution of wealth through the tax system (not!), the war on Libya (Shores of Tripoli Redux!)... Obama's done it all already, except for the boasting part. If Friedman's right, all he needs to do now is to trot out the slogans (Peace Jobs & Justice, and End the Era of Small-Minded Government Now) and some of those nice golf club Republicans will be around grinning and shambling like Tony Blair to take care of the carbon tax themselves! It's how bipartisanship works!

By Kaptain Karmel, at Newgrounds.

*Fom the Farewell Address:

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

**I don't know, by the way, if all you Marxists realize that Mrs. Friedman is nowhere near as highly taxed as she used to be, the family fortune having undergone the largest real estate bankruptcy in history in the course of 2009. I'm not saying they're poor, but they're no longer Koch Brothers rich; it's the Mystax who's paying the bills nowadays, with his literary endeavors and speaking gigs, and that has to be less in conflict-of-interest territory on tax issues than he used to to be. It must be fun at Thanksgiving to have ex-billionaires be the ones who always bring the crappy cranberry appetizer!