A Tom to cast away stones

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Do you remember this?

last November at a conference of the Israel American Council, a lobbying group Adelson has funded, he joked in a public discussion with another wealthy Israeli: “Why don’t you and I go after The New York Times?” Told it was family owned, Adelson quipped, “There is only one way to fight it: money.” At this same conference Adelson was quoted as saying that Israel would not be able to survive as a democracy: “So Israel won’t be a democratic state,” he added. “So what?”

I certainly didn't. That's from a column by Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Vindictae (Mustache of Vengeance), today notably not in the tank for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Hedge Funds for Charter Schools, or Sucking On This, but talking instead about money in politics and in particular the money of Mr. Sheldon Adelson, which owns the government of Israel and has been buying up US Republican Congressional futures like they're going out of style, which I hope they are, but I'm not holding my breath just yet.

What is noteworthy about this piece, beyond its saying some important things that I didn't remember, or didn't know at all, is that it's 100% intelligible, free of exotic locations and name droppings, crazed neologisms, and inapposite metaphors, and the off-road prose parkour that sometimes leaves him stuck in a mud pit or anywhere except where he thought he was going in paragraph one. When Friedman writes about reality, he can actually be a pretty clean writer. Credit where credit is due.

Cynical Driftglass wants to know who the hell he's talking to; it's not us hippies, he figures, because we know all this already, and it's clearly not conservatives, because they not only know it but have trouble controlling their excited drool.

I was thinking a year or so ago that Friedman was talking directly to the Likud Party from the op-ed page of the Times, giving them warning that things didn't look so good for them if they weren't willing to change their retroactionary views on the Palestinian question; so right now I'm wondering if he might be talking to the Labor-Kadima coalition and the next Israeli PM, Isaac Herzog, if Friedman knows a little (or a lot) more than I do about what's happening over there, giving them an encouraging sense of where that old Overton window has been moving on our side. And he's writing clearly and sanely because he has something to say that's not embarrassing.

I really, uncynically hope so: an Iran deal and an Israeli government that believes in the two-state approach in the next months could change the whole way the world looks, for the better.