There are some false dichotomies in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column denigrating what he calls the Tea Kettle movement (such as that diagnosing symptoms somehow makes it impossible to offer policies, that popularity makes a movement automatically suspect, etc.), but he does get a couple of things very right: the description of what kind of presidential and congressional leadership is needed today, the point that real decisions about spending cuts have to be made if the current public dissatisfaction with government is to have any policy relevance (although he actually denies this as a possibility), and above all, what America’s competitive advantage 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.” Of course Friedman, like today’s elites in general, tends to think that nothing happens except what’s reported in his own dreadful newspaper, so he claims that the Tea Party people were content with the Bush years of spending hikes. That is a falsehood, at the very least in the important sense that he is making an unfounded positive

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