Friedman Misses Reality, Again

Friedman's big problem is that he wants to be a moderate, and thinks that means being non-partisan.  The problem of course is that he has, through unfathomable efforts of willful blindness, failed to notice that while Republicans are !@#$%^& CRAZY, the Democrats have stayed more or less attached to that thing called "reality."  So when he opened his column today with the observation that both parties in New Zealand would qualify as Democrats in the USA, I had high hopes.  He continued to raise these hopes when he entirely focused on Republican leaning reasons for polarization (a fired-up religious base), and used climate change as the example of desirable moderation (where the ideas 'down under' match the ideas in the Democratic party).

So, I was, much like Charlie Brown fooled yet again by Lucy, knocked flat on my rhetorical rear by his conclusion that

...we have the worst of all worlds right now. The days when there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, who nudged the two parties together, appear over. We don’t have compulsory voting. Special interest money is out of control, and we lack any credible Third Party that could capture enough of the center to force both Democrats and Republicans to compete for votes there.

Somehow he got from a big pile of evidence that the Democrats represent the entire span of sane politics, and the Republicans have gone crazy, and reached his standard conclusion of "its polarized, and everybody's to blame!"  Good Grief!