In his column in yesterday’s New York Times, Tom Friedman waddled into the Obama “talk with our enemies” thicket:
I swear, I hate to sound like a broken record, but that’s not at all what Obama said. For the umpteenth time, let’s go to the video tape:
Lord knows I’m not as sensitive to subtlety as Tom Friedman, but I don’t see anything about “advancing our interests” in either the text or the subtext above. Perhaps Obama’s actual pledge was so mind-blowingly idiotic, Friedman couldn’t make it compute and had to substitute a more sensible pledge in its place. Of course, what Friedman did here is erect an extremely clumsy straw man. Even working at Neocon central, I’ve never heard anyone say we should avoid talking to other nations, even our enemies, when it’s in our interest to do so. You’d have to be pretty dense to believe otherwise. The point of difference is determining when it’s in our interests to talk with our enemies. And this is where Barack Obama occupies a fringe so lunatic that Tom Friedman refuses to acknowledge it. Obama apparently believes that it is always in our interests for an American president to engage in shuttle diplomacy with our malefactors. Now, it may just be that Obama believes that it’s only in our interests to have such meetings when a golden throated orator such as himself is representing us. After all, his self regard is becoming legendary. Or he may believe that even John McCain should catch the first flight to Pyongyang after his Inaugural to begin “bridging the gap” with Kim Jong Il. Like so many of Obama’s positions on serious issues, his stance here is half-baked and still “evolving.”
