When Tommy met Tommy

Tommy is justifiably catching a lot of shit for today's train wreck of a column, but it's one of my favorites. For years, a standard Tommy column gimmick has been to pen a letter from some world leader like President Bush or the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The point of these columns, like his recent calls for a third party made of Tom Friedmans, is that if the world leaders thought (shudder) and wrote (triple shudder!) exactly like Tommy does, all of our problems would disappear.

Today, Tommy ups the ante, envisioning a fantasy press conference in which the roles of Obama, Boehner, McConnoll, Reid and Pelosi are all played by Tom Friedman. Both Boehner and Obama give long-winded speeches where they promise to be more like Tom Friedman (including by never mentioning those icky wars that Tommy doesn't like to talk about any more.) At one point, Tommy Obama and Tommy Boehner even hug. And as a result of all this Tommy-on-Tommy love, the stock market surges like never before!

It's a bold column -- not in its ideas which are boring, conventional, and wrong -- but in Tommy's openness about the fact that he dreams (a la Buster Keaton in The Playhouse) about a world inhabited by no one but himself. Which is almost enough to make you feel a little better about the world we actually live in now.

Fire Tom Friedman