Tea Party Protests, Republicans in Congress voting no, and democrats losing elections are really coming to represent altogether too much dissent for our friends on the left. Last week, Woody Allen wished aloud that Obama could be dictator for “a few years” so that “he could do a lot of good things quickly.

This week, Thomas Friedman, on Meet the Press, expressed the same kind of frustration with votes in Congress, checks and balances, and public opposition to the “good things” and “right solutions” which he understands with his own privileged insight to be necessary and desirable.

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, David, it’s been decimated. It’s been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don’t like where you’re going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control—really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that’s really what, what it’s come down to. So I don’t—I, I—I’m worried about this, it’s why I have fantasized—don’t get me wrong—but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don’t want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

Hat tip to the Barrister.