Thomas Friedman's China man-crush....

Apropros our conversation yesterday about whether Thomas Friedman has fascistic tendencies given his extolling the virtues of the autocratic ability to "get stuff done" (which presumably is kind of like "making the trains run on time" in 1920's Italy)...

I saw this little nugget from NRO's Jay Nordlinger which would seem to dispel the idea that Friedman's comment was a passing one and not a core belief of his. Apparently in James Mann's 2007 work The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression, Mann quotes Friedman as saying the following in a column from several years ago:

For instance, Shanghai’s deputy mayor told me that as his city became more polluted, the government simply moved thousands of small manufacturers out of Shanghai to clean up the air. . . . At this time, when democracies, like India and America, seem incapable of making hard decisions, I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people.

The autocratic ideal is apparently something that Friedman has been a fan for a while.