Not everything in Tom Friedman’s latest column is wrong or stupid, but where it isn’t that, it’s terribly boring. And I should be clear, it’s not boring because what he says is so conventional. It’s boring because he says the same thing week after week after week. In column after column it goes like this: China’s awesome. America’s not, but it could be if it became more like China and bossed around its citizens and businesses without paying heed to their wishes. Dick Cheney’s wrong. And — always! — my feelings are the newspeg. You’d at least think he’d grow weary of telling us how envious he is of China’s leaders. He at least waters down the sycophancy with a mention of Taiwan this week:

Am I going isolationist? No, but visiting the greater China region always leaves me envious of the leaders of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, who surely get to spend more of their time focusing on how to build their nations than my president, whose agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants.

Oh, foul democracy! How easily distracted you are by murderous terrorist conspiracies! If only we could have a system where such deaths could be written-off as the cost of doing business and kept out of the papers.