The Kumquat Moment, or Can God Save Your Potato Salad?

If you've ever had the sneaking suspicion that all Thomas Friedman columns are well, kinda the same, here's another exercise in effective mockery -- the Thomas Friedman OpEd Generator!

Check out this beauty --

What has been going on in Nicaragua is unique, and it has been on my mind ever since it began. What's important, however, is that we focus on what this means to the citizens themselves. The media seems too caught up in dissecting the macro-level situation to pay attention to what's important on the ground. Just call it missing the shirts for the cloth.

When thinking about the recent turmoil, it's important to remember three things: One, people don't behave like car salesmen, so attempts to treat them as such are going to come across as foreign. Car salesmen never suddenly set up a black market for Western DVDs. Two, Nicaragua has spent decades torn by civil war and ethnic hatred, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If ethnic conflict is Nicaragua's curtain rod, then capitalism is certainly its alarm clock.

Or simply press the button and generate another one:

The first rule of holes is that when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I'd tell them two things about same-sex marriage. First, there's no way around the issue unless we're prepared to spend less: and not just spend less, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of national infrastructure that makes countries succeed. That's going to require some tax cuts as well, but as they say, "When in Rome."

Second, I'd tell them to look at Iceland, which all but solved its same-sex marriage crisis over the past decade. When I visited Iceland in 2002, Bartho, the cabbie who drove me from the airport, couldn't stop telling me about how he had to take a second job because of the high cost of same-sex marriage. I caught up with Bartho in Reykjavik last year. Thanks to Iceland's reformed approach toward same-sex marriage, Bartho has enough money in his pocket to finally be able to afford an apartment for his kids.

Or try this one:

So what should we do about the chaos in Turkey? Well, it's easier to start with what we should not do. We should not lob a handful of cruise missiles and hope that some explosions will snap Turkey's leaders to attention. Beyond that, we need to be careful to nurture the seeds of democratic ideals. The opportunity is there, but I worry that the path to stability is so poorly marked that Turkey will have to move down it very slowly. And of course Ankara needs to feel like it is part of the process.

Speaking with a young student from the large Catholic community here, I asked him if there was any message that he wanted me to carry back home with me. He pondered for a second, and then smiled and said, respre austee, which is a local saying that means roughly, "Abundance, like want, ruins many."

It's more fun than a sack of hammers, I tells ya.