Michael Steele: Friedman a ‘Nut Job’

“Where do these nut jobs come from?” RNC Chairman Michael Steele said on Thursday when asked about Thomas Friedman’s latest column. He was not taking up Friedman’s theme—which was about the dangerous rise of right-wing extremism in the United States—but was attacking Friedman himself. Friedman’s column said that the current political climate reminds him of the political climate in Israel in 1995, shortly before Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. “[S]omething very dangerous is happening,” Friedman wrote. “Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.”