Friedman praises Biden "My Lunch With President Biden" in today's NYT

[flamingdem]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/opinion/biden-trump-republicans-democrats.html?referringSource=articleShare

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What I felt afterward was this: For all you knuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can’t put two sentences together, here’s a news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Western alliance together — stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way to Japan — to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin’s fascist assault.

In doing so, he has enabled Ukraine to inflict significant losses on Russia’s invading army, thanks to a rapid deployment of U.S. and NATO trainers and massive transfers of precision weapons. And not a single American soldier was lost.

It has been the best performance of alliance management and consolidation since another president whom I covered and admired — who also was said to be incapable of putting two sentences together: George H.W. Bush. Bush helped manage the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, without firing a shot or the loss of a single American life.

Alas, though, I left our lunch with a full stomach but a heavy heart.

Biden didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He’s worried that while he has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America.

It’s clearly his priority, above any Build Back Better provision. And he knows that’s why he was elected — a majority of Americans worried that the country was coming apart at the seams and that this old war horse called Biden, with his bipartisan instincts, was the best person to knit us back together. It’s the reason he decided to run in the first place, because he knows that without some basic unity of purpose and willingness to compromise, nothing else is possible.

But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it’s too late.

[mountain grammy]

1. I'm afraid it's too late.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. It's way too late. Fascism needed to be cuffed when the Berlin Wall fell

GHWB failed when it came to managing the fallout. There were bound to be consequences, and all we worried about was the Peace Dividend which never came to fruition. Blame Newt. He was there in the 90s.

[bigtree]

3. Pres. Biden 'didn't say it'

...but Friedman fills in all of the self-projecting cynicism and apathy he can manage.

What a sorry excuse for a journalist.

What Friedman has always bemoaned is the death of the republican party he always imagined existed in the days they hid bigotry and racism behind code words and weak attempts to mollify those who want progressive change into believing republicans stood for more than dividing us.

He can't seem to pin the tail on the elephant, so accustomed as he is to blaming Democrats for republican failure to do more than feather wealthy benefactors' bank accounts while demanding the rest of us pull up bootstraps and wait for their beneficence to trickle down on us.

We're not so much 'divided' as we are besieged by republican obstinacy and neglect, which manifested itself in a political free-for-all of their deepest desires to disrupt government to the point where Americans despaired of it all, as they did what they do best, rob us blind when they controlled all the branches, and tried to end everyone they hate or disagree with.

Fuck Friedman.

[spooky3]

4. And journalists need to do their jobs and tell the truth

If we are to have any hope of uniting. As long as a significant portion of the population believes lies, and they go unchallenged, we will be divided.

[JHB]

14. That's why it would be good if Friedman did his job...

...and didn't attribute his own thoughts to Biden, or his cab driver, or hotel staff, or any of the other people he pretends to quote when playing The Great Synthesizer.

[spooky3]

15. Agree nt

[FalloutShelter]

7. Spot on!

[Celerity]

8. Friedman had been a whingey POS ever since his billionaire heiress wife Ann lost her family fortune

[Boomerproud]

12. When he wrote Defund the Police lie that was it.

Bye bye.

[Lovie777]

5. The RWers want total fear . . ..

so they can control the masses easier. They fear themselves and are insecure, they are over playing their hand.

[flamingdem]

6. I so hope you're right

Their sick behavior cannot stand.

[peggysue2]

9. Friedman couldn't help himself

He just had to throw-in that "every defund-the-police initiative" to the closure because we must have balance, a twosiderism approach even when it comes to what is tearing the country apart--the authoritarian, anti-democratic and unAmerican movement within the Republican Party facilitated by The Former Guy and now spreading like cancer through the nation's body politic.

You cannot solve a problem or even address it until you're willing to admit what the source is.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

10. For this thread

Link to tweet

[liberalla]

13. That graphic IS really good...

[WhiskeyGrinder]

11. Lol good lord

"Here's poor Biden, having to compromise between actual fascists trying to overthrow the government, and mean old 'far-left' Democrats redefining the party." FOH.