Eddie Scarry of the Federalist writes about the latest failure from a high-profile columnist who’s full of them.
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman — yes, the Thomas Friedman — ended his most recent and very bland column this week with the declaration that he had “left my lunch with the president with a full stomach but a heavy heart.”
Friedman no doubt left his meeting full and heavy. The article he churned out after his very important meal with President Biden is beyond bloated. Although Friedman said their conversation was off-record, he was gracious enough to tell his readers what he ate and how he “felt” about the encounter. In other words, it’s a typical Friedman column— practically useless.
His ultimate takeaway: Biden has been exceptionally good at managing our march to the brink of World War III. (It was apparently an epic failure that, unlike Biden, Donald Trump couldn’t goad Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine much sooner.)
“What I felt afterward was this,” wrote Friedman. “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.”
Well, if that doesn’t make your heart soar with patriotism, I don’t know what will, FOLKS!
The only problem with that Olympian achievement Friedman credits to Biden is that it’s not true. Even if it were, which one of the people who voted for him feels that it made her life any better?
Setting aside that Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO, and thus is, in theory, owed nothing by the alliance, Biden hasn’t shown any degree of remarkable leadership there.