Making America America Again 2018 Thomas Friedman
When the Washington Examiner dedicates more than 800 words to mock and denigrate a collection of essays by the best New York Times opinion columnists, you know the Times has struck a nerve, has hit a home run.
In a unique interactive column titled "What have we lost?" the Times features, and links to, all its fifteen columnists' essays that explain "what the by four years have cost America, and what's at pale in this ballot."
The essence of each essay is captured by a few words representing "what nosotros take lost."
For example, Nicholas Kristof'southward "'Persuasion' Trump has exploited and betrayed my friends." In it Kristof describes "The Friendships Trump Pulled Apart."
In "Naïveté How could we have been and then blind?" Charles Blow explains how "America Shocked Itself and the World."
Frank Bruni writes in "Innocence, "I tin't await at America the same way."
In "Imagination, Michelle Goldberg laments "Four years of cultural impoverishment."
Paul Krugman, in "Pax Americana," writes most "Trump'south long international legacy."
Jennifer Senior describes how "Trump has normalized selfishness" in "Generosity."
Roger Cohen decries in "Our Word" how "No democracy takes Trump'due south America seriously."
In an attempt to describe the essays equally "a collective nervous breakdown, total of self-absorbed handwringing and wild-eyed proclamations about the future of the republic," "shameful caterwauling…a pure example of the obscene privilege of the elite [an] appallingly cocky-indulgent collaboration by the New York Times," the Examiner quotes what are in fact the most veracious, damnatory passages. Such as:
From Frank Bruni'south" Innocence," The Examiner quotes "I'd seen u.s.a. err. I'd watched usa stray. Still I didn't think that enough of united states would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump…"
And from Roger Cohen's "Our Word," the Examiner quotes "The Oval Office was once the focal point of the respect the United states of america commanded effectually the world; no longer. Information technology has get impossible for democracies today to believe it is in their national interest to take Trump's America seriously. With this president, there are just too many petulant reversals of course."
Curiously, the Examiner omits, "The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. Alliances are founded on trust. When that goes, they brainstorm to dissolve."
It also conveniently ignores in Nicholas Kristof's "The Friendships Trump Pulled Apart," Kristof calling Trump "a charlatan who preys on my friends who trust him" and asking, "How can a president be chosen 'pro-life' when he has presided over the deaths of more than than 225,000 Americans from Covid-nineteen and even so doesn't have a strategy to fight it?"
The Examiner also skips over Thomas Friedman'south essay on how "Trump Has Made the Whole Globe Darker," which carries a good news-bad news message focusing on the upcoming elections:
The good news is that we've survived four years of Donald Trump's abusive presidency with most of our cadre values still intact. To be sure, the impairment has been profound, but, I'd argue, the cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation. The harm is still reversible.
The bad news is that if we take to suffer four more than years of Donald Trump, with him unrestrained by the need to be re-elected, our state will not be the America we grew upwards with, whose values, norms and institutions nosotros had come up to have for granted.
Friedman adds, "Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America."
Friedman warns, "if we re-elect him, knowing what a norm-destroying, divisive, corrupt liar he is, then the world volition not treat the last 4 years as an aberration. Information technology will treat them every bit an affidavit that we've inverse.
"If America goes dark, if the bulletin broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' to 'get the hell off my lawn,'" Friedman writes, and if "foreigners finish assertive that there is somewhere over the rainbow where truth is even so held sacred in news reporting and where justice is the norm in most of the courts, then the whole world will get darker".
The Examiner concludes, "Trump's [2016] victory was not just a political win. It was a repudiation of an entire worldview, the rejection of routine, tradition, and then-called expertise" and opines that the New York Times "project looks more like a psychotic break than the pooled wisdom of professional columnists whose shared experiences span generations."
A more objective and realistic view of the last iv years would conclude that Trump's 2016 "victory" was in fact the repudiation — rejection — of honesty, decency, civility, of what used to exist Republican "family unit values" and that the pooled wisdom of these 15 professionalsaccurately reflects What We Have Lost during the terminal four years: Persuasion, Innocence, Imagination, Pax Americana, Faith, Generosity, Our Allies, Our Pride, Our Word, Our Illusions — Our America.
A recurring and damning theme throughout the essays is Trump's abominable dishonesty.
Today, two days before the most important ballot in our lifetime, the New York Times puts a bow on this ugly aspect of Trump's graphic symbol.
In "Dishonesty Has Defined the Trump Presidency…" the Times points out the sheer volume, depth and seriousness of Trumps's lies and their lasting impact and tragic consequences:
Dishonesty has been a defining hallmark of the Trump presidency. The sheer volume of untruths, both petty and profound, has been cataloged and quantified time and once again, the subject of a shelf full of books and endless manus-wringing over the "postal service-truth" world.
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Mr. Trump's successor, whether next yr or in five years, could confront a broader crisis in faith, challenged to re-plant credibility with overseas allies and adversaries, while presiding over a state where truth has been cleaved down into tribes and much of the public has been conditioned to distrust institutions of all sorts.
With this in mind, if y'all oasis't notwithstanding done so and knowing what is at pale, please get out and VOTE!
The writer is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.
Source: https://themoderatevoice.com/the-shameful-caterwauling-of-fifteen-new-york-times-columnists-washington-examiner/
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