Friedman: Help wanted: Leadership
In a vacuum, that column sounds extremely reasonable and well-thought out. In the real world, the one in which we currently reside, it is madness. On one side you - Democrats - you have folks who have bent over backwards and given the other side - Republicans - about 80 percent of what it wanted and they walked away any way, and a good portion of their caucus was happily talking about the U.S. going into default, which triggered the first downgrade of our credit in history by S&P. One side put up not only entitlement cuts, but real entitlement reform, which is something its based warned them against doing, but they were willing to do it any way, while the other side turned that down because it didn't want to upset its base about raising taxes on the already-wealthy. This is madness. The only way you can believe what Friedman does is to believe both sides equally either doesn't want compromise - which is not true - or both sides equally want compromise, which is not true. One side openly says that compromising with this president is a bad, essentially evil thing. How do you work with that? Lock them all up in a room? That's original.
