Like FDR, Biden has stepped into the breech

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, Oct. 22, 2023 | 2 a.m.

A date which will live in infamy. A time to avoid a future in which infamy will live.

Like many in America, I listened to President Joe Biden’s address to the nation — only the second of his presidency important enough to come from the Oval Office — and I was struck by what I heard. It was a call for America to be the United States of America we all hope it can be.

On Dec. 8, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress — as this is written, an impossible act for a president today because there is no Congress thanks to a dysfunctional Republican-led House of Representatives — in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Congress, of course, acted promptly to invoke a declaration of war, and the United States went overseas to save the world.

Thursday night, President Joe Biden, urged Americans to come together to support all that our country stands for in 2023.

With Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, trying to obliterate Ukraine, and Iran’s terrorist puppets in Hamas committing the most horrific and inhuman attack on innocent Israeli men, women and babies on Oct. 7, 2023, the president called on all of us to do what America does best — be that essential nation for the world, the nation that supports its friends in need, protects those who seek to live in peace and advances the benefits of freedom wherever people desire to be free.

Having just returned from a nonstop and unprecedented trip to an Israel at war — where he consoled a grieving nation still in shock from the evil perpetrated by Hamas and the failure of Israel’s vaunted security establishment to keep its babies safe, where he participated in an Israeli War Cabinet meeting at which he counseled them to make sure that all innocents in the wake of war be considered — Biden spoke to the nation about the inflection point at which we find ourselves and the imperative that compels our great nation to act.

As he laid out the indisputable case for the United States to stand up to the moral depravity of Hamas and the authoritarian desires of a power-mad Putin, I couldn’t help but think that this was a president for whom all Americans should be proud.

Like a Roosevelt bringing a shocked America to its senses after the devastation at Pearl Harbor, Biden explained the enormity of the challenge we have before us.

We can do nothing and know with certainty that our men and women in uniform­­ — and maybe all of us — will be fighting the evil that surrounds so much of this world for a long time to come, or we can stand by our friends, stand by our principles, stand up for what is right and stand next to those who fight for their very lives and existence and help create a better, safer and more peaceful world at the other end.

There are no illusions. At a time when the world needs the leadership of the United States, a significant part of the United States, our Congress, lacks leadership.

At a time when people cry out for the strength of America to help them in their time of need, America remains weak in its own ability to act as the great nation we are and must always be.

But Israelis saw the real America this week in the person of President Biden. They saw and heard the leader of the most powerful country on Earth has their back. If ever there were a president of the United States to be admired, respected and loved by that tiny Jewish state, it is Joe Biden.

Likewise, Biden has been a pillar of stability and leadership for the people of Ukraine. He gives them hope and holds the rest of the free world together to aid in their cause of freedom.

All he asked from Americans this past Thursday night is that we hold together for the sake of our own country and that “for which it stands.”

By doing so, we can avoid any more dates that will live in infamy and, once again, do what the United States does best: Save the world and, in the process, save ourselves.

Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun