The first major reporting on the outcome of Biden-Putin meeting required no reporting. It could have been written five months ago.
"[Putin] denied that Russia has played a role in a spate of increasingly bold cyberattacks against U.S. institutions, and said the U.S. was the biggest offender," reported the Times. "The Russian leader’s remarks suggested that he was not interested in discussing what Mr. Biden had said was a key objective of the talks [in addition to human rights]….
"For his part, Mr. Biden said that he had pressed the Russian president on a variety of issues — and that he would not stop doing so…. 'I did what I came to do.'"
President Biden has been thrust into a lasting legacy. His predecessor's four-year admiration of fascism abroad strengthened it, and his movement's increasingly successful destruction of democracy at home have allowed dictatorships to portray the American political system as fragile, fickle, all-too representative of Western civilization's decadent weakness.
And America's traitors — those who supported the authoritarian permutations of the former, dictator-loving U.S. president — are loving it. Just one example of many. Tom Cotton, after the Biden-Putin meeting: "All talk, no action, and no consequences for Russia's cyber attacks—Vladamir Putin loves this Biden press conference." He, his Senate comrades and their unprecedented, howling media machine are positively giddy, echoing the world's dictators about American weakness.
Meanwhile, House Republicans are hawking America's comprehensive collapse from every soapbox. Reporter Jonathan Weisman summarizes their 2022 themes: there's an economic crisis, a national security crisis, a foreign policy crisis, a border security crisis, a homeland security crisis, a humanitarian crisis, a public health crisis, an energy crisis, an anti-Semitism crisis, a labor shortage crisis, an unemployment benefits crisis, a Big Tech crisis, a Chinese lab crisis, a critical race theory crisis, a gas supply crisis, a police defunding crisis, a Rep. Ilhan Omar crisis — in short, "America is in crisis," as the new head of the House Republican conference put it.
In effect, the world's Vladimir Putins are a redundancy, a superfluidity. Our stronger, similar enemy lies within.