Pondering the Pundits

“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

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Richard Wolffe: America’s problems aren’t Obama’s fault. They’re George W Bush’s

t’s George W Bush’s world, and we’re just living in it.

Not Donald Trump’s. Not Hillary Clinton’s. Not even Barack Obama’s. No, the unhinged arguments at the heart of the 2016 presidential election are not really a debate about the legacy of the current occupant of the White House. They’re not about Obamacare, or the Recovery Act; the Paris climate agreement or even the Iran nuclear deal.

They are, at their heart, an unresolved argument about the world as the 43rd president defined it: for worse, for much worse, and then for better.

If you’re the kind of person – on the left or right – who cannot hear the name George W Bush without foaming at the mouth, you should leave your comment or post your tweet right now. Because it’s time to take a sober look at a presidency bookended by the spectacular mass murder on 11 September 2001, and the spectacular financial meltdown of 2008.

Michael Winship: Drugs And Privilege: Big Business, Congress And The EpiPen

Cash and carry has become nothing more than standard operating procedure in politics and government, and it’s wrecking the republic. The whole system is rotten to the core, corrupted by big business and special interests from the seventh son to the seventh son.

Or daughter, as we learned these past few days when the news introduced us to Heather Bresch, CEO of a drug company called Mylan and daughter of Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin III, who’s also the former governor of West Virginia.

Mylan manufactures and sells EpiPen, the emergency delivery system for an allergy drug, epinephrine, that can make the difference between life and sudden death. The cost for a two-pack of the devices has soared nearly 550 percent to $608.61. That’s a price far beyond the means of most families with kids threatened by possibly fatal allergic reactions.

At the same time, Bresch has seen her own compensation increase a whopping 671 percent, from $2,453,456 in 2007 (the year that Mylan bought EpiPen) to $18,931,068 in 2015.

She should resign for price gouging rather than get a raise, but like so many of her fellow executives Bresch sails serenely on as her fellow Americans drown in health care debt. Her career and the success of her company epitomize everything that so enrages every voter who believes that the fix is in and that the system is weighted in favor of those with big money and serious connections.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Health Care Is A Right, Not A Business

Financial columnist Megan McArdle recently wrote a column entitled “Healthcare Is a Business, Not a Right.” She was responding to a tweet from financial writer Helaine Olen, which she quotes as:

“The health of Americans should not be a profit center. Health care is a right. Full stop.”

Health care is a business, says McArdle, but most of us aren’t tough-minded enough to admit it. Even if you ask a conservative, she writes, “there is a good chance you’ll get a rant about greedy insurers nickel-and-diming hardworking consumers when they’re sick.”

“Almost everybody feels that there is something fundamentally wrong about making money off someone else’s illness,” McArdle laments.

It’s a straw-man argument. Nobody I know thinks there’s something “fundamentally wrong” with doctors or nurses earning a living, or pharmacies turning a profit. Doctors, nurses, and corner pharmacists are iconic figures in American folklore.

McArdle misrepresents her adversary. Olen’s tweet begins with the number “25,”which McArdle omits, meaning it’s the 25th in a series of tweets. The full series makes it clear that Olen is talking specifically about health insurance. Olen’s “full stop,” which McArdle mocks, seems intended to signal the end of her twitter essay.

But then, you can’t make a straw man without breaking some straws.

Richard North Patterson The Fateful August Of Donald J. Trump

In the month since the conventions, the jittery surface of the 24-hour news cycle has been roiled by crosscurrents, its avatars trumpeting each new event as more dramatic than the last. But beneath there is a sickly stillness of a candidacy mired in the swampland of Donald Trump’s own mind, creating a numbing ennui seeping through the electorate like encephalitis in slow motion. Too many Americans have realized who he is.

The contrast between the dystopia of Cleveland — four midnights in America — and the competence of Philadelphia left him trailing badly. But something worse had happened to Trump himself: instead of provoking excitement, he was inducing fear and stupefaction.

True, his lies come so quickly that none has meaning in itself. But the larger meaning comes through — Trump’s every statement has no meaning but Trump himself. To call him a liar is to assume deliberation in a man who cares nothing about the words he speaks beyond whether they serve him in the moment. Such people are not merely frightening — they are exhausting.

Dave Shilling: Third-party candidates excluded from presidential debates: a snub too many

Free speech in the United States is having a rough go of it lately. Everywhere I turn, there’s some misanthrope whinging about San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s Star-Spangled Banner protest. How dare he denigrate the stars and stripes, a venerable symbol of protest against tyranny, by protesting?

Then there’s the third-party candidates running for president. Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green party candidate Dr Jill Stein, despite surprisingly potent campaigns that are tapping into wellsprings of dissatisfaction with the status quo, will very likely be held out of the upcoming debates. They’re still free to campaign and, because they’re not black NFL players, they can go about saying what they please. They just can’t do it in front of the largest possible audience.

Ladies and gentlemen of the American electorate, it’s finally time for you to rise up and demand that third-party presidential candidates be allowed to debate with their Republican and Democratic peers. Yes, it’s a far more democratic way to go about this “electing the leader of the free world” business, but more importantly, I’m starting to feel sorry for these candidates.