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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

John Hodgman: I Am Sorry for This Scraggly Mess on My Face

I apologize for my beard. Not only because it is terrible — thin, patchy and asymmetrical — but also because it is inexplicable. Many people have asked me why I grew it, and most of those people are my wife, and to them and to her I say: I don’t know. I’m sorry.

Before my beard I had just a mustache, and that was not mysterious at all. In fact, I have grown two mustaches in my life, for equally banal, emotionally transparent reasons. I grew the first one in 1999, in the yearlong run-up to my marriage to the woman who is still my wife. I had ever only been clean-shaven before then (aside from an obligatory early-’90s flirtation with a soul patch in college), and I suppose now I was testing her.

A few very good-looking people I know turn mean when they drink, mocking and abusing the people who care about them. They make themselves ugly to see if people will still love them that way. I think my mustache — thick and dark and unwanted in the middle of my round pale face — served the same function: to be repulsive on purpose. I looked like a bushy 19th-century president who also happened to be a baby.

Jessica Valenti: The floodgates have opened on outing bad men

Oh, you thought things couldn’t get worse? I’m sorry – have you not met 2017? As more women come forward about Harvey Weinstein, so do countless others sharing their stories of harassment and abuse by powerful – and sometimes not so powerful – men.

Whether through #metoo or new accusations and firings, it seems the floodgates have opened on outing shitty men. I suppose that’s a good thing – let’s let the truth come out, as horrible as it may be. But for a lot of women, the constant recounting of just how bad it is and can be means reliving a lot of our own worst memories.

Even worse, while explicit victim-blaming seems to be a little less en vogue these days, we’re still hearing questions again and again about why women didn’t come forward. Perhaps because nothing is done when we do. Perhaps because the majority of women who do report harassment are retaliated against in some way. Perhaps it’s simply none of our goddamn business.

I hope in the weeks ahead, as more of these stories come out, we can learn to listen instead of interrogate. Because women have been through more than enough.

Steven W. Thrasher: Concerned about ‘identity extremists?’ There’s one in the White House

Right now in the United States, there is the threat (and actuality) of racial identity extremism leading to extreme violence. But it is not coming from the so-called “black identity extremists”, an absurd made-up term Trump’s FBI has created to whip up hysteria about black people.

The FBI claims to be worried that “Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” This is just hyperbolic speculation from the US government meant to undermine the movement – just as the FBI tried to undermine Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers decades ago.

The real threat of racial extremism is coming from the White Identity Extremist-in-Chief in the White House – and his name is Donald Trump.

Ruth Marcus: No, John Kelly, women should not be seen as ‘sacred’

John Kelly had me at the ice. He lost me at the women.

Standing at the lectern on Thursday, in a briefing room that has rarely been so hushed, the White House chief of staff described how the bodies of fallen soldiers are packed in ice, not once but twice, to preserve them on their journey home. Soldiers, he could have said but didn’t need to, such as his son, Marine 1st Lt. Robert M. Kelly, killed in Afghanistan at age 29.

So I was mesmerized and, to be honest, a bit teary-eyed as the retired four-star general spoke of what it is like to be on the early-morning receiving end of the news that would break any parent’s heart.

And I was not prepared, or disposed, to be taken aback by some of what came next — in particular, Kelly’s disquisition on the loss of the sacred:

You know when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore, as we’ve seen from recent cases. Life — the dignity of life — is sacred. That’s gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.”

Kelly was on a rhetorical detour here. His main point, fair or not, was that Florida Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson had violated the sanctity of a private phone call between a commander in chief and a grieving family when she listened in on an exchange and then blasted President Trump for alleged insensitivity.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Republicans In Congress Profit From The Coming Trump Apocalypse

Somebody ought to write a self-help book for Republican politicians called, “How to Profit from the Coming Trump Apocalypse.” Although, come to think of it, they’re doing pretty well with that already.

The newspapers have been filled with stories of Trump’s tense relationship with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And Trump’s escalating war of words with North Korea is making everyone else tense, as the planet learns more about the man with the nuclear codes.

A Google search for the words “Trump unstable” yields more than 10 million hits. A search on “Trump” and “mental health” returns more than 28 million results, many of them reviews of a new book entitled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

Spoiler alert: They’re worried. So are the Trump allies who were interviewed without attribution for this genuinely frightening Vanity Fair article.

But, while the world obsesses about the president’s personality, few people are talking about the systemic failures of democracy that made him president in the first place. And while we’re distracted by Trump’s theatricality, Republicans in Congress are busy robbing working Americans of their scant remaining resources.