“Punting 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.
Bob Herbert: America Is Better Than This
America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants – Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?
Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.
Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”
Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”
Washington was on edge on the morning of Aug. 28, 1963. The day was sunny and very warm and Negroes, as we were called in those days, were coming into town by the tens of thousands. The sale of liquor was banned. Troops stood by to restore order if matters got out of control. President John F. Kennedy waited anxiously in the White House to see how the day would unfold.
It unfolded splendidly. The crowd for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” grew to some 250,000. Nearly a quarter of the marchers were white. They gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they were enthralled by the singing of Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez. The march was all about inclusion and the day seemed to swell with an extraordinary sense of camaraderie and good feeling.
Frank Rich: The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
Dana Millbank: Civil rights’ new ‘owner’: Glenn Beck
There is a telling anecdote in Glenn Beck’s 2003 memoir about how the cable news host was influenced by the great fantasist Orson Welles. To travel between performances in Manhattan, Beck recounts, Welles hired an ambulance, sirens blaring, to ferry him around town — not because Welles was ill but because he wanted to avoid traffic.
Most of us would regard this as dishonest, a ploy by the self-confessed charlatan that Welles was. Beck saw it as a model to be emulated. “Welles,” he writes, “inspired me to believe that I can create anything that I can see or imagine.”
I was reminded of Beck’s affection for deception as he hyped his march on Washington — an event scheduled for the same date (Aug. 28) and on the same spot (the Lincoln Memorial) as Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic march 47 years ago. Beck claimed it was pure coincidence, but then he made every effort to appropriate the mantle of the great civil rights leader.
Beck as the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream? And you thought “War of the Worlds” was frightening.
It’s been just over a year since Beck famously called the first African American president a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” And now, accused of racial pot-stirring, he apparently has determined that the best defense is to be patently offensive.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Obama’s Failure in Sudan
When President Obama was seeking the White House, he criticized Republicans for not doing enough on Darfur and insisted that he would make Sudan a priority.
“What we have done has not been enough,” he told me in a 2006 interview when I was guest host for a “Charlie Rose” segment on Sudan. He added that Washington needed “a sustained diplomatic effort to put pressure on Sudan.”
Yet these days, Mr. Obama is presiding over an incoherent, contradictory and apparently failing Sudan policy. There is a growing risk that Sudan will be the site of the world’s bloodiest war in 2011, and perhaps a new round of genocide as well. This isn’t America’s fault, but neither are we using all of our leverage to avert it.
Granted, Mr. Obama has a multitude of other priorities. Granted, Sudan is a mess with no perfect solutions. Nobody expects Mr. Obama to devote much time to Sudan. But the problem isn’t that the administration is too busy to devise a policy toward Sudan but that it has a half-dozen policies, mostly at cross-purposes.
Marc Ambinder: Party Down
Intraparty scrimmages are by no means new to American politics. But during this election cycle, a suspiciously large number of candidates with thin résumés and barely formed political identities are beating well-financed, better-established opponents. What’s more, these upstarts are winning primary races, in no small part, by running against the notion that their opponents were endorsed by the party – by running, that is, against the parties themselves.
snip
Indeed, conservatives and liberals alike will continue to insist on nominating unadulterated candidates and will become more successful in doing so. And those candidates are likely to distrust their own establishments as much as they ideologically oppose the people at the other end of the political spectrum. In such an environment, the parties will be useful to help raise money, set the presidential nominating calendar and organize conventions, but that’s about it.
Whither the national parties? They’re already withered.
Gail Collins: Mr. Simpson Has a Cow
What are we to make of Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission, who recently referred to Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits”?
Personally, I would love for us to have a national cow with that sort of milk-giving capacity. But Simpson, who gets very impatient with people who want to preserve current Social Security benefits, did not mean it as a compliment. Now, his remark is getting a lot of attention, and that is only partly because the rest of the news has been so depressing that Bristol Palin’s rumored agreement to compete on “Dancing With the Stars” was a high point of the week.
Simpson, 78, is a former Republican senator known for his outspokenness – he once called the American Association of Retired Persons “the greedy geezers of America.” In appointing him co-chairman of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the White House broke an important political rule, which is to keep away from anyone who considers himself a colorful old codger.
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