“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.
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Trevor Timm: We’re a year into the unofficial war against Isis with nothing to show for it
This Saturday marks one full year since the US military began its still-undeclared war against Islamic State that the government officials openly acknowledge will last indefinitely. What do we have to show for it? So far, billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of bombs have been dropped, hundreds of civilians have been killed and Isis is no weaker than it was last August, when the airstrikes began.
But don’t take it from me – that’s the conclusion of the US intelligence community itself. As the Associated Press reported a few days ago, the consensus view of the US intelligence agencies is that Isis is just as powerful as it was a year ago, and they can replace fighters faster than they are getting killed.
Like it does for every stagnant and endless war, this inconvenient fact will likely will only lead others to call for more killing, rather than an introspection on why continuing to bomb the same region for decades does not actually work. Perhaps we’re not firing missiles at a high enough rate, they’ll say, perhaps we need a full-scale ground invasion, or perhaps we need to kill more civilians to really damage the enemy (yes, this is an actual argument war mongers have been making).
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The GOP Debate: It’s What Oligarchy Looks Like
In the run-up to the first Republican presidential debate, a flurry of news stories about the candidates offered glimpses of oligarchy in action. [..]
John Kasich’s super PAC raised $11 million in a little more than two months. Out of 166 reportable contributions, 34 were for $100,000 or more. A number of donors gave $1 million or more.
Several leading Republican presidential candidates received most of their funding from a few high-dollar donors. Marco Rubio and Scott Walker each received most of their backing from just four donors. The campaigns of Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry have each largely been financed by a single donor.
Some political high rollers don’t understand why that might be a bad thing. Silicon Valley investor Scott Banister, who gave $1.2 million to Rand Paul’s Super PAC, said, “I’d think that the fact that I’m willing to spend money in the public square rather than buying myself a toy would be considered a good thing.”
Mr. Banister may be well intentioned, but many Americans would rather see him buy a toy than let American democracy become a plaything of the rich.
Do black lives matter to the Republican Party?
The answer was a resounding no if the Thursday night Republican primary debate on Fox News accurately reflected their views.
As Americans across the nation have been talking about the one-year anniversary of the killing of Mike Brown this weekend – which brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of the national political consciousness over the past year – Fox News dedicated less than two minutes out of a two-hour political debate to questions about police violence, racism or any of the ways black America has been undeniably and uniquely under attack in modern society. [..]
No, black lives certainly didn’t matter last night. But to the Republicans and Fox News, neither did the lives of women, immigrants, homosexuals, or transgender soldiers. All Americans should be offended at how limited an idea of America came across in a major party debate, and that the frontrunner, Donald Trump, said we are a nation which “can’t do anything right.”
Megan Carpentier: Medical records must stay private – even for prospective presidents
The cyclical focus on each presidential candidate’s medical records – which has begun in earnest with Hillary Clinton this week and extended to Jeb Bush’s diet – is a political charade designed to allow their opponents to mine for political cudgels what in any other circumstance would be appropriately confidential medical records. But electing a president who later dies in office or becomes physically incapable of serving in the role is an entirely possible and provided-for (if not predictable) circumstance of the US political system, and no amount of listing candidates’ colonoscopy results will prevent it. [..]
The calls for candidates to release their medical records aren’t an attempt to assure the American people that the candidate will survive a four-year term if elected – no one can guarantee that. But it is an opportunity for a would-be president’s opponents and detractors to dig through the most intimate details of his or her life in order to take advantage of existing stigmas under the guise of transparency.
George Zornick: Rand Paul’s Eye-Roll Marked the End of the 9/11 Era
The attacks of 2001 are no longer the potent GOP rallying point they once were.
Republicans didn’t bother to hold their 2004 nominating convention in some far-flung purple state where every county was going to count that November. The Bush-Cheney campaign, which started running advertisements featuring a charred World Trade Center literally one day after the president announced his re-election bid, had a much more potent idea. The RNC happened only three miles from Ground Zero, at Madison Square Garden. Dick Cheney thundered from the stage that “if the killers of September 11 thought we had lost the will to defend our freedom, they did not know America and they did not know George W. Bush.”
Fast forward twelve years to Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, the first of the 2016 campaign. Chris Christie was eager to capitalize on his experience as a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey following the attacks, delivering a saccharine line about how “the hugs that I remember are the hugs that I gave to the families who lost their people on September 11th.”
Senator Rand Paul, at that moment engaged with Christie on a debate about mass surveillance, then gave what we’ll unilaterally dub as the most monumental eyeroll in presidential debate history
I don’t make a really big deal about it and I’ve spent a lot of time in other places, but in terms of media culture I’m totally a creation of the New York metropolitan area. I had two of every network, including PBS as well as about 5 independent channels and that was just TV.
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Heyerdahl and his five-person crew set sail from Callao, Peru, on the 40-square-foot Kon-Tiki on April 28, 1947. The Kon-Tiki, named for a mythical white chieftain, was made of indigenous materials and designed to resemble rafts of early South American Indians. While crossing the Pacific, the sailors encountered storms, sharks and whales, before finally washing ashore at Raroia. Heyerdahl, born in Larvik, Norway, on October 6, 1914, believed that Polynesia’s earliest inhabitants had come from South America, a theory that conflicted with popular scholarly opinion that the original settlers arrived from Asia. Even after his successful voyage, anthropologists and historians continued to discredit Heyerdahl’s belief. However, his journey captivated the public and he wrote a book about the experience that became an international bestseller and was translated into 65 languages. Heyerdahl also produced a documentary about the trip that won an Academy Award in 1951.
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