“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
Trevor Timm: Imagine Obama’s national security policies in Trump’s hands
As Donald Trump gets closer to locking up the Republican nomination and therefore one step closer to the presidency, it’s worth looking back at one of the Obama administration’s most troubling legacies: specifically, the national security precedents that have allowed the US to spy on countless people and kill without accountability. The prospect now – a terrifying one – is of Trump in charge of this vast apparatus.
Civil liberties advocates have been warning of a scenario like this for more than six years. The extraordinary national security powers George W Bush pioneered and Obama shamefully entrenched could now fall into the hands of someone many people consider a madman. Someone whose opinion changes with the wind – or the sound of the crowd – and whose entire candidacy is based around personal vendettas.
Paul Krugman: When Fallacies Collide
The formal debates among the Republicans who would be president have exceeded all expectations. Even the most hardened cynics couldn’t have imagined that the candidates would sink so low, and stay so focused on personal insults. Yet last week, offstage, there was in effect a real debate about economic policy between Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, who is trying to block his nomination.
Unfortunately, both men are talking nonsense. Are you surprised?
The starting point for this debate is Mr. Trump’s deviation from free-market orthodoxy on international trade. Attacks on immigrants are still the central theme of the Republican front-runner’s campaign, but he has opened a second front on trade deficits, which he asserts are being caused by the currency manipulation of other countries, especially China. This manipulation, he says, is “robbing Americans of billions of dollars of capital and millions of jobs.”
His solution is “countervailing duties” — basically tariffs — similar to those we routinely impose when foreign countries are found to be subsidizing exports in violation of trade agreements.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The GOP vulgarians
It was William J. Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan years and the Republican Party’s premier moralist, who embedded a phrase in the American consciousness when he bemoaned the fact that “our elites presided over an unprecedented coarsening of our culture.”
Well, to borrow another famous phrase, it is Bennett’s party and two of its presidential candidates in particular, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, who are merrily defining our politics, our discourse and the American presidency down. The 2016 Republican primary campaign is now on track to be the crudest, most vulgar and most thoroughly disgusting in our nation’s history.
A policy wonk who has spent nearly two decades in politics was watching Thursday’s GOP debate with his two teenage daughters and was horrified when one turned to him and asked: “Is this what you do?” The dad didn’t want to be named because he didn’t want to embarrass his daughters.
Michael Brenner: Truth Be Told? Why Bother!
The national disgrace that is the Republican contest for the presidential nomination, carrying with it the potential for national tragedy, has been brewing for some time. The degradation of standards of public discourse along with the widespread tolerance for the abuse of truth in all its aspects has been the hallmark of 21st century politics in the United States. Responsibility lies with the country’s entire political class — broadly defined — not just the delinquents whose coarseness, dishonesty and calculated fostering of ignorance now dominate the headlines.
Acts great and small have combined to prepare the ground. Most obvious in the former category is promotion of persons for high office whose gross disqualifying traits were overlooked or slighted. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was the historic marker of a breakthrough that has opened the way for the Trumps, Caines, Santorums, Bachmanns, Forinas, Perrys, Sharptons, Jindals, and Carsons. All those among the Republican Establishment who went along with this insult to the Republic, all those apologists among the MSM and the punditocracy, all those who treated it as just another hilarious incident in the pageant of popular celebrity culture — they all share in the blame. Indeed, one could go further and argue that all those who voted for Ms Palin in awareness of the risks that act posed to the national welfare, too, are accomplices in this wound to our democracy.
Robert KuttnerZ: Constitutional Crisis and Political Stalemate
The 2016 election year is shaping up to be America’s most serious constitutional crisis since the Civil War — and the most important partisan re-alignment since 1932 or maybe since 1860. To appreciate what’s at work, it’s important to understand these two trends, and how they interact.
The essence of the constitutional crisis is that one of our two parties, the Republicans, has stopped conceding the legitimacy of the Democrats. This has been building for decades, but it went critical under Obama.
The Republican leadership, and most of the 2016 presidential field, basically don’t concede that Obama is a legitimate President of the United States. You see this in charges of his alleged Muslim religion and foreign birth and his supposed radicalism (Obama is basically a centrist and instinctive compromiser — well to the right on key issues of such presidents as Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon and Eisenhower.)
Earl Ofari Hutchinson: The Senate Is the Real Name of the Game This Election
Here are two scenarios on January 20, 2017. That’s the first day on the job for the 45th president of the U.S.
Scenario one. President Sanders or Clinton, unlike President Obama on his first day on the job, are faced with a GOP controlled House and a GOP controlled Senate. That’s a GOP Congress that’s been carefully and deliberately crafted as a firewall against a Democratic president. It’s a GOP Congress in which its majority leadership has repeatedly made clear their sole mission is to delay, dither, obstruct, gut and torpedo initiatives and legislation of a Democratic president from the budget to all level appointments. In short, a Congress that pretty much did just that during nearly minute of Obama’s White House tenure.
Scenario two. Either President Trump, Cruz or Rubio, on their first day in office, faces a Democratic-controlled Senate. Now the script is gently flipped. There is not the hell-bent mission to gut or torpedo their initiatives and legislation. However, if they carry through on their oft-stated collective campaign, pledge to build a border wall, plow more ground troops in multiple countries, repeal Obamacare, gut or eliminate the IRS, the EPA, the Department of Education, and a litany of other federal agencies, not to mention try to dump anywhere from two to four more strict constructionist, Antonin Scalia- or Clarence Thomas-type judges on the SCOTUS, and throughout the federal judiciary, then the battle-lines will quickly harden. Senate Democrats will be the firewall to their wholesale effort to roll back the 20th Century.
Recent Comments