“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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John Kiriakou: A Worrisome New Plan to Send U.S. Troops to Libya as ‘Advisers’
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Dunford, said last week that the United States is engaged in a “period of intense dialogue” that could lead to an agreement with the government of Libya that would allow U.S. “military advisers” to be deployed there in the fight against Islamic State.
“There’s a lot of activity going on underneath the surface,” Dunford told The Washington Post. “We’re just not ready to deploy capabilities yet because there hasn’t been an agreement. And frankly, any day that could happen.”
This plan should worry every American. If the past is any lesson, the new U.S. military advisers will likely be permanent and will presage a large combat contingent in Libya.
U.S. military advisers first arrived in Vietnam in 1950, a move that presaged the eventual arrival of 9,087,000 military personnel, and reaching a peak in 1967 of 545,000 combat troops. The last U.S. troops didn’t leave Vietnam until 1975, and only after 58,220 had been killed. U.S. troops entered Kuwait in February 1991 to push invading Iraqi forces out of that country. Twenty-five years later, 13,500 troops remain.
U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan after 15 years and still in Iraq after 13 years.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Progressive women are running for office all over the country
With Donald Trump’s misogyny under the microscope, Democrats could have a secret weapon on their side between now and November: not “the woman’s card,” as Trump has called it, but the actual progressive women who will appear on ballots nationwide.
Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president has gotten far more attention in the media, but there are hundreds of female candidates running for office in 2016. And although Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is rightly credited for calling attention to the fundamental unfairness of our rigged economic and political systems, inspiring women such as Zephyr Teachout, Pramila Jayapal and Lucy Flores are carrying the mantle of progressive populism in congressional races across the country. Notably, Sanders has endorsed and fundraised for all three women in their upcoming primaries, recognizing them as important allies in the battle to create progressive change. [..]
These women, in short, are the anti-Trump. In stark contrast with Trump’s contemptible blend of ignorance and intolerant bullying, they are serious thinkers and determined activists who have spent their careers defending the poor, religious and ethnic minorities, and vulnerable members of society who are too often shut out of the political process. They are also proud members of the ascendant “Warren wing” of the Democratic Party, part of a new generation of leaders who understand the need to build a progressive infrastructure at the local and national level in order to make durable change. And while they are just a few of the many women — including women of color — fighting to change the face of Congress, their candidacies should serve as a reminder that, as important as the presidency is, the White House is not the only thing at stake in 2016.
Amanda Marcotte: Hey Mr. Trump, rape is not sex: His Bill Clinton smears are tricking the media into confusing consensual acts with assault
This is what happens when your country is founded by Puritans: Even though it’s been two decades since Bill Clinton received what conservatives continue to treat as history’s first act of oral sex, the former president’s former sex life is in the news again. And sadly, while we’re getting retro with it, the reintroduction of presidential sex talk comes with a side dose of the media once again confusing consensual-if-illicit sex with outright sexual assault. Feminists have spent decades trying to get people to understand there’s a big difference, but the presidential penis’s head bobs back up into our political discourse, and suddenly sense just goes flying right out the window.
Presidential pecker talk has snaked back into the media through two news stories this week: Donald Trump, unrepentant misogynist, is trying to blame Hillary Clinton for her husband’s philandering and Ken Starr, the prosecutor who tried to ruin Bill over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, is in danger of losing his job as Baylor University president due to mishandling of sexual assault cases at the school. In the chatter around both stories, there’s been a dangerous tendency to conflate sexual assault and consensual sex.
Dana Milbank: Republicans’ hopes for an Obama scandal crash and burn
Everything Rep. Darrell Issa knows about impeachment he learned from Wikipedia.
At Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing to consider the impeachment of Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen, Issa, the California Republican and dogged investigator of the Obama administration, confessed he was relying on an open-source website.
“You and I are not lawyers,” Issa told Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who was presenting the panel with the legal case for impeaching Koskinen, “so we’ll tax each other a little bit on a constitutional question. According to Wikipedia, at least, the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors constitutionally says it covers allegations of misconduct . . .”
Issa then questioned Chaffetz about each of the examples cited by Wikipedia contributors.
This was a fitting close to the congressional probes of the Obama years. Again and again, Republicans in Congress have dug into President Obama’s White House, and each time they have failed to unearth high-level scandal.
Ronald A. Klain: Zika is coming, but we’re far from ready
The good news is that both the House and Senate have finally passed bills that would provide some funding to combat the Zika virus. The bad news is that this action comes more than three months after President Obama requested the aid. Moreover, the House bill provides only one-third of the response needed; pays for this limited, ineffective response by diverting money allocated to fight other infectious diseases; and necessitates a conference committee to resolve differences with the Senate bill, meaning we still do not know when any money will finally get through Congress to fund the response.
Of all the things that Congress could be truculent about, fighting an epidemic is the worst imaginable. Zika is not “coming” to the United States: It is already here. H undreds of people who caught the disease abroad are in the country; more than 250 cases of pregnant women in the United States and its territories with Zika have been logged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Soon, as summer arrives, the Aedes aegypti mosquito will become active in Southern states, and the disease will spread there. Cases of sexual transmission will take place as well. It is not a question of whether babies will be born in the United States with Zika-related microcephaly — it is a question of when and how many. For years to come, these children will be a visible, human reminder of the cost of absurd wrangling in Washington, of preventable suffering, of a failure of our political system to respond to the threat that infectious diseases pose.
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