“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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Paul Krugman: The Medicare Killers
During the campaign, Donald Trump often promised to be a different kind of Republican, one who would represent the interests of working-class voters who depend on major government programs. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he declared, under the headline “Why Donald Trump Won’t Touch Your Entitlements.”
It was, of course, a lie. The transition team’s point man on Social Security is a longtime advocate of privatization, and all indications are that the incoming administration is getting ready to kill Medicare, replacing it with vouchers that can be applied to the purchase of private insurance. Oh, and it’s also likely to raise the age of Medicare eligibility.
So it’s important not to let this bait-and-switch happen before the public realizes what’s going on. [..]
You might think this would make the whole idea a non-starter. And this push will, in fact, fail — just like Social Security privatization in 2005 — if voters realize what’s happening.
What’s crucial now is to make sure that voters do, in fact, realize what’s going on. And this isn’t just a job for politicians. It’s also a chance for the news media, which failed so badly during the campaign, to start doing its job.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: And Now, We Remake The Democratic Party. Into What?
For the first time in a quarter-century, we’re about to see a vacuum of political and intellectual leadership in the Democratic Party. An entire generation of leaders – including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill and Hillary Clinton – will be leaving the political stage. With them will go an entire infrastructure of policy advisers, political strategists, associates, friends, and hangers-on.
The party will have to remake itself. The question is, as what? [..]
This is a time to think big. It’s time to comprehensively address climate change, which will get even worse under Trump; to work on making Medicare available to every American; to address the nation’s growing retirement crisis, by increasing Social Security’s benefits; to provide tuition-free higher education; to guarantee jobs for everyone willing to work; and to begin addressing the other great challenges of the 21st century.
The next four years will be painful, especially for the most vulnerable among us. But the struggle for a better future needn’t be. In fact, many people have already found that it gives meaning and purpose to their lives.
The Bernie Sanders campaign reminded us that people will fight for a cause. The Democratic Party needs to become a cause more people want to fight for. In the midst of defeat, it has that chance.
Trevor Timm: If Donald Trump gets his way, his administration will be disastrous
It’s hard to imagine the start of the Trump administration going any worse: their transition team is in absolute chaos, awash with walking conflicts of interest, and the people they’ve floated as cabinet members are extremists, torture supporters and generally awful people who should be no where near the levers of power.
The New York Times reported on the nightmare that is the Trump transition process on Tuesday, which they described as being “marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American allies were blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world”. The Huffington Post reported that Trump representatives missed meetings with several major federal agencies.
But it’s the people who are already in place that are arguably worse.
Robert Reich: The Democratic party lost its soul. It’s time to win it back
Who will become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee? This leadership contest has significant implications for the future of American politics. The choice will help determine how the Democratic party responds to its extraordinary defeats in recent years, ending with the election of Donald Trump.
You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it’s become – which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding.
Don’t bet on it. [..]
The Democratic party will choose its new chair soon after the start of the year. So far the contestants include Howard Dean, a former DNC chair, Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, Naral Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and South Carolina Democratic party chair Jaime Harrison.
Between now and then, there will be a fierce behind-the-scenes struggle among the handful of contenders. I don’t know who will win, but I do know this: the party must transform itself from a fund-raising machine into a movement. That will be difficult, but not impossible. The times demand it. If the Democratic party fails in this mission, it will be supplanted by another organization capable of doing so.
Heather Digby Parton: Donald Trump is bringing torture back: His entire foreign-policy team are big fans of the worst Bush-era practices
One of the most active conversations these days among political activists who oppose Donald Trump is about the extent to which Democrats should “work with” the new president, considering his white nationalist, authoritarian campaign and the people with whom he has surrounded himself. It’s both a strategic and a moral question, and the potential complications and rewards run in a number of different directions. Salon’s Simon Maloy addressed some of the problems in this piece on Thursday.
[..]But let’s be honest. Trump is not the first leader to break with the norms we all took for granted. Republicans have been pushing that envelope ever since they came into power in 1994 and used their House majority to stage a years-long witch hunt against Bill Clinton, which culminated in an embarrassing sideshow of an impeachment over a private sexual matter. They followed up by seizing the presidency under very dubious circumstances, blatantly using the levers of power, both partisan and familial, to do it. Then came the Iraq war, the most abusive break with norms of all, a deeply immoral decision to use a catastrophic terrorist attack as an excuse to fulfill a long-held, but irrelevant, foreign policy objective. We’ve been on shaky ground for a while.
But in my mind for all the broken norms, the one that is the most destructive of moral authority and civilization is the normalization of torture. I still find it stunning that we talk about it matter-of-factly as if it were an argument about whether or not to fund a highway bill rather than the grotesquely sadistic practice it is. A prohibition against torture wasn’t just a “norm” — torture was taboo, something so far outside of our understanding of right and wrong that it was beyond discussion, like pedophilia or cannibalism.
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