“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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Charles M. Blow: A Lie by Any Other Name
This is not a presentation of “alternative facts,” whatever that may mean, as Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s mistress of misdirection, posited over the weekend.
These are lies; good old-fashioned lies, baldfaced and flat-out lies.
Some have suggested that we in the media should focus a bit less on these lies — some of them issued in tweets and some in interviews or news conferences — and focus more on policies, particularly the ineptitude of the gathering cabinet and the raft of executive orders that Trump himself is signing.
But I take the position that this is all worthy of coverage, that there are simply different kinds of news being unearthed about this administration that exist on different strata.
To take it even further, it may be these seemingly smaller infractions that produce the greater injury because the implications are more profound. Trump does not simply have “a running war with the media,” as he so indecorously and disrespectfully spouted off while standing on the hallowed ground before the C.I.A. Memorial Wall. He is in fact having a running war with the truth itself.
Jessica Valenti:The war on abortion is just beginning
f you’ve ever wondered what the oft-used and much maligned word “patriarchy” looks like, you need look no further than a picture of Donald Trump, surrounded by white men, reinstating the global gag rule. The policy, which bans funding any international organization that dares to even talk about abortion, has contributed to thousands of women’s deaths across the globe.
The executive order was just the beginning. In the short time Trump has been president, his administration has set a disastrous course for women’s health and rights. On Tuesday, days after historic marches that put millions of women on the street globally, Republican congressmen introduced the first ever federal ‘heartbeat bill’ – a policy that would ban abortions after six weeks, well before most women even know they’re pregnant.
That same day, the House passed a bill that would make the dangerous and discriminatory Hyde Amendment – which prevents federal funds from covering abortion, even in cases of fetal abnormalities and maternal health issues – permanent. The bill, which targets poor women, would also impact abortion coverage for women with private insurance. Congressional republicans have even introduced a federal ‘personhood’ bill that would define life as beginning at conception.
While the bills will not likely get far, the new administration is sending a clear message – they’re keeping Trump’s promise to punish women who have abortions, and rolling back hard-won rights. These are far-reaching and radical policies that quite literally kill women. There is no overstating just how harmful they are.
Lawrence Douglas: Here are the potential sinister motives behind Donald Trump’s voter fraud lie
During the third presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump whether he would “absolutely accept the result of the election” should he lose. What Wallace neglected to ask was whether Trump would accept the result if he won.
Now we know the answer. [..]
Given the welter of exaggerations and prevarications that emanate from Trump on a virtual daily basis, there is a temptation to treat this as “Donald being Donald”– as nothing more than another display of the boundless narcissism and ego that can only accept the highest ratings, the biggest crowds, the greatest victories.
It is equally tempting to see a Shakespearean drama playing itself out, as the president, convinced that others are working to undermine his legitimacy, imagines himself pursued by the very dark forces that he has unleashed on to the world.
The impulse to heap all of Trump’s lies together or to puzzle over his unusual psychology threatens, however, to deflect our attention from the politics of this particular claim, which contains two separate falsehoods: first, that immigrants robbed him of the popular vote; and second, that the media has conspired to suppress the story. Together these falsehoods can be enlisted to serve three distinctly toxic political goals.
Raúl M Grijalva: The Keystone pipeline will create just 35 permanent jobs. Don’t believe the lies
For those who still insist fossil fuels are the future, the Trump administration represents a new day for some old ideas. In an early sign of things to come, the president showed his faith in big oil when he signed documents Tuesday pressuring federal agencies to support construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines. Each of these projects faced enormous protests and was put on hold by the Obama administration because of legitimate environmental and due process concerns.
Congressional Republicans frequently howled at far less heavy-handed exercises of executive power under the previous administration. Today, they applaud Trump’s move on the mistaken premise that these pipelines are good investments. Not only will these projects not create long-lasting jobs – as CNBC, not exactly an anti-corporate mouthpiece, has noted: “Pipelines do not require much labor to operate in the long term” – they will further delay the inevitable transition to clean, renewable energy our economy needs and the American people demand. ing Rock Sioux: ‘we can’t back down now’ on Dakota pipeline fight. [..]
The George W Bush years offered a direct, real-world refutation of the idea that we can pollute our way to prosperity. Indeed, the Obama job market far outpaced the Bush years despite Republican alarms about environmental regulations.
If President Trump and his allies choose to ignore those lessons, they risk an even bigger backlash from Indian Country and elsewhere – and they will have no one but themselves to blame.
Richard Wolffe: Trump’s lies are delusional. But the dangers they pose are now very real
Let us count the ways Donald Trump lies. He lies about the crowd size at his own inauguration, but that isn’t enough. His lies are so transparent that he stages a fake crowd of stooge supporters at the CIA to applaud his own lies about the crowd. In another country, which Trump rather admires, you’d call this a Potemkin village. But this took place at the CIA, which Trump previously accused of recreating Nazi Germany because they were investigating his Russian dependencies.
Trump lies that he loves the CIA, that the press fabricated the dispute, and that he never had any dealings with Russia. Who needs a lie detector test when you can just watch the president’s lips flapping?
Trump lies about the big stuff and the small stuff alike. He lies about the weather at his own inauguration. As if the weather, and all its divinely ordained raindrops, were some running commentary on his lack of legitimacy. As if we couldn’t watch the rain falling on his fake tan on television. He lies about releasing his tax returns after the IRS audit is complete. He lies about making Mexico pay for his monstrous wall on the southern border. And these are only some of his most frequent lies. [..]
All this would be laughable if Trump were still a private citizen engaging in pre-dawn tweet storms. Instead, he’s the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military and the chief executive of a vast federal government with a global reach. He can dispatch his press secretary, a formerly sane Republican hack, to lie on his behalf from the press room podium about crowd size and illegal voters. Sean Spicer may claim that nobody has the facts, or that people can disagree about the facts. He may claim the president has “studies and evidence” to back up his fabrications. By doing so, Trump and Spicer are destroying not just their own credibility but the good name of the presidency.
And we’re not even a week into this presidency.
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