“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: Ignorance Is Strength
When I travel to Asia, I’m fairly often met at the airport by someone holding a sign reading “Mr. Paul.” Why? In much of Asia, names are given family first, personal second — at home, the prime minister of Japan is referred to as Abe Shinzo. And the mistake is completely forgivable when it’s made by a taxi driver picking up a professor.
It’s not so forgivable, however, if the president of the United States makes the same mistake when welcoming the leader of one of our most important economic and security partners. But there it was: Donald Trump referring to Mr. Abe as, yes, Prime Minister Shinzo.
Mr. Abe did not, as far as we know, respond by calling his host President Donald.
Trivial? Well, it would be if it were an isolated instance. But it isn’t. What we’ve seen instead over the past three weeks is an awesome display of raw ignorance on every front. Worse, there’s no hint that either the White House or its allies in Congress see this as a problem. They appear to believe that expertise, or even basic familiarity with a subject, is for wimps; ignorance is strength.
Charles M. Blow: The Power of Disruption
The Trump resistance movement is stretching its wings, engaging its muscles and feeling its power. It is large and strong and tough. It has moved past debilitating grief and into righteous anger, assiduous organization and pressing activism.
Welcome to the dawn of the fighting-mad majority: The ones who didn’t vote for Trump and maybe even some who now regret that they did.
They are charging forward under the banner of sage wisdom that has endured through the ages: Show up, get loud and fight back. Do it with your body and words, with your time and money, with every fiber of yourself. They see what this dawning regime means and they don’t intend, not even for a second, to wait around to see what happens. “What happens” is happening right now and it’s horrific.
Donald Trump is a vulgar, uninformed, anti-intellectual, extremely unpopular grifter helming a family of grifters who apparently intend to milk their moment on the mount for every red cent.
E. J. Dionne: The next GOP assault on voting rights
When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren last week as she was reading Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter denouncing Jeff Sessions, he jogged the memory of another Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. William R. Keating.
“I went to bed that evening seeing what was occurring,” Keating said in an interview, “and when I woke up in the morning, my mind immediately went back to the outrage of an amendment that had been passed in the House,” almost entirely with Republican votes.
The amendment, introduced by Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and approved on May 9, 2012, was aimed at preventing the Justice Department from using its funds “to bring any action against any state for implementation of a state law requiring voter identification.” [..]
The amendment never made it through the Senate, but for Keating, the episode underscored the dangers that Sessions poses as attorney general. During the Obama years, the Justice Department tried to block state laws plainly aimed at suppressing turnout among minority groups. Now, voting rights advocates will no longer have the attorney general as their ally. “Acts of omission,” noted Keating, a former prosecutor, are often as serious as “acts of commission.”
Amanda Marcotte: Conservatives sure love progressives and radicals — at least after they’re dead
Sen. Mitch McConnell’s ill-advised silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren during the debate over confirming Jeff Sessions as attorney general read as a blatant act of sexism from a man who can’t handle backtalk from a woman. While that was no doubt an important element of it, it’s also important to remember that Warren was trying to read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King, in which King described Sessions’ lengthy history of undermining the civil rights movement in Alabama.
That letter angers Republicans, because in the years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, there’s been a conservative effort to remake King in their own image. Warren’s attempt to read the letter by King’s widow into the record served as an embarrassing reminder that King’s politics had nothing in common with modern conservatism.
Call it the “dead progressive” problem. Conservatives love a dead progressive hero, because they can claim that person as one of their own without any bother about the person fighting back. In some cases, the right has tried to weaponize these dead progressives, claiming that they would simply be appalled at how far the still-breathing have supposedly gone off the rails and become too radical. The Kings are just two prominent victims of this rhetorical gambit.
Heather Diby Parton: Jeff Sessions takes charge: Expect an era of open warfare on civil rights and civil liberties
From the flurry of leaks coming out of the Trump administration over the weekend it appears that the chaos is only getting worse. National security adviser Michael Flynn is under fire over lying about talking to the Russian embassy about sanctions during the transition. The White House is already said to be looking for replacements for chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer. The Japanese prime minister’s state visit was a bit of a mess, culminating with a bizarre and somewhat frightening story about Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe discussing secret information about the North Korean missile launch at a public dinner table at Mar-a-Lago surrounded by customers, some of whom were taking pictures of the national security staff. [..]
Indeed, the best part of Trump’s week had to have been the vote to confirm his attorney general. With Sessions in place at the Justice Department, the likelihood of Trump being able to avoid any serious investigation into his corrupt business activities or foreign influence are substantially increased. That is surely a relief.
While the White House may be a total mess and much of the executive branch is being run by neophytes and fools, the Justice Department is likely to be one agency that functions. Its most obvious and immediate focus will be on immigration and vote suppression, two issues of very special concern to both Trump and Sessions. But the Department of Justice has a vast area of responsibility and Sessions is sure to apply his specific brand of extremism to all of them. He’s been waiting for this opportunity for many, many years.
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