“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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Stanley McChrystal: Save PBS. It Makes Us Safer.
I like to say that leadership is a choice. As our leaders in Washington confront tough decisions about our budget priorities, I urge them to continue federal funding for public broadcasting. Public broadcasting makes our nation smarter, stronger and, yes, safer. It’s a small public investment that pays huge dividends for Americans. And it shouldn’t be pitted against spending more on improving our military. That’s a false choice.
This might seem like an unlikely position for me, a 34-year combat veteran. But it’s a view that has been shaped by my career leading brave men and women who thrive and win when they are both strong and smart. My experience has taught me that education, trusted institutions and civil discourse are the lifeblood of a great nation. [..]
According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, more than half of all kids in our country do not have the opportunity to attend a preschool program. I’ve also seen research that PBS local stations reach more children ages 2 to 5 than any other children’s network, and the new dedicated PBS Kids channel is the only free national programming for children that is available anywhere and anytime.
Kathleen Parker: Who is that masked man in the White House?
If there is one operative rule in Washington’s left-right paradigm, it is to shift the focus of any conversation that seems at risk of revealing something approximating truth — a game at which the current administration and its media surrogates happen to excel.
Thus, the focus early this week was on the “unmasking” of Trump campaign and transition team members who turned up in surveilled communications with foreigners. This unmasking (the naming of said team members) loosely corresponds to President Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama was wiretapping him during the transition.
This back-and-forth history is familiar by now. There was no wiretapping, a James Bond-ish technique by which Trump really meant all forms of surveillance, according to press secretary Sean Spicer. But, as we recently learned, some Trump folks were “incidentally” picked up during the foreign surveillance. We don’t yet know whether these included Russians. [..]
En fin, the crucial unmasking — who is that masked man in the White House? — is yet to come. For now, we know that the most important aspect of the Russia-hacking-wire-tapping-spying-Susan-Rice story is that Trump’s transition team was in contact with Russian operatives and others — and it would be nice to know that they were exploring critical questions related only to cabbage.
Frank Bruni: Jared Kushner, Man of Steel
Why don’t we just stitch him a red cape, put him in spandex, affix a stylized “S” to his chest and be done with it?
SuperJared has taken flight.
He’s President Trump’s point man with the Chinese, having finalized the details of the big meeting at Mar-a-Loco later this week. He was Trump’s middleman with the Mexicans not long ago.
“A shadow secretary of state,” The Washington Post called Jared Kushner, and that was well before he traveled to Iraq on Monday, beating the actual secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to one of the most consequential theaters of American foreign policy. [..]
I’m told by insiders that when Trump’s long-shot campaign led to victory, he and Kushner became convinced not only that they’d tapped into something that everybody was missing about America, but that they’d tapped into something that everybody was missing about the two of them.
Kushner was reborn with new powers, and to the heavens he ascended.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
It’s ridiculous.
David Ignatius: Trump’s shell game on Russia makes everything look suspicious
When Gen. Michael Hayden visited a secret intelligence facility in the United States a decade ago while he was CIA director, the staff gave him a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter Accusations.”
That motto is much-beloved by covert operators. It also seems to be President Trump’s rubric for responding to the FBI investigation of whether any members of his campaign team cooperated with Russian hackers. Maybe it’s becoming our national slogan.
There are now competing narratives for any issue that touches Russia or intelligence. And every day brings a new set of improbable facts: a cloak-and-dagger visit to the White House by a congressman who’s supposedly leading an investigation of the president; a secret meeting in the Seychelles islands between the founder of Blackwater and a Russian emissary.
Good grief! The cascade of news is dizzying. It’s like living inside a tumbling washer-dryer.
Ryan Goodman: Many think this law is obsolete. It could actually be a big problem for Trump.
A major question remains as to whether President Trump’s inner circle violated federal law before coming into office by communicating with foreign governments and undermining the official policies of President Barack Obama. But if you listen to almost any recent commentary, you would think that the law in question — 1799’s Logan Act — is essentially a dead letter. Why? We’re told that no one has been convicted of violating the Logan Act since the law was signed more than 200 years ago.
That’s true, but that’s not nearly the end of the argument. What commentators miss is that the Logan Act has been “enforced” and relied upon time and again by the executive branch, most notably through the State Department.
In the 19th century, secretaries of state kicked foreign ambassadors out of the country for aiding and abetting violations of the Logan Act. The Spanish minister to the United States in 1805 and the British consul during the Civil War were expelled on that basis. (It is fair to wonder if the current Russian ambassador — Sergey Kislyak — should meet a similar fate for his conversations with ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn before Trump’s inauguration.)
Richard North Patterson: Mike Pence And The Rise Of Mediocrity
A Nebraska senator once said of a Supreme Court nominee, “So what if he’s mediocre? [The mediocre] are entitled to a little representation.” But in Mike Pence mediocrity is overrepresented. Not even Donald Trump commends this intellectually blinkered, right-wing provincial as America’s Savior.
He began as a talk show host in 1994 in small-town Indiana, fulminating about the global warming “myth,” the perfidy of Washington, and the verities of an evangelical Christianity menaced by cosmopolites. Piety swiftly merged with pragmatism: ambitious for office, Pence learned what worked — an antichoice, antigay agenda served up with reckless rhetoric couched in a pose of rectitude. He informed his audience that Clarence Thomas was being “lynched,” and that “despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” A quarter-century later, Pence remains as small as his beginnings.
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