“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 Bad, the Worse and the Ugly
This week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew that already.
In fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Mr. Trump’s defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about both the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his ramblings about infrastructure and trade.
First, however, here’s a question: How much difference has it made, really, that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the White House?
The Trump administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled; whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting. Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues in a sultan’s seraglio than policy formulation in a republic. And then there are those tweets.
Richard Wolffe: Donald Trump has jumped into a quagmire with his eyes shut
It may be hard to believe, but Donald Trump is even more simplistic than George W Bush in matters of war. George W Bush enjoyed all the certainty of a very simple man: you were either with us or against us, good or evil, marching for democracy or plotting terrorist attacks.
Yet Donald Trump contrives to make Bush look like a Baron von Metternich of complexity. He just launched military strikes against a brutal Syrian regime he used to describe as “NOT our problem.” That’s the same Syrian regime propped up by his own Russian friends.
There’s a lot to be said for moral clarity after the Assad regime’s disgusting chemical attacks that murdered so many civilians in northern Syria this week. But that’s not what Trump represents. His moral certainty was nowhere to be found in 2013, after the first large-scale chemical attacks that crossed Obama’s infamous red line. “President Obama, do not attack Syria,” tweeted Trump. “There is no upside and tremendous downside.”
John Nichols: Trump Launched Missile Strikes on Syria Without Congressional Authorization
The United States launched a major military strike against Syria on Thursday night.
The attack was authorized by Donald Trump.
It was not authorized by Congress, as required by the U.S. Constitution.
The president, in a brief statement, indicated that the missile assault on a Syrian government airbase was initiated in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians earlier in the week. “Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the air field in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago in Florida. The president said that: “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”
The reference to a “vital national security interest” was an attempt to justify the presidential action.
But Congresswoman Barbara Lee argued Thursday night that “this is an act of war. Congress needs to come back into session and hold a debate. Anything less is an abdication of our responsibility.”
Jill Abramson: Ivanka Trump thinks she is in Beauty and the Beast: more like Macbeth
You can’t have it both ways, Ivanka, especially now that you have new, embossed White House stationery with an official title, assistant to the president.
Drop the wink, wink, nod, nod pretence that you and Jared Kushner are “moderating influences” – where is the moderation? Kushner, who holds the same nebulous but all powerful White House job, has huge influence derived from having married a Trump. Like him, your loyalty is unquestioned. Everyone knows you are your father’s most intimate adviser, in business and, no doubt, politics, too. The two of you bring nepotism to a new level, even surpassing JFK’s choice of Bobby for attorney general. Predictably, you are both already targets of myriad conflict-of-interest stories in the media.
The notion that you are a voice for women should have been voided during the good ol’ “grab them by the pussy” days of the campaign. Now, with your father’s defence of disgraced Fox host Bill O’Reilly as “a good person” who shouldn’t have spent $13m settling sexual misconduct lawsuits, you need to cut the con job.
Jessica Valenti: Remember when men and women could be friends? Republicans don’t
There’s a line in the 1989 hit movie When Harry Met Sally where Billy Crystal’s character insists: “Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” Thus begins the push-pull of one of the most famous romcoms of all time; a film that ends, of course, with the title characters getting married.
Platonic relationships between men and women may be ripe fodder for romantic storylines, but it’s a shame that in real life we’re somehow back in a place where male-female friendships are seen as unrealistic. Or, even worse, a danger.
In the wake of Mike Pence’s no-dinner-with-women-alone rule – a mandate that conservatives defended as good sense for honoring a marriage – a conversation has re-emerged on the right about proper roles for men and women. The short version seems to be that those of us who believe people of the opposite sex are capable of being in the same room without immediately engaging in intercourse are just fooling ourselves.
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