“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: Zombies of Voodoo Economics
According to many reports, Donald Trump is getting frantic as his administration nears the 100-day mark. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand, but one he himself touted in many pre-inauguration boasts. And it will be an occasion for numerous articles detailing how little of substance he has actually accomplished.
Yet many of these reports will, I suspect, miss half the story. It’s important to note just how little the tweeter-in-chief has managed to achieve; but we also need to focus on what, exactly, it is that he hasn’t achieved.
For Mr. Trump sold himself to voters as unorthodox as well as effective. He was going to be a different kind of president, a consummate deal-maker who would transcend the usual ideological divide. His supporters should therefore be dismayed, not just by his failure to actually close any deals, but by the fact that he evidently has no new ideas to offer, just the same old snake oil the right has been peddling for decades.
Charles M. Blow: Resilience of the Resistance
The resistance to the travesty of Donald Trump’s presidency is holding up just fine, thank you very much.
As we approach the 100th day of the Trump administration, a tremendous amount of attention and coverage will be devoted to analyzing its impact and efficacy. But I would also like to take time to celebrate the impact and efficacy of the resistance.
I must say that the issue of resilience was one that I worried and wondered about from the beginning: For far too many Americans in this digital age, stamina is rare, attention spans are short and the urge for instant gratification, or at least for expedient resolution, is enormous.
I worried that modern shortsightedness would prevent resisters from seeing the long game, that the exhaustion of constant outrage would numb them to unrelenting assault.
But, to my great delight, my worry was unfounded. Not only is the movement still strong, it appears to be getting stronger. People have found a salve for their sadness: exuberant agitation. Far from growing limp, the Trump resistance is stiffening and strengthening.
Cornel West: The Democrats delivered one thing in the past 100 days: disappointment
The distinctive feature of these bleak times is the lack of institutional capacity on the left – the absence of a political party that swings free of Wall Street and speaks to the dire circumstances of poor and working people. As the first 100 days of the plutocratic and militaristic Trump administration draw to a close, one truth has been crystal clear: the Democratic party lacks the vision, discipline and leadership to guide progressives in these turbulent times.
The neoliberal vision of the Democratic party has run its course. The corporate wing has made it clear that the populist wing has little power or place in its future. The discipline of the party is strong on self-preservation and weak on embracing new voices. And party leaders too often revel in self-righteousness and self-pity rather than self-criticism and self-enhancement. The time has come to bid farewell to a moribund party that lacks imagination, courage and gusto.
John Nichols: The First 100 Days of Resistance
The awful irony of Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president is that a man who is still frequently described as “erratic” has governed as an entirely predictable corporate conservative—as everyone paying attention knew he would. Trump was always going to choose billionaire-ism over economic populism. The outsider who promised to “drain the swamp” was always going to pack his administration with Goldman Sachs cronies and corporate lobbyists pushing privatization, deregulation, and austerity. The fabulist who inflated claims about his opposition to the Iraq War was always going to drop bombs and escalate conflicts. A political newcomer, Trump was always going to revert to xenophobic bombast and a permanent campaign of fear and bigotry in order to hold on to a base of supporters who will never get the security and prosperity that he promised. [..]
The error made by casual observers of Trump has been a refusal to accept him for who he is: a self-absorbed and largely uninformed man entirely unprepared to assume the responsibilities of the presidency, yet entirely certain that he could gut it out. America finally has the “CEO president” that dim-witted business-channel commentators have argued that we needed for years. Like George W. Bush, the “MBA president” who screwed up everything he touched, Trump brings nothing to the White House but a certainty born of his silver-spoon upbringing and an unaccountable business career.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: Sessions’s aloha-baiting could bring attention to the real problem
Imagine if I began a column about Attorney General Jeff Sessions this way: “I really am amazed that an attorney general who hails from a former Confederate state in the Deep South can issue a series of orders wrecking efforts to reform police practices, cutting back on voting rights and restarting the war on drugs.”
The specifics of what Sessions is up to are accurate, but that knock on the land of cotton would leave my inbox bulging with rebukes to bigotry against Dixie, and I’d probably get many YouTube links to Lynyrd Skynyrd singing “Sweet Home Alabama.” (Don’t go to the trouble. I already have the song on my iPhone.)
Yet the man whose job is to be the top lawyer for all of us said something very similar about a federal judge in Hawaii who blocked President Trump’s travel ban. For the record, here is Sessions’s islophobic sentence:
“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”
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