“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: Trump’s Energy, Low and Dirty
Donald Trump has two false beliefs about energy, one personal, one political. And the latter may send the world on a path to disaster.
On the personal side, Trump reportedly disdains exercise of any kind except golf. He believes that raising a sweat depletes the finite reserves of precious bodily fluids, I mean energy, that a person is born with, and should therefore be avoided.
Many years of acting on this belief may or may not explain the weird and embarrassing scene at the G-7 summit in Taormina, in which six of the advanced world’s leaders strolled together a few hundred yards through the historic city, but Trump followed behind, driven in an electric golf cart.
More consequential, however, is Trump’s false belief that lifting environmental restrictions — ending the supposed “war on coal” — will bring back the days when the coal-mining industry employed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Americans.
Charles M. Blow: Donald Trump: The Gateway Degenerate
Last week, when voters in Montana elected Greg Gianforte to fill the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives, even after he was recorded in a physical altercation with a reporter, many Americans — like me — were left to look on in astonished bewilderment.
There was an audio recording of the altercation. The reporter, Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, says Gianforte body-slammed him while he was simply doing his job, asking questions on the eve of the election. Gianforte’s camp issued a bogus statement basically blaming Jacobs for the incident, but that statement was not at all backed up by the audio.
There were witnesses. [..]
Outrageous. Assault is not a game. It’s not a joke. It’s criminal. Any moral person would know better than to treat it so cavalierly. A moral person wouldn’t make a joke; that person would take a stand.
But Republicans in the age of Trump have sadly moved away from morality as a viable concept.
Yes, Gianforte’s assault is a glaring display of toxic masculinity in an environment made particularly toxic by the man in the White House and his media bullying. But more telling and more ominous is the degree to which Republicans no longer seem to care, and their increasing ability to compartmentalize and justify.
Francine Pose: Donald Trump’s embarrassing gaffes deliver a potent political good: distraction
During Donald Trump’s state visit to the Middle East and Europe, Americans have been playing a sort of bleak party game, asking one another: what is the most tone-deaf remark, the most egregious faux pas, the most historically amnesiac or insensitive gaffe that our president has made in the course of his journey? [..]
Meanwhile, it’s been hard to read the accounts of Trump’s trip that have appeared in the foreign press without cringing in embarrassment for this man who is representing our country abroad.
Immediately following the November election, many of us vowed that we would never normalize the Trump presidency, that we would never allow his mindless, kleptocratic style of governance to seem acceptable, ordinary, quotidian. But what we hadn’t counted on was how much bad behavior there would be, how the daily barrage of outrageousness would diminish our capacity for outrage.
Under another presidency, any single one of the things that Trump has done and said during his journey might have sparked an international scandal; any one of these incidents might have inspired discussion, debate, response and, presumably, an apology.
Douglas Williams: The Democratic party still thinks it will win by ‘not being Trump’
In normal times, the Republican disarray in Washington would have people talking about a Democratic sweep at the midterms in 2018. You saw it with George W Bush’s second midterm election in 2006, where a Republican party riven with corruption and weighed down with the Iraq albatross was decisively defeated by a Democratic party on the ascendancy.
But these are not normal times. And in a Democratic party that is seeing their centrist and incoherent governing philosophy being ground into powder, the last thing that they seem ready for is taking power.
One more example of this occurred last week in Broward County, Florida. There, a group of party progressives gathered to hear Sally Boynton Brown, the newly-minted president – a position akin to the executive director position in other state parties – of the state party discuss the Florida Democratic party’s future with them.
Christian Christensen: Right-wing provocateurs say they are being silenced. Cry me a river
There is a delicious irony when free market zealots become victims of the very system they celebrate. When those who pontificated about the evils of the “nanny state” and the genius of consumer choice and the “invisible hand” suddenly realize that consumers don’t like them any more, and that the invisible hand is about to yank them out of their position of power. When the market tells them: “You know what? You’re losing us money. We couldn’t care less what you did or how much you made for us yesterday. Get lost.”
Of course, it is “leftists” and “liberals” who are most often accused of not being tough enough to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. Lefty “snowflakes” need the warm embrace of the state to compensate for their inability to cut it in the real world. They need “entitlements” and welfare. They need laws to protect them.
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