“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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Chelsea Manning: Chelsea Manning: President Trump, Trans People in the Military Are Here to Stay
With three tweets, the leader of the largest employer in the country just tried to lay off all trans people in the military. Many service members who were just told “we want you” are suddenly being told “go away.” The sudden reversal by the administration, from allowing trans people to serve openly in the military to outright banning us, is a devastating blow to our livelihoods, our basic humanity, our survival. It is also a devastating blow to the entire credibility of the United States military for years to come.
This is all painfully familiar. Once upon a time, I was denied the ability to even exist as who I am. I had to hide. I had to be in the closet. I had to lie to people I stood next to. I had to virtually eradicate my own existence from myself. I served as a gay person under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and also as a trans person under the ban on open transgender service. I came out as trans only during my years working as an analyst in the Army.
So, here we are again. After years of advocacy, research, experts’ weighing-in, lives lost, we made progress. And now, again, we are hurtling backward. We are risking our credibility, our legitimacy as a nation and, again, risking the lives of so many people who are listening and watching, and who are already serving.
Dana Milbank: This column brought to you by the ‘Amazon Washington Post’
The publication you are now reading has a new name: The Amazon Washington Post.
The moniker was bestowed in recent days by President Trump, putting the newspaper in the company of the Failing New York Times, Li’l Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, Crooked Hillary and Low- Energy Jeb.
“A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post. . . . These illegal leaks, like Comey’s must stop!” he roared, via Twitter, early Saturday.
The publication you are now reading has a new name: The Amazon Washington Post.
The moniker was bestowed in recent days by President Trump, putting the newspaper in the company of the Failing New York Times, Li’l Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, Crooked Hillary and Low- Energy Jeb.
“A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post. . . . These illegal leaks, like Comey’s must stop!” he roared, via Twitter, early Saturday.
Gail Collins: Wow, Trump Can’t Terminate
Pick your favorite irony:
1) Donald Trump turns out to be terrible at firing people.
2) The White House celebrates its “American Heroes Week” by banning transgender volunteers from serving in the military.
3) Thanks to the president’s harangues, we are actually starting to feel sympathy for Jeff Sessions.
I can definitely understand if you want to pick No. 2, especially since Trump just finished observing “Made in America Week” with an application to hire 70 foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago.
But let’s talk for a minute about the way our president gets rid of unwanted members of his administration. It’s a monument to passive-aggressive ineptitude. With Sessions, Trump has been broadcasting his displeasure to the world for more than a week without making the obvious follow-through.
Charles M. Blow: ‘First They Came For …’
It is no longer sufficient to brand Donald Trump as abnormal, a designation that is surely applicable but that falls significantly short in registering the magnitude of the menace.
The standard nomenclature of normal politics must be abandoned. What we are witnessing is nothing less than an assault on the fundamentals of the country itself: on our legacy institutions and our sense of protocol, decency and honesty.
In any other circumstance, we might likely write this off as the trite protestations of a man trapped in a toddler’s temperament, full of meltdowns, magical thinking and make believe. But this man’s vindictiveness and mendacity are undergirded by the unequaled power of the American president, and as such he has graduated on the scale of power from toddler to budding tyrant.
This threat Trump poses — to our morals, ethics, norms and collective sense of propriety — may be without equal from a domestic source.
Everything he is doing is an assault and matters on some level.
E. J. Dionne: The norms of government are collapsing before our eyes
The news is being reported on split screen as if the one big story in Washington is disconnected from the other. But President Trump’s lawless threats against Attorney General Jeff Sessions have a lot in common with the Senate’s reckless approach to the health coverage of tens of millions of Americans.
On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, we are witnessing a collapse of the norms of governing, constant violations of our legitimate expectations of political leaders, and the mutation of the normal conflicts of democracy into a form of warfare that demands the opposition’s unconditional surrender.
Trump’s latest perverse miracle is that he has progressives — along with everyone else who cares about the rule of law — rooting for Sessions. The attorney general is as wrong as ever on voter suppression, civil rights enforcement and immigration. But Sessions did one very important thing: He obeyed the law.
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