“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Everyone in the world of opinion spends a lot of time talking about the awfulness of Donald Trump — and with plenty of reason. But can we take a moment to consider the awfulness of Senator John McCain? Awfulness somewhat, but only somewhat, redeemed by his last-minute vote.
In case you haven’t been following the story, what has been going on in the Senate these past few days is one of the most shameful episodes in that body’s history. Policy that will affect the lives of millions of Americans (and may ruin many of those lives), that will shape a sixth of the economy, is being rushed through a process that is both chaotic and cynical.
We don’t know yet how all this will turn out, but one thing is clear: McCain has been a crucial enabler of the Senate’s shame — and a world-class hypocrite to boot. On Tuesday, he cast the decisive vote allowing this whole process to proceed, with no Democratic votes. Then he gave a sanctimonious speech denouncing partisanship and divisiveness, and declared that while he voted to allow debate to begin, he would never vote for the existing Senate bill without major changes.
And later that day, he voted for that very bill, even though, you guessed it, it hadn’t changed in any significant way.
The spectacle of President Trump’s now daily efforts to humiliate the attorney general into resigning has transfixed the country. But while we are busy staring at the wreckage of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ relationship with the man he supported for the presidency, there is something more insidious happening.
The president is attempting to dismantle the rule of law, destroy the time-honored independence of the Justice Department, and undermine the career men and women who are devoted to seeking justice day in and day out, regardless of which political party is in power.
If we are not careful, when we wake up from the Trump presidency, our justice system may be broken beyond recognition.
Over the past few days, many people from both parties have rightly expressed their dismay at how President Trump has publicly lambasted the attorney general, noting the president’s lack of loyalty to a man who has been consistently loyal to him.
The Court of Mad King Donald is not a presidency. It is an affliction, one that saps the life out of our democratic institutions, and it must be fiercely resisted if the nation as we know it is to survive.
I wish that were hyperbole. The problem is not just that President Trump is selfish, insecure, egotistical, ignorant and unserious. It is that he neither fully grasps nor minimally respects the concept of honor, without which our governing system falls apart. He believes “honorable” means “obsequious in the service of Trump.” He believes everyone else’s motives are as base as his.
The Trump administration is, indeed, like the court of some accidental monarch who is tragically unsuited for the duties of his throne. However long it persists, we must never allow ourselves to think of the Trump White House as anything but aberrant. We must fight for the norms of American governance lest we forget them in their absence.
Suppose our fire department was staffed with out-of-shape incompetents who didn’t know how to handle a firehose. That would be really bad news, but it wouldn’t be obvious most of the time because we don’t often see major fires. The fire department’s inadequacy would become apparent only when a major fire hit, and we were left with a vast amount of unnecessary death and destruction. This is essentially the story of modern economics.
The problem is not that modern economics lacks the tools needed to understand the economy. Just as with firefighting, the basics have been well known for a long time. The problem is with the behavior and the incentive structure of the practitioners. There is overwhelming pressure to produce work that supports the status quo (for example, redistributing to the rich), that doesn’t question authority, and that is needlessly complex.
Anthony Scaramucci moves quickly, but not always coherently. In so many ways, the new White House communications director is so much like his boss: grotesquely entertaining like a drunken party before the projectile vomiting begins.
Scaramucci, as his call to the New Yorker so aptly demonstrated, is undisciplined and unprincipled, over-reaching and under-qualified, petty, vindictive, and above all, in love with his own image on TV. In short, he’s the perfectly-coiffed face of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Now there are some signs that he is not in fact the media maven so beloved by political reporters many moons ago, when he was named to his job last week. It turns out that a bravado briefing from the White House podium does not translate to any ability to fill the job of communications director.
But no matter. This is the Trump White House, where competency is of far less value than sycophancy, and virtuous staffers are worth rather less than a Ruby Tuesday special.
Recent Comments