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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Richard (RJ) Eskow: How the Ghost of a Billionaire Dedicated to Privatizing Social Security Will Haunt Us for Years to Come
Peter G. “Pete” Peterson, the billionaire businessman and anti-government crusader, died last week at the age of 91. He leaves behind family and friends who will miss him, and a vast coterie of consultants and politicians who may miss his checks even more. They can take comfort from the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley: “He doth not sleep/he hath awakened from the dream of life …”
Peterson will be mourned by those who loved him. But that’s no reason to forget the harm he has done, especially since his family vows to continue his work. His son, speaking on behalf of the foundation Peterson created, says that “we will carry on his legacy with passion and pride.”
That legacy is marked by Pete Peterson’s long war against Social Security and Medicare, his austerity economics, and the false aura of objectivity Peterson used to promote his ideology.
Behind his carefully stage-managed veneer of bipartisanship (his team once tried to get me suspended from a publication for calling him right-wing), Peterson engaged in a decades-long war on the social contract. Programs like Social Security and Medicare were his immediate targets, but his ultimate goal was even broader: He wanted to extinguish the ideal of public goods, and put an end to the notion that certain social programs should be universal.
Peterson took conservative ideas and gave them an undeserved air of truth and neutrality. Politicians who embraced them were more likely to receive a steady flow of high-dollar contributions and gaining entrée to the right salons and alliances.
Paul Krugman: Is It Policy, or Just Reality TV?
The other day the Trump administration announced a new trade deal with South Korea. It also announced that President Trump was nominating the White House physician to head the Department of Veterans Affairs. What do these announcements have in common?
The answer is that both are indicators of how Trump views his job. He doesn’t seem to see actual policymaking as important; instead, he treats it all as an exercise in reality TV.
Unfortunately, what looks good on TV isn’t necessarily good for America, or the world.
Ronny L. Jackson, the veterans affairs nominee, certainly looks good on TV, as we saw when he gave Trump an excellent bill of health, including a declaration that the president, while overweight, is just shy of being officially obese — thanks to having apparently grown an inch in office.
However, girtherism isn’t the real issue here; as David Axelrod says, “a waist is a terrible thing to mind.” The point, instead, is that running veterans’ health is a management, not medical, job — and Jackson has no managerial experience.
But what does this have to do with trade deals?
Charles M. Blow:Character Should Still Matter
In the throes of the campaign in September 2016, Mike Pence told a crowd at the Living Word Bible Church in Mesa, Ariz.:
“I’m old enough to remember back in the last Clinton administration where America really had a debate over whether character mattered to the presidency. We don’t need to have that debate again. We don’t need to have that debate again. Character matters to the presidency and Donald Trump will bring the highest level of integrity to the highest office in the land. You can count on it.”
Ha.
This after a lifetime of Trump boasting about his sexual conquests, after years of him going on the Howard Stern show and saying the most debauched things, and just two weeks before the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Trump boasted about kissing and groping women without their permission — in other words, sexual assault.
Pence’s proclamation was a lie when he said it, and is even more of a lie now. Trump is involved in litigation over sexual encounters on three fronts, including with the porn star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels.
But the Daniels scandal is hardly making a dent.
Eugene Robinson: Surprise: Trump’s newest Cabinet nominee has no relevant experience
You can’t make this stuff up: President Trump has announced he will nominate a medical doctor who has no discernible management experience to run the second-largest agency in the federal government.
Can presidents be sued for malpractice?
The man Trump has named to become secretary of veterans affairs, Ronny L. Jackson , happens to be the president’s personal doctor. More to the point, given Trump’s perpetual hunger for sycophancy, is the fact that Jackson showered the president with hyperbolic Dear-Leader-style praise during a widely viewed television appearance in January. [..]
I assume Jackson has been more, shall we say, plain-spoken with the president about his health than he was with the public. But am I suggesting that flattery, rather than merit, is what makes him Trump’s choice to replace ousted VA Secretary David Shulkin? Absolutely, because no other explanation makes sense.
Pliability may also be playing a role. In a New York Times op-ed, Shulkin wrote that he believed he was being sacked because he opposed a push by the Trump administration “to put VA health care in the hands of the private sector.”
Vanita Gupta: The bitter lie behind the census’s citizenship question
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross failed a crucial test of leadership this week. Buckling to President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and their anti-immigrant agenda, Ross agreed to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, sacrificing the integrity, fairness and accuracy of the count. For the good of our democracy, Congress must overturn his decision.
Ross testified just last week that he was still considering the Justice Department’s last-minute, “very controversial request” (as he put it) to jam an untested, unnecessary question about citizenship status onto the 2020 questionnaire. That request drew intense opposition from a nonpartisan and ideologically broad group of business leaders, state and local officials, social scientists, and civil and human rights advocates who know how much is at stake with a fair and accurate census.
Not only is the constitutionally mandated census central to apportioning political power at every level of our representative form of government, but also the data collected influences the allocation of more than $675 billion in federal funds every year, along with countless policy and investment decisions by government agencies, nonprofit organizations and private enterprise.
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