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: Did China Just Bribe Trump to Undermine National Security?
Did the president of the United States just betray the nation’s security in return for a bribe from the Chinese government?
Don’t say that this suggestion is ridiculous: Given everything we know about Donald Trump, it’s well within the bounds of possibility, even plausibility.
Don’t say there’s no proof: We’re not talking about a court of law, where the accused are presumed innocent until proved guilty. Where the behavior of high officials is concerned, the standard is very nearly the opposite: They’re supposed to avoid situations in which there is even a hint that their actions might be motivated by personal gain.
Oh, and don’t say that it doesn’t matter one way or the other, because the Republicans who control Congress won’t do anything about it. That in itself is a key part of the story: An entire political party — a party that has historically wrapped itself in the flag and questioned the patriotism of its opponents — has become entirely complaisant in the possibility of raw corruption, even if it involves payoffs from hostile foreign powers.
Eugene Robinson: Democrats have it too good to shoot themselves in the foot
If political power were won by hand-wringing and anguished introspection, the Democratic Party would rule the galaxy.
The hum of obsessive and counterproductive worry is rising: President Trump’s approval has crept up from abysmal to merely awful! Candidates from the party’s progressive wing have won some House primaries! Republicans have not, in every single case, chosen candidates who are unelectable! The Russia investigation is a year old, and still nobody has been frog-marched out of the West Wing in chains! And Trump is still president!
Get a grip, people. Try to focus. The November election is too important, and the political terrain too advantageous, for Democrats to waste time on their customary defeatism.
The Trump administration is dangerous, wrongheaded and inept, both domestically and abroad. Its corruption is staggering. Its corrosion of democratic norms is tragic. And it should be clear by now that the Republican-led Congress will do nothing to restrain a mercurial president who sets the nation’s agenda by what he “learns” from watching hours and hours of “Fox & Friends.”
Catherine Rampell: Republicans want Big Government, too. They just want it to help fewer people.
Leave it to Congress to take food away from 2 million poor people and somehow save no money in the process.
The House farm bill, scheduled for a vote Friday, contains a major overhaul to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps). In many ways, the legislation — which, in a break with tradition, was written entirely by Republicans — contains objectives shared by people on both sides of the aisle. These include helping low-income people find more stable work and encouraging noncustodial parents to contribute financially to their kids’ upbringing.
However noble such goals are, though, the actual consequence of the bill would be a gigantic, expensive new government bureaucracy — one that eats up nearly all the “savings” from kicking people off food stamps, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
The most controversial part of the bill, and the part that President Trump has reportedly made a condition of his signature, involves work requirements.
Jill Abramson: Michael Cohen is giving Washington fixers a bad name
Michael Cohen has pulled off the seemingly impossible. He has actually sullied the meaning of the term Washington fixer. I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to see the sobriquet in a recent New York Times headline above a front-page story earlier this month: “How Michael Cohen, Trump’s Fixer, Built A Shadowy Business Empire”.
For much of my career in journalism, I’ve specialized in covering Washington fixers, the lawyers, lobbyists and consultants who earn huge fees by selling their access to the powerful. I’ve watched presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, bring along their personal lawyers from back home to Washington, where these lawyers – the fixers – rotate through the capital’s infamous revolving door and earn millions opening doors to the rulers they once served. While prostitution may be the oldest profession in much of the western world, in Washington the oldest profession is another form of prostitution: influence peddling.
I thought I had seen it all. One of Clinton’s lawyer pals from Arkansas, Webster Hubbell, followed him to the White House and a high post in the justice department, but then wound up in the slammer for overbilling law clients.
William Rivers Pitt: Rejecting the Mindset of the Forever War
My daughter was born in the 22nd year of the Forever War, which stands today upon its 27th year and counting. People who should know better may tell you the war started only 17 years ago, after September 11, but those people are likely trying to sell you something, and it’s probably more war.
The Forever War began as Desert Storm and wended its way through different iterations such as Operation Desert Fox, before morphing into the current multi-theater murder machine we know today. It has no Pentagon jargon name any more, not really. It’s just forever.
They came for me just before it all began. I was a newly minted high school graduate, green as new grass, when the man in the uniform paid his call. Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as Adolph Hitler, the Army recruiter told me in my living room, with a huge army that threatens the world. War is coming. If I join the Reserve Officer Training Corps in September, however, I wouldn’t see that war for another four years, and I would be an officer when I did. “Probably,” he said, “it will all be over by then.”
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