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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Jimmy Carter: In Syria, an Ugly Peace Is Better Than More War
At their summit in Helsinki, Finland, in July, President Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia reportedly agreed to end the Syrian war and to move Iranian forces away from the Syria-Israel border. President Trump has also indicated that he is willing to accept President Bashar al-Assad’s remaining in office and is prepared to withdraw American forces from Syria. This is a start. But more is needed to end the violence in Syria.
Beginning in 2011, Western and Middle Eastern powers rallied around the slogan “Assad must go.” This singular focus on the fate of Syria’s president hardened positions on all sides and made it much more difficult to explore other options.
The calls for regime change have diminished since then, but there are still some voices in Western policy circles that demand a full transition of power from the Assad government. A better approach at this point would be to test the Syrian government’s ability to embark on a new course that has the potential to bring the war to a close.
Western countries, including the United States, should re-engage incrementally with the Syrian government. They can start by reopening their embassies in Syria, since Western diplomats’ absence from Damascus has led to missed opportunities. The West should also abandon the goal of regime change and temper expectations of democratic transition in Syria in the short-to-medium term. Instead, the focus should be on patiently building democracy.
Paul Krugman: The Tax-Cut Con Goes On
What will happen if the blue wave in the midterm elections falls short? Clearly, at this point it still might: Democrats will surely receive more votes than Republicans, but thanks to gerrymandering and population geography, the U.S. electoral system gives excess weight to rural, white voters who still have faith in President Trump. What if, thanks to that excess weight, the minority prevails?
One answer, obviously, is that the unindicted co-conspirator in chief will continue to be protected from the law. And for those concerned with the survival of American democracy, that has to be the most important issue at stake in November. But if the G.O.P. hangs on, there will also be other, bread-and-butter consequences for ordinary Americans.
First of all, there is every reason to believe that a Republican Congress, freed from the immediate threat of elections, would do what it narrowly failed to do last year, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. This would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance and would in particular hit those with pre-existing conditions. There’s a reason health care, not Trump, is the central theme of Democratic campaigns this year.
But the attack on the social safety net probably wouldn’t stop with a rollback of Obama-era expansion: Longstanding programs, very much including Social Security and Medicare, would also be on the chopping block. Who says so? Republicans themselves.
Charles M. Blow: Search Your Souls (What’s Left of Them), Republicans
How many people from Donald Trump’s campaign and inner circle have to confess to crimes or be convicted of them before it is clear to everyone — Republicans especially — that the campaign was guided by criminals, if not was a criminal enterprise itself?
Tuesday’s conviction of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and guilty plea by the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen provided the utmost amplification of this reality. But it was Cohen’s implication of Trump in a felonious conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws that kicks the national crisis through which we are suffering up another level.
This accusation cries out for a congressional inquiry, and not the sham, partisan, joke investigation that the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee conducted into Russian meddling. We need to know if the president broke the law and did so for his own benefit to influence the election.
But that would require some sense of courage and patriotism among Republicans in Congress, and those qualities have been severely lacking.
Eugene Robinson: Trump the mob boss wants protection
There’s a reason President Trump increasingly sounds like the mob boss in a cliche-ridden gangster film: That’s basically what he is — and he must know how such movies usually end.
Early Wednesday morning — a day after his former campaign chairman was convicted of felonies in one federal courthouse, and his former longtime lawyer pleaded guilty to felonies in another — Trump issued this statement on Twitter:
“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ — make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”
A few days earlier, Trump had referred to John Dean, the White House counsel whose truth-telling was instrumental in President Richard M. Nixon’s downfall, as a “RAT.” And during a Fox News interview broadcast Thursday, he complained at length about defendants who “flip” and inform on higher-ups in exchange for leniency at sentencing: “This whole thing about flipping, they call it, I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years I have been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed.”
Those are not the words of some two-bit hoodlum who feels the law closing in. They are the words of the president of the United States — who apparently feels the law closing in.
Catherine Rampell: No collusion? We’ll see. But what about tax fraud?
President Trump’s touchstone mob boss, Al Capone, famously went down for tax evasion when the feds couldn’t nail him on more serious crimes. Has Trump stopped to consider whether he could be headed for the same fate?
Trump and surrogates have argued that his former lawyer’s and his campaign chairman’s near-simultaneous legal losses don’t imperil the president himself. After all, none of the charges that Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort were convicted of this week involved Russian connections to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Quoth the president: “And what’s come out of Manafort? No collusion. What’s come out of Michael Cohen? No collusion.”
As for the Cohen crimes that did directly implicate Trump — the campaign finance violations — the president and his people have argued that these are not actually crimes. After all, they’re so rarely prosecuted!
What about tax crimes, though?
There’s plenty of precedent for prosecuting those. And the Cohen filings this week raise serious new questions about whether Trump has criminal tax-fraud exposure.
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