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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Michelle Goldberg: An Impeachment Inquiry Is Coming. It Might Have Already Begun.

Robert Mueller’s testimony may have lacked thrills, but it marked a turning point in the case against the president.

Last Wednesday, after Robert Mueller’s terse and sometimes halting congressional testimony, conventional wisdom quickly congealed: Mueller’s performance had made Donald Trump’s impeachment far less likely. “Robert S. Mueller III’s disastrous testimony has taken the wind out of the sails of the Democratic impeachment drive,” wrote Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. CNN’s Chris Cillizza declared Mueller’s testimony “a bust — at least when it came to generating momentum for impeachment.”

ess than a week later, it’s clear that these hot takes were wrong. At no point in Trump’s wretched rule has impeachment appeared more probable. Indeed, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, which would oversee impeachment hearings, argue that an inquiry into impeachment has already begun. An inexorable confrontation between the House and the president has been set in motion.

Before Mueller’s testimony last Wednesday, 93 House Democrats had come out for an impeachment inquiry. As I write this on Monday, the number is up to 109; among them are Katherine Clark, vice chairwoman of the House Democratic caucus, and Mike Levin, a freshman from a swing district. By the end of the week, more than half the Democratic caucus could be on board.

Eugene Robinson: Trump’s escalation of racism means one thing: He’s worried about reelection

President Trump’s decision to put away his racist dog whistle and bring out his racist bullhorn has just one plausible explanation: desperation.

Disregard, as usual, what Trump claims about his political standing and his prospects for winning a second term. He is acting as though he knows he is likely to lose the election, perhaps by a humiliating margin — and fears what will happen to him and his dodgy business empire once he’s out of office.

Hence Trump’s undisguised appeals to white racial resentment and anger: the vicious and absurd demand that four House members of color “go back” to other countries; the unprovoked and sustained Twitter screed against well-liked veteran Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and, unbelievably, the entire city of Baltimore; the gratuitous and slanderous claim that the Rev. Al Sharpton “Hates Whites & Cops!” Nothing subtle in any of this.

It overly flatters Trump to fear he’s playing three-dimensional chess or employing some kind of exotic political jiujitsu. What we’re hearing in his harangues and reading in his tweets is naked fear. And he has reason to be very afraid.

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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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Robert Reich: The Real Reason For Impeachment

In today’s political climate, the question of whether or not to impeach the President of the United States is often thought of in political terms.

But there is a much deeper concern at the heart of the question.

An impeachment inquiry in the House is unlikely to send Trump packing before Election Day 2020 because Senate Republicans won’t convict him. And it’s impossible to know whether an impeachment inquiry will hurt or help Trump’s chances of being reelected.

Does this mean impeachment should be off the table? No. There’s a non-political question that Congress should consider: Is enforcing the United States Constitution important for its own sake — even if it goes nowhere, even if it’s unpopular with many voters, even if it’s politically risky?

Every child in America is supposed to learn about the Constitution’s basic principles of separation of powers, and checks and balances.

But these days, every child and every adult in America is learning from Donald Trump that these principles are bunk. [..]

Trump surely appears to be usurping the powers of the other branches. Under these circumstances, the Constitution mandates that the House undertake an impeachment inquiry and present evidence to the Senate.

This may not be the political thing to do. But in order to safeguard our democracy, it is the right thing to do.

Charles M. Blow: The Rot You Smell Is a Racist Potus

Trump and his views are the real infestations in America.

It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district.

This talk of infestation is telling, because he only seems to apply it to issues concerning black and brown people. He has sniped about the “Ebola infested areas of Africa.” He has called Congressman John Lewis’s Atlanta district “crime infested” as well as telling him to focus on “the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.” He has called sanctuary cities a “crime infested & breeding concept.” He has talked about how “illegal immigrants” will “pour into and infest our Country.” He has called the presence of the MS-13 gang members “in certain parts of our country” an “infestation.”

None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.

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