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: The Trouble With Joe and Bernie
Neither man seems ready for harsh political reality.
It’s still very early, but Joe Biden has emerged as the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders is in second place, although he appears to be fairly far behind, and one poll shows him in a statistical tie with Elizabeth Warren. So what should we think about the men currently leading the field?
Well, I have concerns. Not about electability, a topic about which nobody knows anything. Never mind what today’s general election polls say: What will polling look like after the inevitable Republican smear campaign? The answer to this question depends, in turn, on whether news organizations will cooperate with those smears as gleefully as they did in 2016.
No, my concerns are about what will happen if either man wins. Are they ready for the political trench warfare that would inevitably follow a Democratic victory?
The trouble with both Biden and Sanders is that each, in his own way, seems to believe that he has unique powers of persuasion that will let him defy the harsh reality of today’s tribal politics. And this lack of realism could set either of them up for failure.
Jamelle Bouie: Bill Barr’s Perverse Theory of Justice
In America, no one is above the law — except the president and everyone who does wrong in his name.
On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”
Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.
He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”
Michelle Goldberg: The Only TV Show That Gets Life Under Trump
“The Good Fight” is entertainment for the resistance.
In the second season of the serial drama “The Good Fight,” Diane Lockhart, an attorney played by the regal 67-year-old actress Christine Baranski, makes a heated speech at a meeting about a legal strategy for impeaching Donald Trump. “I have spent the last few months feeling deranged,” she shouts, though she uses an expletive before “deranged.” “Going numb! All Trump, all the time. What’s real, what’s fake? Well, you know what? I just woke up.”
This captures a pretty widespread feeling among Americans right now — consider all the women who mobilized for Democrats in the midterms — but it’s surprisingly rare to see it expressed in pop storytelling. Part of the dystopian character of Trump’s presidency is his ubiquity; he dominates the news cycle, late-night TV, and book publishing. Yet Trumpism has, with only a few exceptions, gone weirdly unprocessed by fiction, either written or filmed.
Perhaps that’s because people are desperate for a respite from Trump, or because the imagination can’t compete with the strangeness of reality. It means that while there’s an explosion of news stories about the current moment, there’s a lack of the sort of human tales that might help discombobulated Americans make sense of what we’re going through.
Greg Sargent: The White House’s latest attack on Mueller reveals an ugly truth about Trump
President Trump’s latest position on the Mueller report is that it both totally exonerates him and is fatally flawed at its very core — because it doesn’t totally exonerate him.
Signs are mounting that House Democrats are reaching a breaking point in the face of Trump’s maximal resistance to any and all oversight. That resistance just took a new turn, when Trump told Fox News that former White House counsel Donald McGahn should defy a subpoena to appear before Congress.
McGahn’s testimony to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III provided the basis for the report’s conclusions on some of Trump’s worst obstruction of justice efforts, and Democrats hope he can shed more light on them. A major confrontation looks all but inevitable.
So the White House is justifying its maximal resistance with a broadened set of claims. These are set forth in a newly released letter that White House lawyer Emmet Flood sent to the Justice Department, complaining bitterly about Mueller’s investigation.
Because the Mueller report disclosed his conclusion that he could not conclusively determine that Trump hadn’t committed criminal obstruction of justice, the letter argues, the investigation is hopelessly tainted.
What’s more, it argues, Trump fully cooperated with that tainted investigation. But now that it’s over, he retains the right to exercise executive privilege to prevent his advisers from testifying to Congress — that is, to resist all efforts to further flesh out Mueller’s conclusions.
The argument is ludicrous but revealing. It shows in a roundabout way that Trump’s real position is that he should be beyond the reach of accountability entirely.
Jennifer Rubin: Drunk on power
No wonder President Trump thinks he can defy Congress, tell his aides and former aides to defy Congress, threaten to fire the special counsel and mislead the American people: Attorney General William P. Barr told him (and us) that a president can end any criminal inquiry if he thinks it is unjustified. (Financial fraud? Witness tampering?) The Founders might be surprised to find out that the term of a U.S. president is the equivalent of a “stay out of jail” card, good until he leaves office — but not before pardoning himself, presumably.
With such advice, the equivalent that a president can do no wrong, Trump is convinced that he can fight “all the subpoenas.” Those Democrats are such meanies, why should he have to endure a co-equal branch investigating him? [..]
On one level, you might say this is just Trump saying stupid things. He cannot stop McGahn, so what is the harm? The harm is that the president is the chief executive who took an oath to faithfully execute the laws, not to think up groundless, absurd ways to block an investigation.
And this is precisely the kind of conduct Barr inspired with his declaration that the president can cut off any investigation he thinks is unjustified. Barr now invites and incites Trump to become even more brazen in his defiance of Congress and his disdain for the rule of law. Barr has created a monster who now roams through the landscape destroying norms, tearing up the statute books and encouraging lawlessness by others. (Why wouldn’t every witness in a criminal proceeding brought by the feds try the same sort of shenanigans?)