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

Jamelle Bouie: The Trump We Did Not Want to See

When are we going to stop trying to rationalize the irrational?

Much of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, an American horror and science fiction writer who worked during the first decades of the 20th century, is defined by individual encounters with the incomprehensible, with sights, sounds and ideas that undermine and disturb reality as his characters understand it. Faced with things too monstrous to be real, but which exist nonetheless, Lovecraftian protagonists either reject their senses or descend into madness, unable to live with what they’ve learned.

It feels, at times, that when it comes to Donald Trump, our political class is this Lovecraftian protagonist, struggling to understand an incomprehensibly abnormal president. The reality of Donald Trump — an amoral narcissist with no capacity for reflection or personal growth — is evident from his decades in public life. But rather than face this, too many people have rejected the facts in front of them, choosing an illusion instead of the disturbing truth.

Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III: Why Is Mitch McConnell So Afraid of John Bolton?

The Senate must hear his testimony in an impeachment trial.

The importance of John Bolton’s offer to testify if subpoenaed in the impeachment proceedings against President Trump cannot be overstated. In a single stroke, Mr. Bolton, the former national security adviser, elevated truth and transparency over political gamesmanship.

The Senate must take him up on his offer, as well as demand the testimony of President Trump and the administration officials he has barred from testifying. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, reportedly has the votes to proceed with the trial despite no agreement with Democrats on new witnesses and to leave it a question to take up after opening arguments. The Senate still must declare that it will call witnesses during the trial.

Everyone — Republicans, Democrats and independents — must know that these crucial witnesses will be heard.

The core principle behind the rule of law is that justice is blind and partisan identity should not influence a trial’s outcome. But anyone watching Mr. McConnell twist himself into knots in trying to block witnesses and documents has to wonder whether this notion ever took root in his mind.

Heather Digby Parton: Who needs John Bolton? Mike Pompeo has been pushing Trump into war with Iran all along

An evangelical Christian and hardline neocon, the secretary of state has quietly become a dangerous power player

Ever since President Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani last Friday night, everyone in the world has been holding their breath wondering what would come next. There were tweets and public statements about retaliation, with the president saying he would target Iranian cultural sites, while the Iranians were promising they would not engage in the asymmetric responses everyone assumed they were planning. [..]

Trump may ignore them and just declare victory. But most experts expect that Iran will not be content with this limited response that causes no pain for the U.S., considering the importance of the man who was killed. Frankly, it’s not reasonable to believe that the U.S. is going to say it’s even-steven either, at least not as long as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has the president’s ear. All the reporting about how the decision was made says this debacle was his baby.

I think the presence of über-hawk John Bolton in the administration somewhat obscured Pompeo’s Iran obsession. As with our hopes that Attorney General William Barr would be a predictable Republican establishment institutionalist, there was some thought that Pompeo’s closeness with the president meant that he would manage his impulsivity and chaotic foreign policy. What appears to have happened is that, like Barr, Pompeo is an ideological extremist who has figured out how to appease and flatter the president into helping him achieve his own goals.

Reverend William Barber: Evangelicals using religion for political gain is nothing new. It is a US tradition

No one who has read US history can be surprised by the hypocrisy of Evangelicals for Trump but it also tells us how their undoing will inevitably come

Last Friday the Trump 2020 campaign held its first rally at a megachurch. King Jesus international ministries, located outside of Miami, Florida, hosted the Evangelicals for Trump Coalition kick-off. Before boasting about his commitment to fight for the religious right’s agenda, the president bowed his head to receive prayers from prosperity preacher Paula White and other religious nationalists who offer spiritual cover for a corrupt and immoral administration.

As a bishop of the church, I am troubled anytime I see Christianity used to justify the injustice, deception, violence and oppression that God hates. Even if Donald Trump had a perfect personal moral résumé, his policy agenda is an affront to God’s agenda to lift the poor and bless the marginalized. The distorted moral narrative these so-called Evangelicals for Trump have embraced is contrary to God’s politics, which have nothing to do with being a Democrat or Republican. But this misuse of religion is not new. It has a long history in the American story.

Strobe Talbott and Maggie Tennis : The Only Winner of the U.S.-Iran Showdown Is Russia

A crisis tailor-made for Vladimir Putin.

Hours before Iran launched a missile attack on U.S. troops in Iraq, Vladimir Putin visited Syria to huddle with his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad over the mounting U.S.-Iran crisis. Russia has repeatedly condemned the U.S. airstrikes that killed Iranian Major Gen. Qassem Soleimani. It’s fair to assume that leaders in Moscow are seeking to turn the situation to their advantage.

Relations between Washington and Tehran have deteriorated since the onset of the Syrian conflict and even more so since President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. At the same time, Russia and Iran have grown closer through military cooperation in Syria. Moscow’s expanding influence in Syria suggests that a conflict between the United States and Iran could advance Russia’s power and reputation in the region. At the very least, Russia will be able to paint the United States as an erratic aggressor, leading regional actors and international allies to question cooperation with Washington.

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

Paul Krugman: Trump the Intimidator Fails Again

Because he’s just a bully with delusions of grandeur.

International crises often lead, at least initially, to surging support for a country’s leadership. And that’s clearly happening now. Just weeks ago the nation’s leader faced public discontent so intense that his grip on power seemed at risk. Now the assassination of Qassim Suleimani has transformed the situation, generating a wave of patriotism that has greatly bolstered the people in charge.

Unfortunately, this patriotic rallying around the flag is happening not in America, where many are (with good reason) deeply suspicious of Donald Trump’s motives, but in Iran.

In other words, Trump’s latest attempt to bully another country has backfired — just like all his previous attempts.

From his first days in office, Trump has acted on the apparent belief that he could easily intimidate foreign governments — that they would quickly fold and allow themselves to be humiliated. That is, he imagined that he faced a world of Lindsey Grahams, willing to abandon all dignity at the first hint of a challenge.

But this strategy keeps failing; the regimes he threatens are strengthened rather than weakened, and Trump is the one who ends up making humiliating concessions.

Michelle Goldberg: The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Rule Is Here

Unstable and impeached, the president pushes the U.S. toward war with Iran.

After three harrowing years, we’ve reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation, has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.

We don’t yet know how Iran will retaliate, or whether all-out war will be averted. But already, NATO has suspended its mission training Iraqi forces to fight ISIS. Iraq’s Parliament has voted to expel American troops — a longtime Iranian objective. (On Monday, U.S. forces sent a letter saying they were withdrawing from Iraq in response, only to then claim that it was a draft released in error.) On Sunday, Iran said it will no longer be bound by the remaining restrictions on its nuclear program in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s cultural sites and tried to use Twitter to notify Congress of his intention to respond to any Iranian reprisals with military escalation. [..]

Unlike with North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. Most of this country has never accepted Trump, but over the past three years, many have gotten used to him, lulled into uneasy complacency by an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.

Kate Aronoff:Republicans preach fiscal conservatism, yet they always find money for war

Costs only become an issue when it comes to programs that run counter to Republican policy priorities

If you know who Sean Hannity is, you probably know that he is no fan of the Green New Deal. The proposal has blanketed Fox News since it debuted in November 2018, with Hannity and fellow hosts on the network narrowing in a particular line of attack, summarized during a radio spot he did last year: “What they are proposing is so outrageously expensive and cost prohibitive even they acknowledge that if we confiscated all the billionaires’ wealth, it still wouldn’t be able to pay for this mess of theirs.” Along similar lines, Republicans circulated a bogus study from the industry-funded American Action Forum claiming a Green New Deal would cost $93tn, elevating the number into something of a meme among rightwing talking heads and politicians. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told his colleagues it would be more than enough to “buy every American a Ferrari”.

Hannity and McConnell, along with most of the rest of the Republican party, have more recently been heaping praise onto Trump for assassinating Iranian Gen Qassem Suleimani. “This is a huge victory for American intelligence, a huge victory for our military, a huge victory for the state department, and a huge victory and total leadership by the president,” Hannity boasted after the killing. Without consulting Congress, the president kicked long-simmering US-Iran tensions up to a boil that now threatens to spill over into another full-blown war in the Middle East. His threats to bomb cultural sites throughout the country – in violation of international law – make that even more likely. So why aren’t Republicans asking how the government would pay for it?

Eugene Robinson: Welcome to Trump’s war

This is what we feared, what we warned about. An erratic, petulant, clueless president, manifestly unfit to serve as commander in chief, has sparked a high-stakes international crisis. Welcome to Donald Trump’s war.

Trump’s decision to authorize the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was typically rash and shortsighted. Blowing to smithereens a high-ranking official of a sovereign nation is, by any standard, an act of war. Doing so without any discernible plan for what to do next is an act of stupidity, one for which I fear we will pay dearly with American blood and treasure.

Think about it: The president of the United States has threatened to bomb Iran’s priceless cultural sites, for no reason except spite and a desire to look “tough.” How would that differ from what the Taliban did in Afghanistan? Is this the kind of foreign policy we’re supposed to be proud of?

Trump campaigned on a promise to end our involvement in Middle East wars. Despite all his tough talk, he is so conflict-averse that he won’t even fire aides who displease him in person, instead using emissaries and tweets. His instinct now will probably be to back off. But I worry that the events he has set in motion will have a logic and momentum of their own.

Helaine Olen: Trump claims he wants to protect seniors. He’s actually their worst enemy.

One reason Donald Trump is president and Hillary Clinton is not is because of the support of seniors. He received a majority of the vote from people over the age of 65 in 2016. He presented himself as their ally, vowing to protect Social Security and Medicare.

But Trump is not the best friend of senior voters. He’s actually just about their worst enemy. If he’s elected to a second term, older Americans — and all those who care about them — will likely learn that the hard way.

Nowhere is this more clear than health care in general and Medicare in particular. Last fall, Trump told a group of seniors at one of Florida’s largest retirement communities that Medicare is “under siege” from Democrats. Medicare-for-all, he said, “would totally obliterate Medicare.” What he didn’t tell the audience was that same day he signed an executive order that likely will weaken Medicare. As Michael Hiltzik pointed out at the Los Angeles Times, the order, which demanded the government investigate raising Medicare reimbursement rates, could raise the cost of the program, undermining its finances, not to mention potentially increasing the amounts seniors need to pay over time. At the same time, Trump’s plan — also contained in the executive order — encourages more use of Medicare Advantage, which could ultimately push seniors toward narrow medical networks, cutting access to doctors and restricting choice. Finally, according to The Center for American Progress, the Trump policy could also make it more likely that seniors are subjected to surprise medical bills, something current law mostly protects them from.

In other words, under the guise of protecting seniors, Trump is laying the groundwork to weaken Medicare. “It’s actually a plan to reshape the program in favor of further enriching the health care industry at the expense of the sick,” says Emily Gee, a health economist with the Center for American Progress.

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

Charles M. Blow: Crisis as Political Catalyst

The Democratic presidential candidate must be able to respond to any situation.

Last week, Donald Trump demonstrated the incredible power the president has to create such a crisis with the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Iraq.

There is no way to know as of yet what prompted Trump to take such an action. The administration has said that there was an imminent threat from Suleimani, who was actively planning attacks on American interests. However, as CNN reported, “The lack of evidence provided to lawmakers and the public has fueled lingering skepticism about whether the strike was justified.” [..]

Whatever Trump’s reasoning, he has, at least for the moment, shifted the narrative.

Impeachment talk recedes a bit as newspaper column inches and television news analysis adjust to include coverage of the attack, fears of Iranian retribution and the broader question about what this all means for our interests and allies in the Middle East.

Democratic candidates on the trail are now discussing the Iranian episode in addition to health care, an issue that has come to define the contest.

And as all this happens, voters see candidates through a different lens. The candidates deemed strong on domestic policy may not enjoy that same favor on foreign policy.

Susan E. Rice: The Dire Consequences of Trump’s Suleimani Decision

One thing is clear after the killing of Iran’s second most important official: Americans are not safer.

Americans would be wise to brace for war with Iran.

Full-scale conflict is not a certainty, but the probability is higher than at any point in decades. Despite President Trump’s oft-professed desire to avoid war with Iran and withdraw from military entanglements in the Middle East, his decision to order the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, as well as Iraqi leaders of an Iranian-backed militia, now locks our two countries in a dangerous escalatory cycle that will likely lead to wider warfare.

How did we get here? What are the consequences of these targeted killings? Can we avoid a worse-case scenario? [..]

When Iran does respond, its response will likely be multifaceted and occur at unpredictable times and in multiple places. President Trump will then face what may yet be the most consequential national security decision of his presidency. If he reacts with additional force, the risk is great that the confrontation will spiral into a wider military conflict. If he fails to react in kind, he will likely invite escalating Iranian aggression.

It’s hard to envision how this ends short of war.

Robert Reich: Trump’s lawless thuggery is corrupting justice in America

Intimidating whistleblowers, politicizing law enforcement, protecting rogue military officers and criminal sheriffs – the pattern is depressingly clear

As the Senate moves to an impeachment trial and America slouches into this election year, the rule of law is center stage.

Yet Donald Trump is substituting lawless thuggery for impartial justice.

The biggest immediate news is the president’s killing of Qassem Suleimani. The act brings America to the brink of an illegal war with Iran without any congressional approval, in direct violation of Congress’s war-making authority under the constitution. [..]

You see the pattern: whistleblowers intimidated, the justice department politicized, findings of special counsels and inspectors general distorted or ignored, foreign policy made by a private citizen unaccountable to anybody, rogue military officers and rogue sheriffs pardoned.

Each instance is disturbing on its own. Viewed as a whole, Trump’s lawlessness is systematically corrupting justice in the US.

Impartial justice is the keystone of a democracy. Even if the Senate fails to remove Trump for impeachable offenses, American voters must do so next November.

Andrew O’Herir: Waterloo for the anti-anti-Trump left (and all other normalizers): You knew he was a snake

Those who made their peace with Trump all made the same fatal mistake: Believing that he believed in anything

If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson famously observed, then maybe Donald Trump really is the “stable genius” he has proclaimed himself. Certainly our president’s vanity and narcissism are such that he’d enjoy seeing himself on Emerson’s list of the great and misunderstood giants of history: “Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.” At least, Trump might appreciate that if he knew who even half those people were. Or if he could read.

There are other, more plausible explanations for Trump’s behavior, of course. Such as that his greatness is entirely in his own mind, and that he barely recognizes other people or the outside world as real. He is a damaged, impulsive man-child whose pathologies distill many of the worst pathologies of the nation that (more or less) elected him. So many judgments of Trump — from those who love him, those who hate him and those who have ridden along and made their peace with him for various reasons — were built on the faulty premise that he could be predicted or controlled, or at least that he was guided by some recognizable ideology.

Nearly all of us, frankly, have been guilty of that to some degree. In this moment of crisis, I think we all owe a debt to NeverTrump conservatives like Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson, and to mental health professionals like Dr. Bandy Lee, Dr. Lance Dodes, Dr. John Gartner and others, who have consistently warned that Trump was unstable and unpredictable, and at some stage was likely to endanger the safety of not just the United States but the entire world. Well, here we are.

Heather Digby Parton: Why Trump did it: A strategic distraction, or a spoiled child showing off his new toys?

Iran killing pushed impeachment out of the headlines, showed off some hardware and impressed the Christian fanatics

For all the talk about Donald Trump wanting to end the “forever wars,” I think we knew what he was really talking about, don’t we? He wanted to end the “Bush-Obama” wars because his only real foreign policy has been to reverse anything his predecessors did. That includes all of them going back to at least Franklin D. Roosevelt, and maybe Abe Lincoln.

It’s been clear from the beginning that Trump had no real understanding of world affairs or history, beyond a vague notion that America has become weak and feckless due to our foolish adherence to silly legal and moral restraints on our behavior. Despite our economic and military dominance in every corner of the globe, he feels the U.S. has been humiliated by strongmen who think we’re soft. It is the worldview of a spoiled child.

It was inevitable that he would one day decide to demonstrate military strength to prove his mettle, and entirely predictable that he would do it impulsively at a moment of extreme political danger. His anger and frustration over the impeachment process have been palpable. He’s been way in over his head from the start, and the stress of trying to do a job he is so clearly unqualified to do has undoubtedly frayed his nerves. He was going to lash out — it was only a question of when and where.