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

Michael H. Fuchs: Trump’s foreign policy is for sale. That threatens our national security

The president’s efforts to govern in his own self-interest will undermine the world’s faith in our commitments

The Ukraine scandal is not only undermining American democracy – it’s damaging national security. US foreign policy increasingly looks like that of a mafia state, wielded at the behest of, and for the benefit of, one man’s personal interests, and for sale to the highest bidders. This is devastating America’s role in the world.

Trump led an effort – along with other government officials and the president’s personal lawyer – to use the power of the United States to pressure the government of Ukraine to fabricate smears about one of Trump’s domestic political opponents. As the White House admitted in a transcript of Trump’s 25 July call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump asked Zelenskiy for a “favor” – to look into the former vice-president Joe Biden and his son – and said that the US attorney general, Bill Barr, and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, would help.

At the same time, Trump withheld military assistance to Ukraine – which is fighting a war with Russia – on a timeline that makes it clear that it was part of an attempt to use taxpayer dollars as leverage to get Ukraine to do Trump’s personal bidding.

Charles M. Blow: Donald Is Desperate

He will do and say whatever he can to avoid impeachment.

On Wednesday I watched Donald Trump in the Oval Office, while seated next to the Finnish president, take questions from reporters in what can only be described as the unhinged rantings of a desperate man melting down, spiraling out of control and lashing out.

Over the last few years, and particularly since the Robert Mueller investigation concluded, I have grown accustomed to Trump delivering his insults, launching his attacks and spewing his lies with a swaggering smugness.

This was not that. What was on display Wednesday was anger animated by panicked fear.

And at another news conference with the Finnish president, Trump repeated his stupefying performance, rambling and raving, dodging questions and misdirecting attention. And, of course, lying.

Donald Trump is scared. And he is incensed that he is scared. And his only impulse is to fight like a thing near death: with everything he has, and by all means necessary. [..]

Trump ran for president as an exercise of self-flattery and to boost his brand. His win was surprising, even for him. So we should never expect him to be patriotic when he is being condemned.

Before Trump will allow himself to be chased from the temple, he’ll bring it down.

Jamelle Bouie: Andrew Johnson’s Violent Language — and Trump’s

The House should consider the president’s incendiary rhetoric as a separate offense, worthy of its own article of impeachment, as it was in 1868.

Over the weekend, in a rage over impeachment, President Trump accused Representative Adam Schiff of “treason,” promised “Big Consequences” for the whistle-blower who sounded the alarm about his phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and shared a warning — from a Baptist pastor in Dallas — that impeachment “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”

We’re already on to the next news cycle, but we shouldn’t lose sight of what happened with those tweets. The president was using the power and influence of his office to intimidate a witness and threaten a member of Congress with prosecution (of a crime still punishable by death), before raising the specter of large-scale political violence should lawmakers hold him responsible for his actions. If he had said this anywhere besides Twitter — in the Rose Garden or at a campaign stop — we would see it as a clear and unacceptable abuse of presidential rhetoric, his authoritarian instincts at work.

The House impeachment inquiry will almost certainly focus on Trump’s attempt to solicit foreign intervention in the 2020 election. If it goes beyond that, it might also include the president’s corruption and self-dealing. But in whichever direction the investigation goes, the House should consider Trump’s violent rhetoric as a separate offense, worthy of its own article of impeachment.

Nicholas Burns: Trump’s Assault on the State Department Must Be Stopped

Congress needs to repair the damage the president has caused to the effectiveness and morale of the nation’s diplomats.

One of the first casualties of President Trump’s murky dealings with Ukraine has been the United States Foreign Service, the group of nonpartisan career professionals who serve as America’s primary point of contact with the world beyond our borders. While the House impeachment inquiry has rightly become a top priority, Congress must also act to repair the substantial damage Mr. Trump has caused to the effectiveness and morale of our diplomats and other State Department employees. [..]

Congress should also begin work on a bill to reauthorize the Foreign Service in its central mission, structure and responsibilities, which was last done in 1980. Given the changes in the global economy, technology and global balance of power — and in light of this president’s antagonistic relationship with the State Department — reaffirming and strengthening the role and mission of our career diplomats is a necessity.

The State Department is in crisis. Mr. Trump has done enormous harm to its mission and self- confidence. Republicans and Democrats in Congress must take steps to rescue an American institution that with proper support and presidential leadership, could help make America a great and respected global power once again.

Michael Tomasky: Democrats Have Impeachment by the Tail. Here’s How They Tame It.

It’s not about fast/slow or narrow/broad. It’s about conducting this in a way that nullifies right-wing talking points.

The debate among Democrats and liberals on impeachment right now is: Fast versus slow, narrow versus broad.

It’s understandable that these would emerge as the flash points, but those questions aren’t the right starting place when thinking about impeachment.

The actual first questions the Democrats need to think about are these: 1, what will be the main right-wing talking points? And 2, what will be swing voters’ more sincerely held reservations? If Democrats can find the answers among themselves to these two questions, they’ll also answer the fast-slow, narrow-broad questions the right way.

This is going to be an awful, hideous slog. A death match. Donald Trump, not exactly heretofore associated with the word “hinged,” is going to become more and more unhinged as this goes on, as we saw already with the 80 weekend tweets. Sometimes this will be fun, to watch his public meltdown. But other times it’s going to feel like he and his apologists are shoving bamboo shoots into our eyeballs.

Get ready. They’re going to be presenting a whole alternative-universe narrative that, unless you’ve made it a habit of watching Sean Hannity chat with Gregg Jarrett and Dan Bongino, you don’t know anything about. In this universe, Trump was the victim of Hillary-Ukraine collusion in 2016, which Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in on. They’re going to try to make it impossible for your average citizen to sort through any of it.

So it’s really important that the Democrats do this in a way that makes sense to your average citizen—that helps them sort through it. Here’s how.

There will of course be a gajillion Republican attack lines, but I see two main ones.

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

Laurence H. Tribe: The House must flex its constitutional muscles to get to Trump

Only the procedures enshrined in the impeachment process have the power to cut through the president’s smokescreens

There is now powerful evidence that Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses by using his foreign policy and military powers to solicit (and all but coerce) Ukraine’s president to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has confirmed that the House will move swiftly to investigate this threat to democracy, national security, and the separation of powers.

The first stages of that impeachment inquiry are already under way. It’s therefore important to think ahead about what should happen as the House inquiry unfolds – especially in the House intelligence and judiciary committees, chaired respectively by Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler. If the House is going to impeach the president, it better have a plan. [..]

Eventually, if impeachment is warranted, the judiciary committee – acting closely with the other investigating committees – will need to produce a detailed factual and legal report making that case, along with specific proposed articles for the House to vote on. The judiciary committee report recommending articles of impeachment against Nixon is one of the great works of constitutional law of the 20th century.

They should follow that model here, both to present the strongest possible case to the public and the Senate and also to document for history the record of Trump’s outrageous misconduct. But it will have to do so expeditiously. Time is not the friend of this indispensable effort to hold a renegade president properly to account – and to protect the republic from his continued and seemingly escalating abuses.

Harry Litman: Did William Barr break any rules? Only the most important one.

Multiple news agencies reported Monday that Attorney General William P. Barr has had extensive personal involvement in the Justice Department’s investigations into the origins of the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

That involvement — including trips abroad for personal meetings with foreign officials — is certainly “fairly unorthodox,” in the words of a former Justice Department official. Is it also inappropriate?

After all, part of an attorney general’s job is to liaise with foreign counterparts. It’s not unusual to have in-person meetings, especially at the beginning of an attorney general’s tenure, both to meet and greet and to discuss mutual priorities.

Moreover, Barr is the head of the Justice Department. No department business is beyond his concern. Unlike, say, the barriers that are supposed to stand between the White House and the Justice Department, there is no out-of-bounds area for the department’s political appointees, much less the attorney general.

Thus, during Barr’s first tenure as attorney general, he personally argued a case in the Supreme Court, a task normally reserved to the solicitor general and his or her assistants. No one took him to task for weeding in the solicitor general’s garden.

So what, if anything, might be worrisome about Barr’s conduct now?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: What the godfather of modern whistleblowing can teach us now

After House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry last week, President Trump condemned the person responsible for the whistleblower complaint that set the wheels in motion, likening the whistleblower to “spies” who are guilty of “treason.” It may be tempting to attribute this rhetoric to the president’s dictatorial streak, but the sentiment behind Trump’s words is all too familiar. Yes, many are portraying the anonymous intelligence official who blew the whistle on Trump as a hero, but all too often Americans who reveal truths about government misdeeds are treated as traitors.

Take Edward Snowden. It has been six years since Snowden leaked a trove of secret documents that exposed the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program. For this act of public service, Snowden was charged with violating the Espionage Act, forcing him to live in exile in Russia. And even as the latest whistleblower scandal was breaking, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Snowden over the release of his new memoir, “Permanent Record” — an absurd act of spite considering that the book contains no details about surveillance that have not been previously reported.

“When the government is embarrassed after being caught breaking the law, they say the people who revealed that lawbreaking have caused serious harm to national security,” Snowden explained in a recent interview on CBS. “This was the case of Daniel Ellsberg way back in the Vietnam War with the Pentagon Papers.”

Catherine Rampell: There’s another whistleblower complaint. It’s about Trump’s tax returns.

Hey, have you heard about this whistleblower complaint?

An unnamed civil servant is alleging serious interference in government business. If the allegations are true, they could be a game-changer. They might set in motion the release of lots of other secret documents showing that President Trump has abused his authority for his personal benefit.

Wait, you thought I meantthe whistleblower from the intelligence community?

Nope. I’m talking about a completely different whistleblower, whose claims have gotten significantly less attention but could prove no less consequential. This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service’s audit of the president.

In defiance of a half-century norm, Trump has kept his tax returns secret.

We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad.

Eugene Robinson: Impeachment is serious. Trump trying to avoid it is good comic relief.

Impeachment of a president is a deeply serious affair. Efforts by President Trump and his defenders to explain away his clear-as-day abuse of power are providing a bit of comic relief.

The problem for the president and his amen chorus is that the White House released a document proving Trump guilty of an impeachable act. In the official memorandum of a July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — at a time when Trump was unilaterally withholding $391 million in military aid for Ukraine, which Congress had approved — Zelensky expresses a desire to purchase U.S. antitank missiles. Trump replies: “I would like you to do us a favor though.”

Book him.

The “favor” includes firing up an investigation of Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Trump ignores U.S. national security interests and uses taxpayer funds as leverage to coerce a foreign leader into interfering in the 2020 election. For such conduct, he not only can be impeached but also must be impeached.

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: Warren Versus the Petty Plutocrats

Why do they hate her? It’s mainly about their egos.

Remember when pundits used to argue that Elizabeth Warren wasn’t likable enough to be president? It was always a lazy take, with a strong element of sexism. And it looks ridiculous now, watching Warren on the campaign trail. Never mind whether she’s someone you’d like to have a beer with, she’s definitely someone thousands of people want to take selfies with.

But there are some people who really, really dislike Warren: the ultrawealthy, especially on Wall Street. They dislike her so much that some longtime Democratic donors are reportedly considering throwing their backing behind Donald Trump, corruption, collusion and all, if Warren is the Democratic presidential nominee. [..]

But why does Warren inspire a level of hatred and fear among the very wealthy that I don’t think we’ve seen directed at a presidential candidate since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

Michelle Goldberg: Trump’s Claims About Biden Aren’t ‘Unsupported.’ They’re Lies.

The president’s accusations turn reality on its head and the media should say so.

Turning this history on its head, Trump has accused Joe Biden of coercing Ukraine to jettison Shokin in order to protect Hunter. He has pressured Ukraine’s current president to open an investigation into the Bidens, which would make Trump’s charges seem more credible. As the president faces impeachment, his surrogates are parroting his attack on Biden, and his campaign is reportedly spending a staggering $10 million on an ad to amplify the smear.

Journalists, perhaps seeking to appear balanced, have sometimes described Trump’s claims about Biden as “unsubstantiated” or “unsupported.” That is misleading, because it suggests more muddiness in the factual record than actually exists. Trump isn’t making unproven charges against Biden. He is blatantly lying about him. He and his defenders are spreading a conspiracy theory that is the precise opposite of the truth.

Susan Rice: We Are in Uncharted Territory

Almost everything about President Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s president violated protocol.

President Trump, his Republican sycophants in Congress, and the right-wing media are working overtime yet again to distract and manipulate the American public. To downplay Mr. Trump’s transgressions, they are drawing a false equivalence between his July phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine and former Vice President Biden’s efforts in 2015 to encourage the replacement of the Ukrainian prosecutor general.

Don’t be confused. These two cases have almost nothing in common. While I was President Obama’s national security adviser, Mr. Biden took repeated steps — at the president’s behest — to advance a widely supported, completely overt United States government policy to encourage Ukrainian officials to aggressively combat endemic corruption and bolster Ukraine’s nascent democracy. [..]

This broadly backed anti-corruption policy had nothing to do with Mr. Biden, his son Hunter, or any other individual. Moreover, the policy was conducted transparently and openly for all to see. As has been widely reported, the prosecutor general also was not pursuing any inquiry of Hunter Biden or the owner of the company whose board he sat on, Burisma, at the time of the vice president’s intervention. Indeed, by pressing for the removal of the corrupt prosecutor general, Mr. Biden backed a policy that increased the likelihood that a responsible replacement might pursue Burisma’s owner and others.

By contrast, President Trump conducted absolutely no government business when he spoke for thirty minutes with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, Mr. Trump solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election to advance his own political interests. Mr. Trump clearly pressured Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden, the president’s most formidable and likely political opponent, as well as his son. By withholding almost $400 million in urgently needed military assistance appropriated by Congress for Ukraine, which is still combating the occupation of its eastern territory by Russia, and using it to extort Mr. Zelensky’s cooperation, Mr. Trump again put his personal interests above our national security.

Kara Swisher: Trump Is Too Dangerous for Twitter

The president flagrantly violates the social platform’s rules. It’s time to bar him.

It’s almost as if Donald Trump is trying to get impeached.

By Twitter, I mean.

That’s where the twitchy fingers of the president of the United States have been working overtime to try to get him tossed off the digital communications service by posting all kinds of rule-breaking things and often in all caps with lots of exclamation marks — just so we don’t miss them.

But just as the internet companies have been gifted with a big hug of a law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which extends them broad immunity from controversial content that is posted on their platforms, Mr. Trump has been given an epic pass on Twitter for whatever he does.

Why? Basically, he’s been deemed newsworthy by the company.

True enough. But that means that every day and literally twice on Sunday, it’s more incendiary tweets and rage-filled tweets and appalling tweets and reckless tweets and misleading tweets and inaccurate tweets and really inaccurate tweets. And the many lies as tweets — so, so many tweet lies.

Charles M. Blow: Impeach the Malignant Fraudster

This is how Republicans can redeem themselves.

It is the clarity of Donald Trump’s transgression that is most remarkable.

By his own admission, and backed up by the quasi-transcript released by the White House and by the whistle-blower complaint, he abused the power of the presidency to enlist a foreign government to help him politically.

People don’t have to wade through the tome that Robert Mueller produced, through the murky parts and the fine legal points. This is as clear as a bell. Trump has confessed to the central allegation.

No matter how much his defenders squirm — and they certainly are squirming — to justify or diminish that fact, it is nevertheless a fact. He did it.

Now, they can squabble over whether or not this thing is impeachable, a process over which the founders fretted. That’s Congress’s job. But, the brazen betrayal of his office, the Constitution and the American people is undeniable.