Pondering the Pundits

“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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Doctors Without Borders: In 2016, Whose Lives Matter?

We face the greatest displacement of humanity in decades — more than 60 million people forced from their homes by war, misery or oppression from places like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, or Eritrea. A tiny percentage of these desperate men, women and children have risked their lives on overcrowded boats and knocked on Europe’s front door. Faced with this crisis, European leaders were given a choice — to work together to provide asylum and help those in need, or push people out of sight to other countries, where the European public cannot see their suffering and where European leaders can more easily hide their shame.

They chose the latter.

Signed in March, the EU-Turkey deal compensates Turkey financially and politically to block people from Europe’s shores and accept deportees from squalid prison camps in Greece. For MSF, this dirty deal marks a historic abdication of Europe’s moral and legal responsibilities to provide asylum to those in great need.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Obama’s Hiroshima visit can’t undo the past. But it can change the future.

As the White House announced that President Obama would visit Hiroshima, Japan, it immediately pledged that the he would not apologize for the United States dropping atomic bombs on that city and Nagasaki during World War II. But the real reckoning in Hiroshima should be about the future of nuclear weapons, not the past. Unless the president acts and speaks forthrightly, his visit may mark not only the ashes of Hiroshima but the ashes of his own promise to move toward a world freed of the threat of nuclear annihilation.

In his first major foreign policy address, delivered in Prague in April 2009, President Obama trumpeted “America’s commitment” to a “world without nuclear weapons.” To accept their continued existence, he warned, was to accede to their eventual use. But the use of even a single nuclear bomb was too horrible to contemplate. Nuclear disarmament, he acknowledged, would not come easily or quickly. It would take “patience and persistence,” but the goal of complete disarmament should drive strategy and concrete actions.

Jill Abramson: Can Hillary Clinton convince in the age of the goldfish?

In small groups, Hillary Clinton answers questions in perfect paragraphs, sometimes long ones. It can be a dazzling display. She is so prepared that she rarely needs a pause to think about what to say.

One aspect of her precision and careful phrasing, with nary a “like” or “you know” ever tumbling from her mouth, is that you need to listen hard to take it all in.

Clinton is definitely the candidate for voters with long attention spans.

That could be a challenge in a world where the human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish, according to a recent Microsoft study.

At rallies, her studied speeches can drag on. In Kentucky last weekend, some of the school-age girls standing behind her with their Fighting for Us signs openly yawned or fiddled with their hair during the talk. One put her back to the audience to chat with a friend. Time described a recent stop at a Virginia bakery as “so boring that you could practically hear the muffins get crusty”.

As president, Bill Clinton, of course, was also famous for his long-winded, policy-rich speeches. But this was before the iPhone, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat helped usher us into the age of distraction.

No one is better suited to these times than Donald Trump, the candidate of short attention spans.

Dean Baker: Can Donald Trump Teach Us About the National Debt?

Many people might think that Donald Trump can only teach the country how to offend women, African Americans, and a range of non-European ethnic groups. While that may be his area of expertise, it seems that his rants on dealing with debt may actually provide a teachable moment. As a result, the country, and possibly even the policy elites, may get a better understanding of when and how debt can pose a problem.

Trump first raised the debt issue a couple of weeks ago when he implied that as president he would negotiate discounts on U.S. debt just like he did with many of his businesses that faced bankruptcy. In those cases Trump could tell his creditors that if they didn’t make concessions, like accepting fifty cents on each dollar of debt, then he would go into bankruptcy. If a Trump business went into bankruptcy, the creditors might have to wait years to get anything and may end up with much less than the discount Trump proposed.

That might work for a business, but it doesn’t make sense for a government like the United States, which has a perfect credit history and borrows in a currency it prints. Trump later made exactly this point. Of course since the U.S. government prints dollars, it is hard to see what it could mean for the country to go bankrupt, unless we forget how to use the printing presses.

Eugene Robinson: Trump’s bizarre, dangerous neediness

Donald Trump’s opponents in the primaries were right to call him a con artist, a narcissist and a pathological liar. Just ask “John Miller.”

That’s one of the names Trump used with journalists to burnish his status as a bold-faced Manhattan celebrity; he also called himself “John Barron.” Both personae were supposedly publicists who just wanted to explain what a wonderful guy Mr. Trump was and how beautiful women seemed unable to resist his charms. [..]

Does it really matter if Trump had a bit of fun at the expense of some reporters two or three decades ago? It wouldn’t if he were merely asking for another season of “The Apprentice.” He wants us to make him the most powerful man in the world, and the “Miller” and “Barron” episodes — along with the transparently untrue denials that they ever took place — betray a level of ambition and insecurity that voters should find deeply alarming.

In my experience, most successful people could be described as needy in some sense. Trump, however, takes neediness to a bizarre and frightening extreme.