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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Monica Potts: Donald Trump’s boorish behavior is bad for all women, even if some don’t mind it

This weekend, the New York Times detailed Donald Trump’s misogynistic treatment of numerous women. The push-back was immediate.

Trump’s defenders got a boost Monday from Rowanne Brewer Lane, whose story about meeting Trump at a pool party at his Palm Beach, Fla., resort was featured in the first few paragraphs of the article. She’d told the Times about how Trump asked her to change into a bikini and then paraded her in front of other guests, but on “Fox and Friends,” she disputed the reporters’ characterization of this as “debasing.”

“[H]e never made me feel like I was being demeaned in any way. He never offended me in any way,” she told the network, and went on to call Trump a gentleman.

Case closed as far as the Trump camp is concerned. “She clearly doesn’t feel like she was debased. So they have inserted their own opinion of how she felt, which is crazy,” senior adviser Barry Bennett told Politico.

It’s not, though. The way victims themselves feel is important, of course. But Brewer Lane’s opinion on the matter is not the only way we measure the negative affects of these things.

Lucia Graves: The math is in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But there’s still a huge passion gap

For Hillary Clinton at this point in the season, it must be very tempting to skip out on primary campaigning entirely.

It was almost a month ago now that the AP explained that Clinton could lose every state left to vote and still win, and the numbers have only gotten worse for her inexhaustible opponent since then: Bernie Sanders now needs upwards of 87% of delegates and 66% of pledged delegates to win the Democratic nomination.

But it turns out Clinton may be after more than the numbers this primary season. In pulling out a narrow victory in hotly contested Kentucky and keeping Sanders’ victory to the single digits in liberal Oregon on Tuesday night, she just took away one of the most valuable assets he has left: clear bragging rights.

Scott Lemieux: Trump’s supreme court picks are a conservative dream come true

With Donald Trump becoming the improbable Republican nominee for president, the party is slowly but surely uniting around him. Conservatives from House majority leader Paul Ryan to Fox News’s Megyn Kelly have met cordially with Trump, signaling that he’s an acceptable candidate. This rapprochement is not a one-way street, either. Trump clearly wants to win, and he needs support – financially and otherwise – from the Republican party to mount a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton. Today, Trump announced a list of potential supreme court nominees – and it’s pretty much everything a conservative activist could hope for. [..]

One notable thing about Trump’s list is their lack of diversity. All 11 are white, and only three are women. Given the problems Trump already faced in attracting the support of minorities, this is a fact that Hillary Clinton is sure to mention more than once. Trump’s inability to identify a single person of color he considers qualified to be a supreme court justice is telling.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Clinton and Sanders must make peace

The success of Bernie Sanders’s insurgency is a marvel and an achievement.

His showing is a mark of the anger and frustration felt by so many Americans over the abuses of capitalism that led to the crash of 2008. With the help of millions of voters, especially the young, he has broadened a political debate long hemmed in by the dominance of conservative assumptions and the stifling of progressive aspirations. [..]

But there is another reality about Sanders’s effort. He has lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. He was defeated not through trickery or manipulation but in the democratic way: by voters casting ballots.

Amanda Marcotte: New GOP talking point to “defend” Trump: He’s just BS-ing to bamboozle the yahoos of our base

Republicans know they have to line up behind Donald Trump, but one reason there’s likely some hesitation is that it’s genuinely difficult for them to do so without signing off on some of the more over-the-top things he says. It seems Republicans are starting to form their main talking point: Trump’s just a liar who will say anything to our yahoo voting base to get elected.

Of course, they put it in politic terms, but that’s the general message coming out of Republicans who are asked if they support Trump on this front. Talking Points Memo contacted multiple Republican congressmen to ask what they think about Trump’s views on immigration, and the general consensus seems to be that you can’t take anything he says seriously. [..]

If these folks are right, then Trump’s immigration “policy” claims are well beyond the typical truth-embroidering that most politicians get up to. On the contrary, this makes him more a con man running a grift. Which leads to a whole new host of questions, starting with why all these Republicans are willing to back a man who treats their voters like a bunch of marks to be conned out of their votes with  shameless lies.