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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Dean Baker: Is Donald Trump Serious About Trade, Or Anything?

One of the main themes of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been the idea of getting tough with our trading partners. He has attacked President Obama and his predecessors for negotiating bad deals. Trump promises to get tough with the Chinese, Mexicans, and other trading partners and thereby bring jobs back to the United States.

While many working people would agree that recent trade deals have not benefited them, they have good cause to be skeptical about Trump’s get tough promises. Most immediately his vice-presidential pick, Governor Mike Pence, has been a strong supporter of NAFTA and other trade deals. But choosing vice-presidents with differing views certainly has precedents.

More importantly, it is not clear what Trump thinks he is going to do when he gets tough with the Chinese and the other bad guys in his story. It’s true that China and Mexico and many other countries are running trade surpluses with the United States. And it’s also true that these surpluses have cost the jobs of millions of workers. In some cases these workers have been able to find new jobs, generally at much lower pay. However in many cases these workers remain unemployed and end up dropping out of the labor force altogether.

New York Times Editorial Board: The Most Extreme Republican Platform in Memory

For all the disruption and damage that Donald Trump has meant for Republicans, the party’s statement of its views in its newly written convention platform rivals him for shock value. Platforms are traditionally written by and for the party faithful and largely ignored by everyone else. But this year, the Republicans are putting out an agenda that demands notice.

It is as though, rather than trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s heretical views with conservative orthodoxy, the writers of the platform simply opted to go with the most extreme version of every position. Tailored to Mr. Trump’s impulsive bluster, this document lays bare just how much the G.O.P. is driven by a regressive, extremist inner core.

Mr. Trump’s anti-Muslim phobia and fantasy wall across the Mexican border are front and center, along with his protectionist views, which deny long-held positions of the party. No less alarming is a raft of planks that ideologues pushed through to banish any notion of moderation and present-day reality from the party’s credo.

Jessica Valemnti: Fox News is a cesspool of sexism. Firing Roger Ailes won’t fix that

This week, all signs point to Roger Ailes being fired from his position as head of Fox News. If ousted, it will be over sexual harassment claims – poetic justice at its very best. This is a man presiding over a network with a legendary disdain for women and women’s rights, taken down by a woman, Gretchen Carlson, who was the target of some of the worst of it.

Carlson alleges, among other things, that Ailes told her, “You and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.” He said this, amazingly, in a meeting about sexual harassment. Carlson also claims that her contract wasn’t renewed as direct retaliation for complaining about the pervasive harassment and sexism she faced. [..]

But removing one lascivious man can’t turn around the mess of misogyny that is Fox News. This is a network that bans its female on-air talent from wearing pants, where a host characterized a military operation against Isis led by a woman as “boobs on the ground” and the ethos of the coverage is shockingly antagonistic to women’s rights.

Thomas Frank: The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America’s wake up?

A snapshot of America in the middle of June 2016. It is several days before the first great shock of the summer, the Brexit vote, and here in America, all is serene. The threat posed by Senator Bernie Sanders has been suppressed. The Republicans have chosen a preposterous windbag to lead them; the consensus is that he will be a pushover. For all the doubts and dissent of the last year, the leadership faction of the country’s professional class seem to have once again come out on top, and they are ready to accept the gratitude of the nation.

And so President Barack Obama did an interview with Business Week in which he was congratulated for his stewardship of the economy and asked “what industries” he might choose to join upon his retirement from the White House. The president replied as follows:

… what I will say is that – just to bring things full circle about innovation – the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.

In relating this anecdote, I am not aiming to infuriate because the man we elected in 2008 to get tough with high finance and shut the revolving door was now talking about taking his own walk through that door and getting a job in finance. No. My object here is to describe the confident, complacent mood of the country’s ruling class in the middle of last month. So let us continue.

Richard North Patterson: Leading The Lemmings: The GOP’s Idiot King Marches On Cleveland

On the eve of their convention, the erstwhile chief counselors of the GOP had, at last, comprehended the horror which is Donald Trump.

There is comedy in this. One imagines the ministers of some obscure Ruritanian monarchy, awakening to discover that their new King is the idiot former Crown Prince, who combines congenital feeble mindedness with preposterous vanity, irrational willfulness, unpredictable outbursts of rage, the attention span of an infant, and a frightening ignorance of statecraft. In short, the not-so-good King Drumpf.

If only Peter Sellers still lived.

Regrettably, this is not a movie set in Moldavia. It is an American presidential campaign, and the idiot King is the Republican nominee. Which is way too serious to serve as farce.

Still, one must grant its farcical aspects — not least in the two weeks prior to his coronation in Cleveland.