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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Richard (RJ) Eskow: Clinton Must Go Bold — And Go Left — For Her VP

Word is that Hillary Clinton will announce her vice presidential choice on Friday, and rumors that she’s going with a “safe” pick should worry Democrats. In this political climate, a search for “safety” could put her candidacy in serious danger.

The GOP chose Mike Pence in part because his extremist views will reassure the Republican base. Pence is also an seasoned politician whose nomination is meant to reassure voters who worry that Trump has no experience in statecraft or governance.

(Note to readers: Yes, I just used the words “Trump” and “statecraft” in the same sentence. It feels as strange to me as it does to you.)

Clinton’s needs are different. She has to energize and excite the Democratic base, along with millions of millennials who have never voted. She needs to bring excitement, and a sense of the new, to a campaign conspicuously lacking in those qualities.

Voters remain deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Clinton’s biggest problem, and the greatest threat to her candidacy, is the fact that she’s seen as the candidate of the status quo.

Eric Boehlert: Ailes, Trump And The Republican Reckoning

Who could have scripted a doomsday scenario for the Republican Party that would feature Fox News’ Roger Ailes reportedly being ousted as chief of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing outlet amidst mounting allegations of sexual harassment, the same week political novice Donald Trump secures the GOP’s nomination?

Last summer, both seismic conservative events were seen as impossibilities by many observers. Yet they’re now unfolding in plain view and both threatening to do grave and lasting damage to the GOP.

Ailes and Trump are inexorably linked, and together they’ve become like a two-man wrecking crew, wreaking havoc on the GOP.

Trump’s been denounced as a “vicious demagogue,” a “con man,” a “glib egomaniac” and “the very epitome of vulgarity” this year. And that’s been from conservative pundits. The Trump nomination has split the GOP like no election in the last half-century. And Republicans owe it, in part, to Ailes. Fox News for years laid the groundwork for Trump’s radical and improbable run.

Jonathan Freedland: The targeting of Hillary Clinton suggests a vicious campaign ahead

We now know how Donald Trump will take on Hillary Clinton this autumn – by framing her as a criminal who should be sent not to the White House, but to jail.

Trump had already signalled as much via the two-word label he likes to hang around the neck of his Democratic opponent: Crooked Hillary. But the Republican convention in Cleveland, which on Tuesday formally nominated Trump as its presidential candidate, has given colour and shape to that strategy. Now we know how it will look and sound. [..]

But there is a larger calculation at work. The Trump campaign has clearly concluded that there is not much it can do about their man’s stratospherically high disapproval ratings. (He is regarded as dishonest by 62% of Americans, for example, and his other numbers are even worse.) So if they can’t lift him up, they might as well tear her down.

The result will be a relentlessly negative campaign from now until November, with both candidates depicting the other as the greater evil. And if talk of evil, rather than the merely criminal, sounds excessive, consider Tuesday’s closing speech by one of Trump’s former fellow candidates, Ben Carson. He suggested Clinton was a devotee of a man, the long-ago radical Saul Alinsky, who had once praised … Lucifer. Yes: Hillary Clinton was just one degree of separation away from Satan. If this is what the Republicans are saying about their Democratic opponent in July, imagine what they’ll be saying come November.

Dana Ellis Hunnes: Why Electing A President Who Believes In Climate Change And Wildlife Conservation Is More Important Than Ever

The signs of climate change are there, we just need to pay attention. Weather patterns are shifting, 100-year floods are now a common occurrence, while drought and loss of water-sheds are as well.

Climate change is happening.

More Americans than ever believe that anthropogenic climate change is here.

Yet somehow, Congress, hasn’t gotten that message.

Today’s Congress is filled with professional politicians, who don’t act on this critical, important, and extremely dangerous issue. Unfortunately though, it is time to act and stem the tide of climate change. Congress should have acted a decade ago, last year, last week, or even yesterday. But, they haven’t. Not in any meaningful way. Yes, we sign climate accords and agreements, but, that only addresses one small facet of the problem. Energy.

Steven W. Thrasher: Who can now say the Republican party isn’t a vehicle of white power?

Let’s just say it out loud: the Republican party is the white power party.

How can we know this?

How about Representative Steve King blatantly saying that white people were superior to any other “sub-groups”? When you pair that up with Trump’s desire to “make America great again”, is not the dominant sentiment from the Republican party a kind of desire to scrub America clean of (or to at least subjugate) its non-white people?

How about that time the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, took a selfie with a group of interns so blindingly pale, the caption ought to have been: “Show us your pearly whites!”

Or Rudy Giuliani declaring: “What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America!” (Presumably he meant that a President Trump would follow Mayor Giuliani’s lead in curbing the speech of black artists and violently, disproportionately and lethally policing black men).