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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter

New York Times Editorial Board: The G.O.P.’s Surreal Diversity Show

The unrelenting whiteness of the Republican National Convention — perhaps the whitest in 100 years — is stunning in itself. Donald Trump has tried to mask its segregationist flavor by strategically featuring African-American speakers to colorize the hall and validate the pronouncements of white speakers like Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who have ceaselessly lectured black people on criminality. Among these was David Clarke Jr., the Milwaukee County sheriff, who denounced the Black Lives Matter campaign and applauded the acquittal of a Baltimore police officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray.

But after the lights go down in Cleveland, when the yelling subsides, the balloons go limp and the delegates go home, the party will be alone with its message and its nominee.

What next? Why, minority outreach, of course. “Donald Trump’s going to be doing a Hispanic engagement tour coming up soon,” said the party chairman, Reince Priebus.

Amanda Marcotte: Grifting USA: Snake oil salespeople rule the stage at the RNC

While the second half of Wednesday night’s RNC programming was dominated by the usual professional politicians one expects at events like this (and fireworks thanks to Ted Cruz) the earlier parts of the evening were downright puzzling. After Laura Ingraham worked the crowd into an orgasmic frenzy of hate towards both Hillary Clinton and the press, the hard-won energy drained out of the room as the gathered were subject to one frankly weird speech after another.

Phil Ruffin, Pam Bondi, Eileen Collins, and Michelle Van Etten: These speakers ranged from uninspiring to being Ambien in human form. Bondi managed to look alive at parts and Collins confused the audience by talking about government having roles outside of cracking skulls and kicking hippies, but it was Ruffian and Van Etten that truly made no sense from an aesthetic or political perspective.

Ruffin was a trollish man whose speech was so boring that it started to feel like a human rights violation. Van Etten, portrayed as an entrepreneur, was somehow even worse, so bad that the cringe could be felt across Twitter.

Arwa Mahdawi: Newt Gingrich has turned Islamophobia into an art

If you missed Newt Gingrich’s speech at the Republican National Convention then this was the gist of it: ‘Be afraid of the Islamists. Be very, very, very afraid. Thought September 11 was bad? Hah! You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

The former speaker had something of a tough spot; squeezed in between Ted Cruz, who sort of stole the show by refusing to endorse Trump, and Mike Pence, who formally accepted the VP nomination. But, you know, when life gives you lemons, you’ve just got to go ahead and invoke a bloody apocalypse, backed with some spurious statistics.

As someone on Twitter pointed out, an anagram of “Republican National Convention” is “Con vulnerable nation into panic” and Gingrich did just that in a way that only Gingrich can really do.

Richard Wolffe: Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement of Trump sets fire to Republican ‘unity’

Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again. At least that’s what it says on his baseball cap. But after three days in Cleveland, it’s not clear he can make his own convention great again.

By this stage of an election, the disgruntled former rivals have normally reconciled themselves to their fate – and the party welcomes them back into the fold with cheers of relief. But this is not a normal convention and Trump is not a normal nominee.

So when Ted Cruz took to the stage, we saw just how far the party has traveled since the bitter primaries: not very far at all. When we last heard from Cruz, less than three months ago, the Texas senator held the reality TV star in something less than high regard.

“This man is a pathological liar,” he told reporters. “He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”

That was before he called Trump “a narcissist” and “utterly amoral”. Oh yeah, and chronically insecure.

Henry Rosemont, Jr.: Just Say ‘No’ To Republican Family Values

For far too long progressives for whom family is the center of their lives have remained silent while conservative Christian groups with “Family” in their names hijacked the concept of “Family values.” Groups like Focus on the Family, The American Family Association, and the Family Research Council have been demeaning these values for decades, but until now the harm they have been able to wreak has been pretty much confined to their mega-churches and radio talk shows. Thanks to their participation and influence in drafting the platform of the Republican Party for this week’s convention in Cleveland, however, they are now threatening the futures of the vast majority of well-functioning American families in ways that go far beyond neo-liberal economic policies, destructive though those policies are, too; if these groups have their way and the Republican platform becomes operational, many values which enable families to flourish will be much harder, if not impossible to realize in the future, and their fragility makes it imperative to speak out against the Republican conception of family life now. [..]

But I should not conclude without noting that arch- conservatives do not have a monopoly on wrong thinking about families; individualists celebrating capitalism and championing personal freedom at all costs also contribute mightily to the ongoing degradation of familial affairs; conservative Christians are not alone responsible for the malaise. A particularly egregious case of insensitivity to the dynamics of loving family life – in the name of scholarship — has come from the discipline of political science, and has been in the news recently because the results of the research supposedly serve to predict accurately the kind of persons likely to vote for Donald Trump. The political scientist, Stanley Feldman, has worked out a mere four question test that has become the gold standard for discerning certain patterns of voting behavior.