“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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Why Hillary Clinton is the right choice for progressives
At the second presidential debate, Donald Trump once again played down the recording of his vile comments bragging about sexual assault as “locker-room talk.” But as the fallout from the tape continues, the Republican Party has essentially become a locker room divided, with many members of the red team abandoning their quarterback and scrambling to save themselves.
For some progressive voters who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primaries, however, the latest revelations do little to ease their concerns about Hillary Clinton. They clearly recognize that Trump is — in every way imaginable — egregiously unfit to be president. They know that, on issue after issue, Trump is a bitter enemy of progress. But they also don’t trust Clinton to advance the important causes that Sanders forced into the debate.
This skepticism is understandable, especially after a hard-fought primary battle that left many feeling alienated from Clinton and the Democratic establishment. Yet as the Nation, which endorsed Sanders in the primary, argued in our endorsement of Clinton last week, there are many compelling reasons for staunch progressives to get behind her — not merely as the default choice or the strategic choice but also, on her own merits.
Amanda Marcotte: Russian propaganda on Wikileaks makes its way into a Donald Trump speech in record time
Donald Trump was awfully defensive about the fact that Russian intelligence is almost certainly behind the DNC hacks that the Trump campaign has grown so dependent upon to keep their flailing electoral efforts alive. As Margaret Hartmann at NY Magazine notes, he even floated the odd conspiracy theory that there was no hack, which requires believing that the Democrats are releasing their own private information and inviting negative news cycles all just so that Hillary Clinton can blame the Russians for it all during a debate.
Hey, this is a guy who insisted, and refused to back off until just a few weeks ago, claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. There is no conspiracy theory too idiotic for the likes of Trump. But I digress.
Now Donald “Leave Putin aloooooooooone” Trump has exposed his soft underbelly, stumbling into a situation that makes it all but certain that his campaign is getting its talking points, one way or another, from Russian propagandists.
Steven W. Thrasher: The greatest snub of the debate? It was against Black Lives Matter
On Sunday night, I wanted Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to delve into real talk about race in America. After all, they debated at Washington University in St Louis, just about 8 miles from the Canfield Apartments where Michael Brown was killed.
It didn’t happen.
There was no substantive conversation on race (or on much of anything, really). Racism and police killings were never addressed directly. Black Lives Matter was outrageously never brought up. An African American woman asked the first question on presidential behavior, and a brother asked a pabulum “all lives matter”-style question about each candidate’s ability to lead all people.
Medea Benjamin: Do Western Nations Care about Yemeni Lives or Saudi Blood Money?
How much is the life of a Yemeni worth? Not much, according to the Saudi regime that has been bombing and starving the people of Yemen for since March 2015, or to the Saudi’s western backers, particularly the US and UK, which have been supplying the Saudi regime with weapons, military training, logistical support and diplomatic cover for its dirty interventionist war.
The latest outrage is the October 8 bombing of a packed funeral hall in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa. This horrendous attack killed more than 140 people and injured about 600 more.
On the heels of this attack comes a blistering report by Reuters showing, through Freedom of Information Act documents, that the Obama administration went ahead with a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings from US officials that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians.
Michael Winship: At Second Debate, A Monster Calls
If there was the tiniest doubt left in your mind that Donald Trump holds no regard for the principles and ideals of a representative democracy — or that he views this country as anything more than a podium for his grandstanding ego, base dictatorial instincts and gutter mentality – Sunday night’s debate should have shot that shred of doubt straight to hell.
It was not enough for Trump that he continue to slime our airwaves and the Internet with his offensive rants and tweets or that he responded to the 2005 videotape of his sexist, brutish behavior with a non-apology apology that segued into yet another attack on the Clintons. Which in turn segued into that bizarre, tabloid-style press conference just before Sunday’s debate with four women accusing not only Bill Clinton, but Hillary Clinton as well, of abusive conduct.
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