“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 we must close Guantanamo now
At a time when the Senate is refusing to even consider a Supreme Court nominee, President Obama is pressing forward with another plan that faces roadblocks in Congress: closing the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Obama’s proposal to shutter the facility, announced last week, is a timely reminder of the grave issues at stake in 2016. Guantanamo is a monument to the worst abuses the George W. Bush administration committed in the name of safety and the “war on terror.” Its continued existence beyond the boundaries of the law makes a mockery of American values and weakens our standing in the world. “This is about closing a chapter in our history,” Obama said. “It reflects the lessons that we’ve learned since 9/11 — lessons that need to guide our nation moving forward.” [.]
Obama’s latest effort. In a statement, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a longtime supporter of closing Guantanamo, bluntly stated: “President Obama’s proposed plan is too little, too late.” CCR also argues that the centerpiece of the plan, moving detainees who have not been charged and never will be charged with any crime to a U.S. prison, does not “close Guantanamo”; it merely relocates it to a new Zip code. “The infamy of Guantanamo has never been just its location, but rather its immoral and illegal regime of indefinite detention.”
The president should be commended for reviving the issue of Guantanamo, which has loomed over his presidency since he vowed to shut it down during his first week in office. But it’s also important to recognize, as CCR and other civil liberties and human rights groups remind us, that the protracted battle over Guantanamo’s fate has always been about more than the prison itself. It’s also about the use of torture.
Trevor Timm: Congress showed it’s willing to fight the FBI on encryption. Finally
Members of Congress did something almost unheard of at Tuesday’s hearing on the brewing battle over encryption between Apple and the FBI: their job. Both Democrats and Republicans grilled FBI director Jim Comey about his agency’s unprecedented demand that Apple weaken the iPhone’s security protections to facilitate surveillance. This would have dire implications for smartphone users around the globe.
Normally, congressional committee hearings featuring Comey are contests among the members over who can shower the FBI director with the most fawning compliments in their five-minute allotted time frame. Hard questions about the agency’s controversial tactics are avoided at all costs. But on Tuesday, in rare bipartisan fashion, virtually every member of the House judiciary committee asked Comey pointed questions and politely ripped apart his arguments against Apple.
Christopher R. Barron: For the Republican party, it’s Trumpocalypse Now
There will be those in the Republican and conservative establishment who will try to spin the Super Tuesday results. Some among the GOP chattering classes will tell you that Trump didn’t get the knock-out punch he wanted – that there is still a chance to restore order. Don’t believe it. The numbers make it clear that, for the Republican party, it’s Trumpocalypse Now.
While Ted Cruz won his home state of Texas as well as Oklahoma, and Rubio ran him close in Virginia and actually managed to win Minnesota, Trump dominated elsewhere. His success extended from Massachusetts to Georgia to Alabama to Tennessee to Oklahoma. He won in Ted Cruz’s south, and he won in the north-east, where a more establishment-friendly candidate like Marco Rubio was supposed to prevail. [..]
The race is not technically over. While Trump will win the lion’s share of delegates tonight, both Cruz and Rubio will pick up delegates and spend the next couple of weeks trying to convince voters and donors that they can stop the frontrunner – that they have a path to the nomination. Whether or not either of these men can really achieve that at this point – and I remain highly skeptical, despite Cruz’s two-state win – the day of reckoning for the Republican party has arrived. Whatever happens, what neither Cruz nor Rubio nor anyone else can do is to stop the forces that Trump’s candidacy has unleashed.
Richard Wolffe: The cold, hard truth: it’s game over for Bernie Sanders
It’s time for some cold hard truths in this presidential election.
Here’s an ice cold one: winning a landslide victory in the mighty state of Vermont is not a foundation for success. Especially if Vermont has been your home since the Jurassic age of politics.
Here’s another: if you hold a victory rally before most of the states have been called, you’re not fooling anyone. When your victorious supporters have emptied the hall before the TV pundits have barely warmed up, you’re actually throwing a consolation party.
Bernie Sanders has built his impressively insurgent campaign on the premise that he’s a truth-teller. On Tuesday night, he repeated the commonplace belief that climate change is not a hoax (as many Republicans argue), and that the science is clear.
On that basis, it’s only a matter of time before Sanders stops perpetuating his own hoax and looks at the data of the delegate count.
Amanda Marcotte: Hillary Clinton’s commanding Super Tuesday victory: Bernie Sanders stays alive but has slim path to nomination
With the Republicans tearing themselves apart over the previously non-controversial question of whether it’s okay to be for the KKK, it’s amazing that the Democrats are getting more than cursory attention this Super Tuesday. It’s a testament to how tense the Hillary Clinton/Bernie Sanders race has felt, a perception fueled by the high stakes that are inevitably involved when one side is pushing for the first female president and the other side wants to elect someone who literally calls himself a socialist. [..]
It appears that the Clinton strategy is working. Clinton picked up heavy support in states that Sanders needed to win. He was banking on those areas to prove his strategy of targeting states with majority white voters was feasible. Even in other states, where she was projected to win, her performance with white voters suggested that the racial division that Sanders was counting on to win is not materializing.Sanders, however, is still alive in the race, picking up four states: Vermont, Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma.
Andrew J. Bacevich: Trump’s rise, democracy’s fall: The Donald threatens our very system of government
Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well. Should he prevail in November, his election will alter its very fabric in ways likely to prove irreversible. Whether Trump ever delivers on his promise to “Make America Great Again,” he is already transforming American democratic practice.
Trump takes obvious delight in thumbing his nose at the political establishment and flouting its norms. Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.
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