“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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Robert Creamer: Should America Entrust The Nuclear Launch Codes To Someone Who Is Unhinged?
I’m not a psychologist, but after watching Donald Trump’s thirteen-month Presidential campaign, it certainly appears that he is unhinged.
He is erratic, eager to pick a fight with anyone for pretty much any perceived slight or affront. He is probably the most narcissistic person we have ever encountered — in his mind everything appears to be about him. [..]
The bottom line is this. The thought of having a person like Donald Trump in control of the nuclear launch codes should be terrifying to every American — and to everyone on the planet.
Remember, the president’s power does not just extend to leading the executive branch and signing legislation. The president of the United States personally controls a nuclear arsenal with the power to destroy much of humanity.
As Hillary Clinton has pointed out, imagine Donald Trump in the situation room at the White House in control of those nuclear codes and not just a Twitter account.
The last person we need as president is a thin-skinned man with a hair-trigger temper, who can’t restrain himself from striking back at any perceived slight or disrespect.
Charles M Blow: Trump Reflects White Male Fragility
As the New York Times’ Upshot pointed out in July, “According to our estimates, Mrs. Clinton is doing better among basically every group of voters except for white men without a degree.” Put another way: “Hillary Clinton is largely performing as well or better than Barack Obama did in 2012, except among white men without a degree.”
Indeed, a Monday report in The Times put it this way: “A New York Times/CBS News poll two weeks ago found that white men preferred her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, to Mrs. Clinton almost two to one, 55 percent to 29 percent.”
These are the voters keeping Trump’s candidacy alive.
He appeals to a regressive, patriarchal American whiteness in which white men prospered, in part because racial and ethnic minorities, to say nothing of women as a whole, were undervalued and underpaid, if not excluded altogether.
White men reigned supreme in the idealized history, and all was good with the world. (It is curious that Trump never specifies a period when America was great in his view. Did it overlap with the women’s rights, civil rights or gay rights movements? For whom was it great?)
Steven W. Thrasher: New York’s newest protesters are right: it’s time to defund police
My professor friend AJ and I led a walking tour of college students earlier this week about protest and policing in New York City. Between our stop at One Police Plaza, where “broken windows” policing was unleashed on our city, and the site of Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island, we stopped at the newest occupation in town at City Hall Park.
Mayor Bill de Blasio had just announced police commissioner Bill Bratton’s resignation as we walked through the park, quickly achieving one of the occupying group’s three ambitious goals when they appeared on Monday. The other two call for defunding the NYPD and using some of that money for reparations for survivors of “police terrorism”.
The group, Millions March NYC, makes a solid point: it is imperative to defund police departments across the country immediately, redirecting that money instead to black futures and the marginalized. Because while reparations paid to next of kin for police abuse is already a billion-dollar business, there is no need for anyone to be executed in the first place.
Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yes, Donald Trump. The electoral system is ‘rigged’ – against black Americans
With each passing day, Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to fall, and the specter of defeat in November looms larger. Perhaps in preparation for that outcome, the Republican presidential nominee claims that if he loses it won’t be due to his ineptitude. Instead, he says the electoral system is “rigged” against him. This argument is not only absolute nonsense, but threatens the stability and integrity of our society.
Rigged elections have been a hot topic this election. Hordes of Bernie Sanders supporters claimed that the Democratic primaries were “rigged” against him. They cite the DNC email scandal, which showed some party staffers seeking to undermine Sanders, as evidence.
To reinforce his spurious claims, Trump has said that the recent striking down of Republican-sponsored voter ID laws and other voting impediments that have proven to be purposefully discriminatory will result in rampant voter fraud.
Lucia Graves: Donald Trump is tone-deaf on sexual harassment. No surprise there
At the moment Donald Trump was called on to show the most straightforward sort of empathy for women, he revealed he has none.
Presented with a hypothetical earlier this week about how he would respond if his own daughter Ivanka were sexually harassed at work, Trump put the onus for changing the situation on the victim. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said.
The notion that harassed women can simply “go find another career” like picking up an extra bottle of bubbly at the supermarket is the thinking of a man who’s had everything handed to him, who inherited a fortune as well as his father’s business, and whose greatest existential threat in recent years has been determining how many millions and billions of dollars he’s really worth.
The response signals an utter lack of understanding for what the woman in this situation might be going through. As Lisa Bloom, a civil rights lawyer who’s been representing sexual harassment cases for years, put it in a statement, “Women fought a generation ago and won the right to equal respect in the workplace. We do not have to choose between a good job and our dignity.”
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