“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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New York Times Editorial Board: Mr. Trump’s Foreign Policy Confusions
Donald Trump’s speech on Monday was advertised as an attempt to redirect his campaign from a series of blunders to a more serious discussion of foreign policy, starting with combating global terrorism. As such, it marked another test of his readiness to lead. It did not go well.
Far from coherent analysis of the threat of Islamic extremism and a plausible blueprint for action, the speech was a collection of confused and random thoughts that showed little understanding of the rise of the Islamic State and often conflicted with the historical record.
Meanwhile, with terrorism as his central focus, Mr. Trump doubled down on the anti-refugee themes that have dominated his campaign, dressing them up as a national security issue. He proposed a new “extreme vetting” approach to immigration that would impose an ideological test on newcomers and undermine the very American values of tolerance and equal treatment that he said he wanted to encourage. He also called for the creation of a commission that would “expose the networks in our society that support radicalization,” which struck many listeners as an uncomfortable echo of McCarthyism.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The phony populism of Donald Trump
Last week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” could rise up against Hillary Clinton if she wins the election and called President Obama “the founder of ISIS.” He also delivered a policy speech at the Detroit Economic Club that, understandably, received much less attention.
Given Trump’s near-constant breaches of common decency, many people have given up on parsing the details of his policies, which can feel at times like complaining about the music in a crashing car. Yet while Trump’s affinity for regressive economics is nowhere near the top of the list of reasons to oppose him, there is still a real possibility that he could become the nation’s chief policymaker, and the policies he outlined last week counteract one of the prevailing narratives of the election — that Trump is a “populist.” [..]
But Trump’s populism, like so much of his public image, is a deceptive marketing ploy. When it comes to actual policy, Trump is proposing mostly the same regressive ideas that Republican candidates from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney have been peddling for decades.
Richard North Patterson: No Time For Trump: Transforming Our Corporate Supreme Court
The GOP’s unprecedented refusal to consider President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court underscores the stakes in the 2016 race. One is whether the Roberts court will continue to shield corporate interests at whatever cost to law or reason.
For millions of Americans, two decisions dramatize this question.
In Citizens United, five conservative justices — Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Alito —reached well beyond the scope of the case, finding that businesses and individuals have a constitutional right to spend unlimited sums to defeat candidates who displease them. This decision reversed long-established precedent and shredded campaign finance laws aimed at limiting the power of money in politics. In short, the court changed established procedure and existing law to empower plutocracy over democracy.
The Lily Ledbetter case was almost as remarkable. The same conservative justices allowed Goodyear to invoke the statute of limitations to protect decades of pay discrimination it had concealed from a female employee — even though she filed suit promptly upon discovering that she was earning less than her male counterparts. The essence of this ruling was that a corporation can perpetuate pay discrimination by hiding what it’s doing.
But these cases are not notorious because they are unique. In the jurisprudence of the Roberts court, they are business as usual — in every sense of that phrase.
Eugene Robinson: ln defense of pointy-heads and MSM puppy-dogs
Let us now praise the most reviled group of people in America: “elites.” And how about a round of applause for the hated “mainstream media” as well?
If you listen to Donald Trump, or even if you paid attention to Bernie Sanders during the primary season, you might think all the nation’s problems can be blamed on two pointy-headed cabals. The “elites” who rigged the system to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else; and the puppy-dog “mainstream media” or “MSM,” also known as the “corporate media,” who were complicit.
Even as the Trump campaign devolves into raving lunacy and most Sanders supporters line up behind Hillary Clinton, the idea lives on: “Regular” or “everyday” Americans have been failed by out-of-touch elites and the MSM, who basically have screwed up the country.
Such thinking is no more sound than Trump’s conviction that all the nation’s ills should be blamed on Mexicans and Muslims.
Amanda Marcotte: The Clinton BS Files: In the ’90s, right wingers claimed Hillary and Bill framed a rapist
Clinton paranoia led Mike Huckabee to release convicted rapist Wayne DuMond, and DuMond went on to kill two women
A lurid right-wing conspiracy theory about the Clintons took off in Arkansas in the ’90s. Unfortunately, this particular conspiracy theory led to death: Two women were raped and murdered in the early 2000s, crimes that would likely not have happened but for the right-wing noise machine churning out Clinton conspiracy theories.
From the get-go, the case of Wayne DuMond, of Arkansas, was a strange one. In the mid-80s, DuMond was convicted of raping a teenager named Ashley Stevens in Forrest City, Arkansas. Shortly thereafter, as Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recalled in a 2007 retrospective, DuMond became “the Arkansas celebrity inmate of the 1990s.” [..]
It was one of the earliest cases of the Clinton conspiracy theory machine. During Bill Clinton’s tenure as governor of Arkansas, he refused to either pardon DuMond or help him get early release, causing Clinton’s political enemies to float the claim that Clinton was involved in framing an innocent man. (Why Clinton would want the wrong man in jail for his second cousin’s rape has never been explained by the haters.)
Likely, due to conservative hatred of Bill Clinton — who drew ire in no small part because of his feminist wife — DuMond because a cause célèbre of the Christian right in Arkansas.
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