“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: Donald Trump’s Deportation Nation
It’s ridiculous that Donald Trump’s immigration proposals — not so much a policy as empty words strung together and repeated — should have propelled him as far as they have. This confounding situation hit peak absurdity on Wednesday.
It started with Mr. Trump’s meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, in Mexico City. It was surreal because Mr. Trump has spent his entire campaign painting Mexico as a nation of rapists, drug smugglers and trade hustlers who would have to pay for the 2,000-mile border wall that Mr. Trump was going to build. But instead of chastising Mr. Trump, Mr. Peña Nieto treated him like a visiting head of state at a news conference, with side-by-side lecterns and words of deferential mush. [..]
Mr. Trump then headed back over the border, shedding his decorum by the time he got to Phoenix.
Trevor Timm: Clinton’s embrace of Republicans will harm her own party’s future
The Clinton campaign has now spent months trying to convince relatively obscure former Republican officials to endorse her campaign while also adopting many Republican slogans and arguments in her quest for the presidency.
One has to wonder how much long term damage she is doing to progressive policies by deploying this strategy, even if she beats Donald Trump along the way. [..]
Last week, Clinton again handed legitimacy to the Republican party through the way she has decided to attack Trump. She gave a speech in which she praised prior GOP candidates for their treatment of Muslim Americans, including George W Bush, in an attempt to rhetorically separate Trump from these other supposedly upstanding Republicans. In the process, she is kneecapping Democratic candidates around the country who are attempting to retake the House and Senate.
Instead of hanging Trump around all Republicans’ necks, she is cleaving him off from other GOP candidates and giving them an easy out, despite the fact that Trump is a direct product of the GOP’s pandering to classist and racist elements of society for a decade. (Leaked Democratic National Committee emails show that at least some Democrats were worried about this exact scenario.)
Richard Wolffe: Tough guy in Arizona, meek in Mexico: Trump’s latest reversal
Donald Trump went on his first non-golfing foreign travel of the 2016 election and returned a changed man. Gone was the candidate who talked about all those good-hearted illegal immigrants who have lived honestly in the US for decades. Gone was all the talk of them paying back taxes to get legal status. Gone was the kinder, gentler Trump.
Instead, the Republican nominee delivered an immigration speech on Wednesday night with all the sweetness of the Sex Pistols, the brevity of Fidel Castro and the brains of Archie Bunker.
This was, in the nominee’s words, “a detailed policy address” on immigration. Not to be confused with his declarations on the subject in a billion primary debates, TV interviews and midnight tweets.
So in place of “a deportation force” to forcibly remove 11 million undocumented immigrants, Trump described a “deportation task force” to merely eject 2 million “criminal aliens”.
David Klion: If Russia is trying to hack America, it is not to help Donald Trump win
Americans know that a functioning democracy relies on a basic trust in the validity of the process. Russia, a country that has thoroughly undermined trust in its own democratic process, now appears to have every incentive to do the same to ours.
US intelligence officials told NBC News this week that Russian-based hackers have stolen data on thousands of registered voters in Illinois and unsuccessfully attempted to do the same in Arizona. They have suggested that the hackers in question may be directly tied to the Russian government.
These claims come in the wake of recent suspected Russian cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton Foundation and Washington think tanks, as well as Donald Trump’s possibly sarcastic but alarming request for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Claims of this nature are inherently murky, and it’s worth noting that cyber security experts have been warning that election infrastructure in the US is vulnerable to hackers with far fewer resources than the Kremlin. Still, stipulating that Russia may be behind a pattern of cyber attacks, the question becomes: why?likely to win.
Peniel E. Joseph: ‘White Lives Matter’, now a hate group, is part of a long arc of white supremacy
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of the White Lives Matter organization as a hate group this week confirms what we already knew: that a group of white racists have organized what might be called a backlash to the Black Lives Matter surge.
It is more accurate, though, to view it as a continuation of a long and dreadful history of white supremacy in America. This country’s practice of anti-black racism coupled with official denial of institutional racism and collective amnesia regarding the horrors and crimes inflicted on black people nurtures white resentment against black advancement.
White supremacist groups rose in the civil war’s aftermath, organized by southern white people determined to use violence to deny Reconstruction-era promotion of black citizenship. The Ku Klux Klan is the most famous of these groups, whose numbers steadily increased at the end of the 19th century. By the early 20th century the Klan’s worldview helped shape the racial nativism – marked by anti-immigrant fervor, antisemitism and anti-Catholicism – that gripped the nation.
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