“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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Paul Krugman: Hillary Clinton Gets Gored
Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election — bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.
You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.
Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.
And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.
Amanda Marcotte: A modest proposal: Trump has it all wrong — to prevent crime, we need to do some “extreme vetting” of men
Donald Trump’s alarming speech on Thursday night was built around the claim that immigrants are a uniquely terrifying source of murder and mayhem and therefore, in the name of self-defense, the U.S. should expunge undocumented immigrants and narrow the standards for legal immigration.
The problem with his argument — which is barely an argument and more a bunch of right-wing buzzwords expectorated at top volume — is that immigrants, undocumented or not, commit crime at lower rates than native-born people.
There are, however, two groups of people who really do commit crime, especially violent crime, at wildly different rates: Men and women.
According to FBI crime statistics, men are arrested for roughly three-quarters of all crimes. When it comes to violent crime, the stats are even worse. Nearly 9 out of 10 people arrested for murder are male. Ninety-nine percent of rape arrestees are men. Men are arrested for 8 out of 10 aggravated assaults.
If Trump is right and the crime rate is serious enough of a problem to compel us to abandon basic human rights so as to subject certain groups of people to monitoring and legal intimidation, then it’s not immigrants we should target. It’s men.
John Paul Brammer: ‘Taco trucks on every corner’? That’d really make America great again
The taco, in both its bowl and its corner truck form, is having a political moment.
On Thursday, Marco Gutiérrez, a Mexican-born founder of the Latinos for Trump group (yikes), said on MSNBC that if Donald Trump loses in November, there would be “taco trucks on every corner”.
I must spell out that he meant this as a negative thing and not, as it might seem on the face of it, a great reason to vote for Hillary. [..]
The comments earned Gutiérrez rightful mockery on social media. Isn’t an America with a taco truck on every corner the utopia we deserve? To suggest otherwise gives us insight into the depravity of the average Trump supporter.
Joking aside, Gutiérrez is everything the Trump campaign could want in a surrogate. He apparently possesses enough self-loathing to deliver the talking points of white supremacy from a non-white mouth. He reassures Trump supporters that their racist views couldn’t possibly be racist because, see? He agrees with us!
Charles M. Blow: Donald Trump Does Detroit
So, after weeks of preaching his sinister sermon of black pathology to mostly white audiences as part of his utterly fake “black outreach” — which is in fact the effort of a bigot to disguise his bigotry — Donald Trump finally brought his message before a few mostly black audiences.
He spoke Friday to a handful of African-Americans in North Philadelphia, and as described on philly.com, told them that “he is not a bigot, and blamed the media for portraying him that way, according to people who attended a private event.”
No sir, stop right there. We are not going to allow any deflection or redefining of words here. You are a bigot. That is not a media narrative or a fairy tale. That is an absolute truth. No one manufactured your bigotry; you manifested it.
You have proudly brandished your abrasiveness, and now you want to whine and moan about your own abrasions. Not this day. Not the next day. Not ever. You will never shake the essence of yourself. Your soul is dark, your character corrupt. You are a reprobate and a charlatan who has ridden a wave of intolerance to its crest.
Robert Reich: Standing Up to Apple
For years, Washington lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have attacked big corporations for avoiding taxes by parking their profits overseas. Last week the European Union did something about it.
The European Union’s executive commission ordered Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple.
But rather than congratulate Europe for standing up to Apple, official Washington is outraged.
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan calls it an “awful” decision. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who’s likely to become Senate Majority Leader next year, says it’s “a cheap money grab by the European Commission.” Republican Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, accuses Europe of “targeting” American businesses. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden says it “undermines our tax treaties and paints a target on American firms in the eyes of foreign governments.”
P-l-e-a-s-e.
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