“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: Donald Trump’s ‘Big Liar’ Technique
Long ago, you-know-who suggested that propagandists should apply the “big lie” technique: make their falsehoods so huge, so egregious, that they would be widely accepted because nobody would believe they were lying on that grand a scale. And the technique has worked well for despots and would-be despots ever since.
But Donald Trump has come up with something new, which we can call the “big liar” technique. Taken one at a time, his lies are medium-size — not trivial, but mostly not rising to the level of blood libel. But the lies are constant, coming in a steady torrent, and are never acknowledged, simply repeated. He evidently believes that this strategy will keep the news media flummoxed, unable to believe, or at least say openly, that the candidate of a major party lies that much.
And Wednesday night’s “Commander in Chief” televised forum suggested that he may be right.
Amanda Marcotte: Dispatches from the condom war: Democrats fight to keep women’s access to contraception during the Zika virus crisis
As most of the media is riveted to the presidential election, Democrats and Republicans continue to battle it out in the escalating war between the parties over contraception and other reproductive health care access. Cutting funding for affordable contraception for low income women remains a major Republican priority — this week suggests it is the major Republican priority — but Democrats are fighting back, and hard.
The headline-grabbing news this week is that Republicans have yet again slipped an anti-contraception rider to a bill that’s supposed to be about funding efforts to fight the Zika virus, even though the CDC advises that the public needs “access to the full range of contraceptive methods to prevent unintended pregnancy is an important way to prevent Zika-related birth defects.” The move forced the Democrats to block the bill again, and demand one that funds contraception services at Planned Parenthood, the organization that is the best equipped in the country to distribute contraception safely and effectively.
But while this fight is taking up the headlines, the Obama administration has been making moves to protect contraception access more generally. The HHS proposed a new rule for Title X funding that would make it much harder for state level Republicans to strip contraception funding from health care organizations, like Planned Parenthood, for purely ideological reasons.
Lucia Graves: We just got a terrifying taste of the Clinton-Trump debates to come
It was supposed to be the substantive counterpoint to a primary season dominated by frivolity, but Wednesday’s national security forum – hosted by NBC and featuring back-to-back appearances by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – was nothing of the sort.
To say it wasn’t television news’ finest hour would be an understatement.
Instead of testing the limits of Trump’s knowledge or probing Clinton to move beyond her standard talking points, the forum’s setup seemed to encourage candidates to assume their usual roles. Trump was allowed to ramble on topics utterly devoid of policy content, while occasionally asserting lies as truths; Clinton was forced to repeatedly defend herself against the same accusations regarding her private email server that have plagued her all election cycle.
Trump was able to play all his greatest, phoniest hits – saying, for instance, he was against the war in Iraq all along. That’s a lie, pure and simple, as has been documented by a whole cadre of journalists by now. But NBC moderator Matt Lauer didn’t correct him, instead rerouting the conversation to a soft-ball referendum on Trump’s temperament.
Jamie Weinstein: Gary Johnson’s ‘Aleppo’ moment was cringeworthy, but he’ll never be president
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, libertarian presidential contender Gary Johnson humiliated himself by showing total ignorance of the Syrian city of Aleppo, which has been the center of so much carnage during the ongoing Syrian civil war.
“What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?” show panelist Mike Barnicle asked.
“And what is Aleppo?” Johnson responded.
It was hardly a good moment for Johnson, and it is an unacceptable knowledge gap for someone running for commander-in-chief. Before an American president can exercise judgment, there is a basic knowledge threshold that has to be met.
But, in Johnson’s (weak) defense, he has never claimed to be the world’s greatest foreign policy guru, and no serious person actually believes he will ever be president.
Which brings us to one Donald J Trump.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Clinton knows: in the new economy, caring is crucial
Hillary Clinton’s political brand is mainstream, incremental and pragmatic. She presents herself as “the progressive who wants to get things done”, a tagline that emphasizes the need to sacrifice grand visions on the altar of results. She may prioritize reform over revolution, but she is also the candidate of much bigger ideas than is typically recognized.
One of these touches the heart of government itself: the role of the state. The modern state was created to protect its citizens; although the line between defending citizens from one another and foreign invaders and waging war as a foreign invader was blurry at best. As the sociologist Charles Tilly wrote: “War made the state and the state made war.” The state thus created was the “fiscal-military state”. In Manuel Lin-Miranda’s rap retelling of precisely this struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson: “If we assume the debts, the union gets a new line of credit, a financial diuretic; If we’re aggressive and competitive the union gets a boost.”
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