“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: Thugs and Kisses
First of all, let’s get this straight: The Russian Federation of 2016 is not the Soviet Union of 1986. True, it covers most of the same territory and is run by some of the same thugs. But the Marxist ideology is gone, and so is the superpower status. We’re talking about a more or less ordinary corrupt petrostate here, although admittedly a big one that happens to have nukes.
I mention all of this because Donald Trump’s effusive praise for Vladimir Putin — which actually reflects a fairly common sentiment on the right — seems to have confused some people.
On one side, some express puzzlement over the spectacle of right-wingers — the kind of people who used to yell “America, love it or leave it!” — praising a Russian regime. On the other side, a few people on the left are anti-anti-Putinists, denouncing criticism of Mr. Trump’s Putin-love as “red-baiting.” But today’s Russia isn’t Communist, or even leftist; it’s just an authoritarian state, with a cult of personality around its strongman, that showers benefits on an immensely wealthy oligarchy while brutally suppressing opposition and criticism.
And that, of course, is what many on the right admire.
Charles M. Blow: About the ‘Basket of Deplorables’
Let’s get straight to it: Hillary Clinton’s comments Friday at a fund-raiser that half of Donald Trump’s supporters could be put in a “basket of deplorables” wasn’t a smart political play.
Candidates do themselves a tremendous disservice when they attack voters rather than campaigns. Whatever advantage is procured through the rallying of one’s own base is outweighed by what will be read as divisiveness and disdain.
Here is Clinton’s full quote:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
Then, she continued: “But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
That second basket got too little attention. Context doesn’t provide the sizzle on which shock media subsists. Noted.
What Clinton said was impolitic, but it was not incorrect. There are things a politician cannot say. Luckily, I’m not a politician.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: No one is asking Clinton or Trump about the No. 1 threat to security
Last week we saw another installment of the media malpractice that has plagued the 2016 campaign. NBC’s Matt Lauer was widely criticized for his performance moderating the network’s Commander-in-Chief Forum, especially his failure to correct Donald Trump’s repetition of the lie that he opposed the invasion of Iraq. But another mistake has been getting far less attention. The nationally televised event yielded little serious debate about the many great security challenges facing the United States today, including perhaps the single most urgent threat on the planet: nuclear weapons.
Though Hillary Clinton was asked about the Iran nuclear deal, there was no discussion of nonproliferation or the perils of nuclear weapons in general. For that, to be fair, Lauer is only partially to blame. The unfortunate reality is that, at a time when experts have warned that the danger of a nuclear disaster is on the rise, neither of the major-party nominees has said much about it. [..]
In an election dominated by spectacle and confrontation, many policy issues have fallen by the wayside. But as the nuclear peril intensifies, we desperately need to have a real debate about issues such as the first use of nuclear weapons, taking our nuclear arsenal off hair-trigger alert, and at last ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that President Clinton signed 20 years ago this month. Reports that North Korea conducted a nuclear test in recent days underscore the need for a new approach to this challenge.
Amanda Marcotte: Clinton’s health is Obama’s birth certificate all over again: A barely disguised way for conservatives to wallow in bigotry
Any other year, a presidential candidate who got wobbly at a 9/11 memorial service because he was battling a minor case of pneumonia would be regaled as a hero. How tough and patriotic he is, to brave the summer heat while wearing a Kevlar vest, even though his doctor told him to stay in bed for a couple days!
But since the candidate in question is a she and not a he, the narrative is very different this time around. Now that it’s Hillary Clinton, everyone’s wondering if Grandma is too weak and fragile for the job. Never mind that she’s running against a man who is himself an elderly grandfather, or that most presidents have been older men. Or that, as Digby noted in Salon on Monday, previous male presidents have had a slew of common health problems, from the common flu to cancer surgery. Or that getting sick occasionally is just the price you pay for being human. [..]
The feigned concerns over Clinton’s health strongly resemble the feigned concerns that Barack Obama was faking his natural born citizenship, right down to the posturing about how this is all the target’s fault for not providing more and more documentation, to drive home how much those of us who aren’t white men cannot be trusted. In both cases, it’s about wallowing in ugly stereotypes — that black people aren’t patriots, that women are inherently fragile — without admitting that’s what’s going on.
And no surprise that the person behind the Clinton health hysteria is also the same man that was pushing the Obama birth certificate hysteria: Donald Trump.
Dana Milbank: Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist
Hillary Clinton may have been unwise to say half of Donald Trump’s supporters are racists and other “deplorables.” But she wasn’t wrong.
If anything, when it comes to Trump’s racist support, she might have low-balled the number.
Trump, speaking to the National Guard Association of the United States’ annual conference here Monday afternoon, proclaimed himself “deeply shocked and alarmed” about Clinton putting half of his supporters in the “basket of deplorables”— as if anybody, especially Trump, could be shocked by anything this late in the campaign. How dare she, Trump said, “attack, slander, smear, demean these wonderful, amazing people.”
But this isn’t a matter of gratuitous name-calling. This election has proved that there is much more racism in America than many believed. It came out of hiding in opposition to the first African American president, and it has been welcomed into the open by Trump.
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