“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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Richard Cohen: Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth
The Economist, a fine British newsmagazine, is rarely wrong, but it was recently in strongly suggesting that the casual disregard for truth that is the very soul of Donald Trump’s campaign is something new under the sun. The technology — tweets and such — certainly is, but his cascade of immense lies certainly is not. I’d like to familiarize the Economist with Adolf Hitler.
I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is. [..]
Germany was not some weird place. At the advent of the Hitler era, it was a democracy, an advanced nation, culturally rich and scientifically advanced. It had a unique history — its defeat in World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920s — so it cannot easily be likened to the contemporary United States. But it was not all that different, either. In 1933, it chose a sociopathic liar as its leader. If the polls are to be believed, we may do the same.
Hillary Clinton: My Plan for Helping America’s Poor
The true measure of any society is how we take care of our children. With all of our country’s resources, no child should ever have to grow up in poverty. Yet every single night, all across America, kids go to sleep hungry or without a place to call home.
We have to do better. Advocating for children and families has been the cause of my life, starting with my first job as a young attorney at the Children’s Defense Fund, and if I have the honor of serving as president, it will be the driving mission of my administration.
The good news is that we’re making progress, thanks to the hard work of the American people and President Obama. The global poverty rate has been cut in half in recent decades. In the United States, a new report from the Census Bureau found that there were 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty in 2015 than just a year before. [..]
But make no mistake: We still have work to do. Families across the country were devastated by the Great Recession.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Edward Snowden is the perfect candidate for a presidential pardon
Edward Snowden is the former National Security Agency contractor who risked his job, his prestige and his freedom to expose the NSA’s secret mass surveillance programs that trampled the privacy rights of Americans. For that, he has earned the gratitude of millions of Americans and the loathing of the security state. The Justice Department indicted him under the Espionage Act for revealing classified information. The State Department stripped him of his passport while he was in a Russian airport transit lounge, effectively exiling him to Russia. Now human rights organizations at home and abroad are joining to call on President Obama to pardon Snowden.
Even those who oppose a pardon acknowledge that, as Obama’s former attorney general Eric Holder said, if Snowden’s leak of classified information was “inappropriate and illegal,” the whistleblower had performed a “public service.” [..]
The facts on this are clear. Snowden broke the law in the service of the public’s right to privacy, and to enforce the vital democratic imperative that the secret state operate under the laws and the constitution of this country.
A presidential pardon is precisely designed for this situation. It is an act of presidential discretion to do justice. It sets no precedent. It does not preclude the prosecution of those who endanger national secrets, whether a paranoid secretary of state, an infatuated general or a foreign spy. No future leaker could count on similar treatment. A pardon would recognize the public service that Snowden provided, without undermining the rule of law. For a president who has argued that we need not sacrifice our liberties for security, it is time to act.
Eugene Robinson: A vote for Trump is a vote for climate catastrophe
July and August were the hottest months for the planet since record keeping began. Scientists are confident that 2016 will be the hottest year. Rising sea levels have made flooding commonplace in several major U.S. cities. And meanwhile, one of our leading presidential candidates says climate change is some kind of Chinese hoax.
Elections have consequences, and this is one of the most fateful: Anyone who takes climate change seriously had better do everything possible to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
Believe it or not, there are issues more important than Trump’s latest offensive outburst or Hillary Clinton’s score on the likability scale. Clinton accepts the scientific consensus on climate change, which is increasingly supported by what we see and feel every day. She would build upon President Obama’s efforts to address the issue, which include the historic Paris agreement, seen by many experts as our last best hope to prevent catastrophe.
Amanda Marcotte: Pat McCrory’s shifty gambit: N.C. governor tries to blame pro-gay laws for NCAA boycott
North Carolina’s HB2, which became nationally known as the anti-trans “bathroom bill,” has turned into an unmitigated disaster for the Tar Heel State. That isn’t stopping Republicans from clinging to increasingly desperate gambits to hang onto this discriminatory legislation.
The law, which was passed and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory during the span of a single day last March, repeals all local or city ordinances protecting LGBT people from discrimination, and requires trans people to use the bathroom corresponding with their birth certificate and not with their experienced gender. The nationwide outcry against this law has resulted in economic problems for the state. [..]
Under this immense economic pressure, McCrory is reluctantly admitting that perhaps HB2 wasn’t the greatest idea. But in the grand Republican tradition of trying to hold someone else responsible for your own poor choices, McCrory has taken to blaming pro-LGBT forces for North Carolina’s problems. You see, he argues, it’s not his fault that Republicans passed this horrific law encouraging discrimination and abuse of LGBT people. The liberals made him do it by trying to protect LGBT people from discrimination.
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