“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: The Lying Game
Here’s what we can be fairly sure will happen in Monday’s presidential debate: Donald Trump will lie repeatedly and grotesquely, on a variety of subjects. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton might say a couple of untrue things. Or she might not. [..]
PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statements and classified them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling. Mr. Trump had 48 Pants on Fire ratings, Mrs. Clinton just six; the G.O.P. nominee had 89 False ratings, the Democrat 27.
Unless one candidate has a nervous breakdown or a religious conversion in the next few days, the debate will follow similar lines. So how should it be reported?
Eugene Robinson: In America, gun rights are for whites only
If you are a black man in America, exercising your constitutional right to keep and bear arms can be fatal. You might think the National Rifle Association and its amen chorus would be outraged, but apparently they believe Second Amendment rights are for whites only.
In reaching that conclusion I am accepting, for the sake of argument, the account given by the Charlotte police of how they came to fatally shoot Keith Lamont Scott on Tuesday. Scott’s killing prompted two nights of violent protests that led North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) to declare a state of emergency. Last Friday, police in Tulsa shot and killed Terence Crutcher — an unarmed black man — and the two incidents gave tragic new impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Scott’s relatives claim he was unarmed as well. But let’s assume that police are telling the truth and he had a handgun. What reason was there for officers to confront him?
North Carolina, after all, is an open-carry state. A citizen has the right to walk around armed if he or she chooses to do so. The mere fact that someone has a firearm is no reason for police to take action.
Jessica Valenti: Hillary Clinton’s problem? We just don’t trust women
Blues legend BB King once sang: “Never trust a woman, until she’s dead and buried.” Sadly, it’s a sentiment that sounds just at home in our current political discourse as it does an old song: while this week’s NBC/WSJ poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump in general support, voters consider Trump more “honest and straightforward” than Clinton by 10 points.
Let’s take a moment to consider this. A candidate whose first campaign ad was judged by one site to contain one lie every four seconds and who, according to Huffington Post, told over 70 lies in just one televised town hall; a man who one philosopher argues has “perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool”, is considered more honest than his opponent.
This isn’t a new problem for Clinton – a CNN poll from July found that only 30% of people surveyed found Clinton trustworthy, while 43% thought Trump was. It’s also not a new issue for American women.
Andrew Rosenthal: Donald Trump’s Real Message on Race
The more Donald Trump presses his supposed effort to appeal to black voters, the more bizarre it gets.
Just this week, the Republican nominee for president said the answer to inner-city violence was to revive New York’s stop-and-frisk program, abandoned after federal courts ruled that the results were racist.
He suggested that his decision to recant his insidious “birther” claims against President Obama was an insincere attempt to change the subject. He declared that his “movement” already embraces “everybody.” And one of his county campaign chairs announced that there was no racism before Obama was elected.
Not convinced that this is going to make black Americans vote for Trump?
That’s probably because Trump isn’t actually speaking to minority voters. He is offering excuses for white Americans who might otherwise hesitate to support a racist candidate.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Wells Fargo Had a Bad Day. That’s a Start.
People who came looking for drama in Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s Senate testimony on Tuesday did not come away disappointed. Stumpf was called before the Senate Banking Committee after his bank was fined $185 million for opening more than two million accounts in customers’ names, without their knowledge or consent, over a five-year period.
We now know that these two million phony accounts, and the 5,300 employees held responsible, may not reflect the full extent of the wrongdoing. Stumpf announced that the bank had agreed to extend its review of its misconduct to 2009 and 2010, and said he would consider reviewing earlier years as well.[..]
Wells Fargo’s CEO faced a rough grilling today. That’s a start. But John Stumpf is undoubtedly decompressing somewhere right now, waiting in comfort for the heat to die down. Wall Street’s fraud won’t end until its senior executives are held fully accountable for their actions – and not just for a day.
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