“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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Bruce G. Blair: Trump and the Nuclear Keys
As the 1973 Yom Kippur war between Israel and neighboring Arab states intensified, I was in an underground missile launch center in Montana with a crewmate when we received an emergency message to prepare for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Only at the president’s behest would we ever turn keys to fire up to 50 nuclear-armed missiles that could extinguish millions of lives in less than an hour. Once we closed our eight-ton blast door to begin alert duty, we took orders from no one else. [..]
We assume that presidents will grasp the power of the nuclear arsenal at their disposal and show the utmost restraint in using it. Dwight D. Eisenhower recoiled at the concept of nuclear overkill, where far more people are killed than necessary to defeat an enemy. After a nuclear war briefing, John F. Kennedy opined in dismay, “And we call ourselves the human race.” Richard M. Nixon (president during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war), in the words of his chief of staff, worried about the way war plans “lightly tossed about millions of deaths.” Ronald Reagan, for all his thunder about the Soviet Union being “an evil empire” and joking that “we begin bombing in five minutes,” was privately averse to nuclear weapons. He wished to eliminate them, as does President Obama.
Donald J. Trump is of a radically different ilk and temperament from past presidents. If I were back in the launch chair, I would have little faith in his judgment and would feel alienated if he were commander in chief. I am not alone in this view. A vast majority of current and former launch officers in my circle of friends and acquaintances tell me they feel the same.
Garrison Keillor: Donald Trump is four centuries too late
It’s the scariest and hairiest election of this old man’s life, and I pore over the polls and the electoral maps. One day Iowa is red, the next day blue. Hillary Clinton pulls ahead in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump in Ohio. Tiny New Hampshire, more like a county than a state, comes to prominence. Other democracies miss out on the excitement because they forgot to include an electoral college, which got a bad rap in 2000 but which makes a national election a series of local ones. Democrats win the West Coast and Northeast and chunks of the Midwest, the GOP takes the Bible Belt and the Wild West, and they go marauding for the swing states. This year, Mr. Trump has succeeded in turning a number of reliably Republican states into swing states. Remarkable. [..]
Mr. Trump would have enjoyed the 17th century, the tumult, the divine right of kings, the suppression of Parliament. Vituperation was normal discourse, the idea of privileged sexual aggression was common in high places, money flowed freely, rich men commissioned great monuments to themselves. He was in excellent form on Sunday night, strutting, stalking, words and phrases flowing out of him like water from a hose — “disaster” and “horrible” over and over — and if you put him on Grub Street in 1650, he’d be magnificent in his great swirling robes, surrounded by courtiers and sycophants, ranting against the Puritans, supporting the monarchy, smiting his enemies. The problem in 2016 is that most of what he says is a lie. Nobody learns anything from lies. The country is not in crisis. The government is not a disaster; it is a culture of process and law and organization that is alien to him. The Syrian refugee will quickly know more about this country than the man in the triplex penthouse. It would have been better if, instead of running for president and wasting everyone’s time, he’d just sat down and written a novel.
Jaclyn Friedman: ‘Locker room talk’ isn’t harmless – it normalizes rape
It’s just words.” That’s the excuse that you, Donald Trump, offered Sunday night, when Anderson Cooper asked you if you understood that you had been caught bragging about sexually assaulting women.
“No, I didn’t say that at all,” you retorted. “This was locker room talk.” You repeated that phrase three more times, as though it held magic powers. Locker room talk. Locker room talk. Locker room talk.
I’ve been queasy all day, Donald (I’ve heard you hate being addressed by your first name, but hey, it’s just words, right?). I know what it feels like to have a man seize my body against my will. To know that you think that makes him more of a man makes me literally sick. I have so many friends who are also survivors. We’re all sick from this, Donald. You say you want to make us safe, but your words are hurting us.
Richard Wolffe: Paul Ryan can’t escape from Trump’s shipwreck of the Republican party
Today’s Republican party makes no sense.
It spent decades as the party of national security before nominating a man who both defends Russia and pretends to know nothing about the place.
If it is the party of small government and constitutional liberty, it’s not clear why its members feel so good about locking up political opponents like Hillary Clinton.
To cap it all, the party is currently led by a reality TV star who destroyed his own campaign with a TV interview.
But all those contradictions look simple compared to the pretzel shape that now passes for the strategy of its leadership.
House speaker Paul Ryan was a reluctant endorser of Donald Trump. Now he is a reluctant non-endorser of the same. [..]
But there is no escape from this shipwreck, as Trump himself made clear on Twitter. “Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget, job and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting Republican nominee,” said the same nominee.
Amanda Marcotte: Righteous hypocrite: Wisconsin senator believes in charity to solve social ills — but his family foundation gives away scraps
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is a right-wing Republican who, like many in his party, believes that the federally-funded social safety net is a disastrous failure and that private charity works much better at helping lift people out of poverty. But as Salon has discovered by looking through Johnson’s family foundation’s tax documents and his own financial disclosure statements, Johnson’s own charitable foundation does not exactly represent the poverty-destroying generosity he claims will work so much better than government spending.
In 2013, for instance, the Johnson family’s Grammie Jean Foundation gave $20,000 to the Oshkosh Opera House and only $1,500 to anti-poverty programs.
It’s a strange choice from a man who has a long record of arguing that private charity works better to relieve poverty than taxpayer-funded programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
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