“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Paul Krugman: How to Rig an Election
It’s almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror? Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton. Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election. [..]
It’s a disgraceful record. Yet Mrs. Clinton still seems likely to win.
If she does, you know what will happen. Republicans will, of course, deny her legitimacy from day one, just as they did for the last two Democratic presidents. But there will also — you can count on it — be a lot of deprecation and sneering from mainstream pundits and many in the media, lots of denial that she has a “mandate” (whatever that means), because some other Republican would supposedly have beaten her, she should have won by more, or something.
So in the days ahead it will be important to remember two things. First, Mrs. Clinton has actually run a remarkable campaign, demonstrating her tenacity in the face of unfair treatment and remaining cool under pressure that would have broken most of us. Second, and much more important, if she wins it will be thanks to Americans who stood up for our nation’s principles — who waited for hours on voting lines contrived to discourage them, who paid attention to the true stakes in this election rather than letting themselves be distracted by fake scandals and media noise.
Rebecca Solnit: Whether Trump or Clinton wins the US election, what follows is up to us
Presidential elections are a form of madness that comes over us once every four years. They fit the great-man or -woman narrative of history, seducing us into forgetting how powerful we are. They erase our memory of grassroots power, direct democracy and civil society. Leaders beget followers; people pin their hopes on one person, and with that they seem to shed responsibility for anything beyond getting that one person into office. Or, they wash their hands of any further involvement if it’s not their one person. [..]
A politician is not a given. Each one is in part what we make them, by pushing, blocking, pressuring, encouraging, fighting, reframing, emphasizing, organizing. Every election season we pretend that one person will have all the power and that whatever they promise up front is exactly who they’ll be, for better or worse. We forget our own influence, the innumerable times we’ve swayed outcomes, such as the decision to veto the Keystone XL pipeline. We forget the way culture and activism set the norms for political decisions on matters such as same-sex marriage rights.
Election seasons erase the memory of movements that worked for years or decades, outside and around, below and above electoral politics. They drown out the histories that matter: how women got the vote, how the civil rights movement progressed, how the Free Trade Area of the Americas trade deal withered and died, how the World Trade Organization was hobbled and its poorer member nations inspired to revolt by the great 1999 shutdown in Seattle, how fracking got banned in New York State, how rape law has been radically revised in many ways and places thanks to feminist action and discourse. In all these cases, the people who we mislabel leaders only followed the will of the people.
To reiterate: it matters who is president, but what a president does has everything to do with what the people demand or refuse or do themselves, and what the House and Senate send them or sabotage.
Charles M. Blow: Vote for Your Health and for Your Life
America, Election Day is our national day of reckoning, the day we do battle at the ballot box to beat back the advance of the butternut squash-tanned barbarian. [..]
But Tuesday you have the power to turn things around. You no longer have to passively take this torture; now you can do something about it (if you haven’t already): You can vote!
Indeed, the American Psychological Association issued five tips for managing the stress of this election, the last of which was this:
“Vote. In a democracy, a citizen’s voice does matter. By voting, you will hopefully feel you are taking a proactive step and participating in what for many has been a stressful election cycle. Find balanced information to learn about all the candidates and issues on your ballot (not just the presidential race), make informed decisions and wear your ‘I voted’ sticker with pride.”
On Election Day, you get to have your voice heard and choice registered. You get to say yes to normalcy and rationality and no to insanity.
John Paul Brammer: The Donald Trump nightmare will endure for Latinos regardless
The nightmare truly began when Donald Trump threw Jorge Ramos out of a press conference in August last year. Some might argue it was when he called Mexican immigrants “rapists” the month before, but the beast hadn’t yet emerged, hadn’t yet been given a clear face or features.
“Go back to Univision!” Trump shouted as Ramos was escorted out of the room. The familiar syntax was not lost on us Latinos, who have been told to “go back” for as long as we’ve been in the United States, whether we were born here or not. [..]
Al mal tiempo, buena cara, goes an old Mexican proverb. “To the bad times, good face.” When I first delved into the world of activism, I used to hold the saying in contempt. It seemed to feed into the bottomless humility of the Mexican American in the face of oppression, the immigrant family, the Chicano who doesn’t want to make a fuss. It painted us, I thought, as a people who merely stood by while bad things happened to us.
Watching the Trump campaign, being its first scapegoats, I felt we were in that helpless place where our only option was to endure. The slogan Make America Great Again encapsulated exactly how we are seen in this country. We are the unclean other, our culture dilutes the purity of America’s white citizens who must be protected from us. Make America great again – by kicking us out.
Amanda Marcotte: Democrats are just better at this stuff: Obama used executive power for progressive ends — and Hillary Clinton will follow his lead
Even though the 2016 presidential election has become an all-consuming beast, eating up the nation’s time and attention, almost no attention has been paid to what the president actually does. A study released last week by the Tyndall Report shows that the flagship news programs of the big three networks devoted three times as many minutes to covering Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails — the same ones that have produced zero evidence of any illegal behavior — as they did covering real issues in the presidential campaign.
The larger media landscape, which takes in the televised debates, has delved a bit more into the nuts and bolts of presidenting and on occasion has dipped into substantive topics like picking judicial nominees, crafting a legislative agenda and conducting foreign policy. Even then, there has been little discussion about the executive duties of the executive office: building and maintaining the various federal bureaucracies that make our government work.
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