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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Charles M. Blow: White Extinction Anxiety
Last week Pat Buchanan was on “The Laura Ingraham Show” to discuss the humanitarian crisis Donald Trump has created at the border by ripping children away from their parents.
He was not particularly sympathetic to these families’ plights, instead choosing to focus on the demographic danger facing whiteness: “This is the great issue of our time. And, the real question is whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character — political, social, racial, ethnic — character of the country entirely.”
He continued: “You cannot stop these sentiments of people who want to live together with their own and they want their borders protected.” Make no mistake here, Buchanan is talking about protecting white dominance, white culture, white majorities and white power.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Don’t forget Trump’s cruelty is routine
President Trump has a special animus toward immigrants, but the children of those crossing our borders are not the only vulnerable people in his sights. His administration is waging a less visible war on our nation’s poorest citizens, with the complicity of its Republican allies in Congress.
We can welcome the fact that the president’s family-separation policy aroused the indignation of a broad empathetic majority. This instinct for compassion and justice should also be mobilized to stop efforts that will, quite literally, take food off the tables of Americans who already have great difficulty making ends meet.
And can we please stop using the word “populist” to describe a crowd that would slash programs for the neediest to help finance a deficit-inflating tax giveaway that disproportionately benefits the very wealthiest people in our country? There is nothing populist about transferring money and power to those who already have a great deal of both.
Robert Kuttner: Trump’s Trade Fight With Canada Highlights Two Approaches To Capitalism
President Donald Trump’s savaging of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gotten a good deal of attention for its sheer weirdness — why scapegoat one of America’s most loyal allies and benign trading partners? But it’s worth looking below the surface at the actual trade relationship and the differences between the two countries.
For now, Trump may have done Trudeau a favor. After the U.S. president’s trade tantrum and imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum, polls showed that 72 percent of Canadians supported Trudeau’s handling of the dust-up. But polls also showed Trudeau’s Liberal party slightly behind the rival Conservatives, with both losing ground to the more left-wing New Democrats.
Trade friction between the two nations is nothing new, and the North American Free Trade Agreement did not put an end to them. One long-standing complaint involves the dairy industry.
Both countries have systems for protecting their dairy farmers against imports, but the American dairy industry has long argued that the Canadian system is more closed. In principle, consumers would benefit from lower prices with freer trade. On the other hand, farming is notoriously vulnerable to drastic price fluctuations, and a somewhat protected system allows for more stable rural life. Economic theory does not provide a simple right answer.
Michael Winship: Trump’s Gang May be Incompetent At a Spectacular Level — But They’re Also Cruel and Nasty to the Bone
Our “I alone can fix it” president has gotten us in another fix, all right.
Of course, whenever he screws up big time, Mister I Alone starts blaming everyone but Mister I Alone.
He had admitted as much the other day when he was in Singapore for his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and bragged about the great deal he imagined he had made: “I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.” He was, in his gruesome way, joking, but many a truth in jest, etc. [..]
Trump and his crowd are dedicated to curdling the milk of human kindness. They fill their pockets while destroying America in a misbegotten attempt to take it back to a time of ethnic purity that never really was while establishing a new Gilded Age where only a handful can prosper at the expense of everyone else. We are becoming a mean boy nation, a nation once of immigrants but now one of bullies and tyrants. Our president breaks everything he sees, including our democracy and our republic.
Only we can fix it.
Suzanne Moore: Roseanne calls herself a ‘hate magnet’, but her thinking is depressingly mainstream
Can “hate-magnets” be rehabilitated? This is how Roseanne Barr described herself while talking about how she was “impaired” because of sleeping pills when she posted a racist tweet that she now regrets.
She has black children in her family. She didn’t mean it and has lost everything. Barr was once great. She gave us a smart, savvy portrayal of working-class culture. It was groundbreaking and she was loved. But, long before the new series of Roseanne was aired, she had revealed herself on Twitter to be a Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist. Her views were, as the kids say, “problematic”. Round-the-clock sleeping pills?
Hate-magnet is a self-serving term of victimhood if ever I heard one. As with Morrissey, there will be those who claim in retrospect to have seen all this coming from the get-go. It is excused, then ignored and then everyone falls over themselves to condemn the bitter old viper.
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