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”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: The Economy Won’t Rescue Trump
Although there have been approximately 100,000 media profiles of enthusiastic blue-collar Trump supporters in diners, the reality is that Donald Trump is extraordinarily unpopular. A recent Pew analysis found only one other modern president with such a low approval rating two years into his administration.
On the other hand, that president was Ronald Reagan, who went on to win re-election in a landslide. So some Trump boosters are suggesting their champion can repeat that performance. Can he?
No, he can’t. And it’s worth understanding why, both to assess current political prospects and to debunk the Reagan mythology still infesting U.S. conservatism.
Let’s talk first about the Reagan story.
Eugene Robinson: Above all else, Trump is a bully
As the shambolic Trump presidency caroms and lurches into Year Three, a shameful governing philosophy has emerged: cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Let us take stock:
Roughly one-quarter of the federal government has been closed for a month, in the longest shutdown in U.S. history. An estimated 800,000 employees are either furloughed or being forced to work without pay, as well as untold contract workers who also are idled. Prospects for a near-term solution to the impasse between President Trump and Congress range all the way from dim to dimmer.
Imagine going a month without a paycheck. Imagine lining up the bills and deciding which get paid and which don’t — mortgage or rent, electricity, heating. Imagine having to commute to work at an “essential” government job and trying to scrape together enough money for gas or bus fare.
All of these hardships, and many more, are being inflicted on hardworking public servants for no earthly reason. From the beginning, Democrats have taken a reasonable position: Keep the government open, and let’s have a debate and a negotiation about border security. Trump agreed — until far-right pundits accused him of abandoning his border wall, which everyone knows will never be built.
Catherine Rampell: The GOP has become the pro-Russia party
Once upon a time, Ayn Rand-reading, red-baiting Republicans denounced Soviet Russia as an evil superpower intent on destroying the American way of life.
My, how things have changed.
The Grand Old Party has quietly become the pro-Russia party — and not only because the party’s standard-bearer seems peculiarly enamored of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Under Republican leadership, the United States is starting to look an awful lot like the failed Soviet system the party once stood unified against.
Supposedly middle-class workers — people who have government jobs that are supposed to be stable and secure — are waiting in bread lines. Thanks to government dysfunction and mismanagement, those employed in the private sector may also be going hungry, since 2,500 vendors nationwide are unable to participate in the food stamp program while the government is shuttered and unable to renew licenses for the Electronic Benefit Transfer debit card program.
Why? Because of the whims of a would-be autocrat who cares more about erecting an expensive monument to his own campaign rhetoric than about the pain and suffering of the little people he claims to champion.
Michelle Goldberg: May the Best Woman Win
The February before the 2016 election, Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and some of his colleagues tried to measure how threats to traditional masculinity affected male voting behavior.
They polled 694 registered voters in New Jersey about their support for various candidates. Half of the respondents were first told that in an increasing number of households, women out-earn men, and they were asked whether that was true in theirs. The researchers expected many men to lie; the point of the question was to get them thinking about shifting gender roles.
Presented with a hypothetical matchup between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, men who weren’t asked about women’s earning power favored Clinton by 16 points, close to Barack Obama’s 2012 margin of victory in the state. Men who got the question about gender and money, however, favored Trump by eight points. There was no difference between the two groups in the margin of their support for Bernie Sanders versus Trump. [..]
There are many explanations for Clinton’s loss, including her campaign’s mistakes, Russian hacking and James Comey’s blundering investigation of her email server. But sexism pretty clearly played a role.
R J Eskow: Here are 11 questions you should ask Libertarians to see if they’re hypocrites
Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.
They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical “free market” is better at everything than the government is, yet when they really need government protection, they’re the first to clamor for it.
That’s no reason not to work with them on areas where they’re in agreement with people like me. In fact, the unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be among this nation’s most forthright and outspoken advocates for civil liberties and against military interventions.
Merriam-Webster defines “hypocrisy” as “feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not.” We aren’t suggesting every libertarian is a hypocrite. But there’s an easy way to find out.
Recent Comments