Harry Enten:
Does Donald Trump lead the race for the Republican presidential nomination? Or does he lead it by a “yuuuuuge” margin? Bloomberg recently released a poll that gave Trump 24 percent to Ben Carson’s 20 percent. On the same day, Ipsos released a poll that put Trump at 37 percent to Carson’s 14 percent. Normally, I’d suggest you average the results and move on. But these two polls are emblematic of a deep divide this year first noted by Jonathan Robinson: The Bloomberg poll was conducted over the phone with live interviewers; the Ipsos poll was conducted online.
Dave Roberts:
This is a model with which political analysts are extremely familiar. Many still think it fits, that Trump will flame out and the establishment will rally around an alternative.
Maybe so. But Trump's dominance has gone on longer than anyone predicted, and it is making all kinds of people nervous, including the establishment media — the Sunday shows, horse race pundits, and Villagers who have become such an integral part of the Beltway political class.
Their trepidation has less to do with the fact of Trump lying than with the way he lies. They don't mind being properly lied to; it's all part of the game. What they cannot countenance is being rendered irrelevant. Trump is not kissing the ring. He barely bothers to spin the media. He does not need them, or give two shits what centrist pundits think. Their disapproval only strengthens him. Media gatekeepers are in danger of being exposed as impotent bystanders. …
The [GOP base] anger is understandable, even justifiable in many ways, but unfortunately it also involves believing lots of nonsense. And no amount of understanding and empathy can make Jade Helm anything but, factually speaking, nonsense.
Thus the dilemma. The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee. But what they confront now is aggressive, unapologetic nonsense, piped up from a nationalist, ethnocentric, revanchist conservative base through the mouth of one Donald J. Trump. He is forcing them to choose sides, to accept his bare assertions and make a mockery of their purported allegiance to accuracy ... or to call him out and, in the eyes of his supporters, formally align against him.
The conceptual space for neutrality has all but disappeared. Media outlets are being forced to take sides, and facing the grim possibility that even if they do, they have no power to affect the outcome. Their twin idols — objectivity and influence — are being exposed as illusions. That's what has them so anxious about Donald Trump.
As a blogger, there is no such dilemma (Trump is a lying fascist. See, was that hard?)
I half expect media to call for a blogger ethics conference to resolve the issue.
But some in media will still try. Here’s Dana Milbank:
Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.
Some will think this an outrageous label to apply to the frontrunner for a major party’s presidential nomination. Ordinarily, I would agree that name-calling is part of what’s wrong with our politics.
But there is a greater imperative not to be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and now the disabled. His pattern brings to mind the famous words of Martin Neimoller, the pastor and concentration camp survivor (“First they came for the socialists…”) that Ohio Gov. John Kasich adroitly used in a video last week attacking Trump’s hateful broadsides.
Josh Marshall:
I don't say this lightly or often. But this is one of the most important studies in years in terms of understanding the current state of American politics and society. The study is the work of two Princeton University scholars, Ann Case and Angus Deaton, who analyzed vast quantities of federal government data about mortality rates across age cohorts, racial and ethnic groups and genders. They made a startling discovery. As you would expect, every age and ethnic/racial grouping has continued to see a steady reduction of morbidity (disease) and increase in lifespans for decades. But there's one major exception: middle aged (45-54) white people. Since roughly 1998, disease and death rates for middle aged white men and women has begun to rise. …
Let's put this clearly: the stressor at work here is the perceived and real loss of the social and economic advantages of being white.
With this predicate in place, the role of education seems clear. As noted with 'relative decline', all things are indeed relative. We are also living in an era of stagnant or declining incomes for most Americans. That hits those with the lowest education levels the hardest. The declining importance of being white is simply not as big a thing if you're a professional with an advanced and a solid income than if you're someone with a high school education who was laid off from what you thought would be your career for life in your mid-forties.
This gets to why I think this study is such a critical contribution to our understanding of contemporary American politics. Several weeks ago I had lunch with a prominent US journalist who I'd been acquainted with for some time via email and social media but never met in person. In our conversation, this colleague spoke about the irreducible role of anger in the GOP presidential primaries and in the GOP Congress. As many have discussed, we're now at the point where overthrowing leaders or shutting down the government isn't simply a tool ready (perhaps too ready) at hand to achieve this or that policy goal. Rather it's the desire to shut the government down and overthrow leaders that now appears to be the real goal and drive. Deciding whether it's over the budget or Obamacare or Planned Parenthood or Syrian refugees is a secondary matter. Beneath the often febrile and sometimes race-tinged Republican talk about Obama "radically tranforming" America, or being a socialist whose erasing American 'exceptionalism' or various other regular themes on Fox News, one fairly straightforward, clear message is almost always discernible: The country people know, their country, is being taken away from them. We have grown accustomed to seeing a large segment of the body politic ready, indeed almost relishing the opportunity to break the state if it cannot control it.
So where does that anger, that combination of anger and loss come from? I'd say right here in the statistics we're talking about.
Paul Waldman:
Nowhere else among the world’s major nations (and maybe the minor nations, too, though I don’t claim to be familiar with all 200 of them) is there a political party representing half the electorate which is adamantly opposed to doing anything to address climate change. So congratulations, Republicans: you have made America truly exceptional.
It’s important to note, however, that there is diversity of opinion within the GOP on this issue — to a point. At one end you have the denialists, who believe that climate change is not occurring at all. The people who believe this also tend to believe that the fact that it still snows in the winter constitutes proof that climate change isn’t happening, which shows the intellectual rigor they bring to this question. This group includes not only the notorious Sen. James Inhofe and a gaggle of less prominent congressional knuckleheads, but also presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee.
At the other end you have a few lonely Republican voices saying that climate change is a real problem that we should do something to address. Included in their number are two of the presidential candidates, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki. But the broad majority of the party’s elected officials fall into what we might call the uncertainty caucus. When you ask them whether climate change is happening, they say, “Maybe, sure, who knows?” Is it caused by human activity? “It’s possible, could be, how can we say for sure?” What should government do about it? “Absolutely nothing.” So while they might not sound as deranged as the denialists, their policy prescription is the same.
George Condon, Jr.
What Obama Will Leave Behind
In Paris, the president tries to project confidence. But he knows the biggest challenges of our age—terrorism and climate change—won’t be solved before his successor takes office.
Kurt Eichenwald:
They are convinced the world is reaching End Times, the apocalypse foretold in Scripture. They believe Jesus the Messiah will then return to join the faithful in a battle against the antichrist. The glorious confrontation will be won, with Jesus and his followers reigning supreme after the defeat of evil.
And who are these believers? No, not evangelical Christians—they’re the members of ISIS.
If that’s surprising, it reflects the general lack of understanding about this group. That Jesus will return in humanity’s last days is a tenet of fundamentalist Islam and is a driving force behind some of ISIS’s decisions. Unfortunately, many Americans have fallen prey to the idea that studying the enemy is a sign of placation or weakness. Too many people—led by disingenuous or ignorant politicians—take pride in their refusal to make the militarily essential decision to learn about the extremists.
Eric Roston:
The American public has turned away from outright denial of climate change. Sixty-three percent of adults describe the problem as "serious" in the latest opinion poll from the Washington Post and ABC News, a dip from the 69 percent who held that view in June. The minority who remain skeptical of climate science—a group that includes presidential hopefuls and powerful lawmakers—can count on a dedicated network of several thousand professional supporters.
New research for the first time has put a precise count on the people and groups working to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S., according to a paper published today in Nature Climate Change. ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics. As a two-week United Nations climate summit begins today in Paris, it's striking to notice that a similarly vast infrastructure of denial isn't found in any other nation.
Ed Kilgore:
As we wait to learn more about the background and motivation of Robert Dear, the alleged murderer of three people at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado, anti-choice activists and pols are rushing to distance themselves from the terrible act. Senator Ted Cruz has ingeniously (if not very credibly) sought to place Dear in the camp of the hated liberal enemy. But, by and large, right-to-life leaders are relying on a ritualized tradition of deploring violence they developed and refined during the 1980s and 1990s, when terrorism against abortion facilities and providers was a relatively frequent phenomenon.
It is not, accordingly, fair or accurate to suggest that the palpable desire of American conservatives to re-criminalize abortion, or their recent demonizing of Planned Parenthood, “inspired” actions like Dear’s, even if it becomes apparent he was sane and politically motivated. Conservative opinion-leaders should, however, be held accountable for two persistent strains of extremist rhetoric that provide a theoretical basis for violence against abortion providers specifically and enemies of “traditional values” generally.