Comments of the Week: Here Comes Trouble

torbakhopper / CC BY-ND 2.0

As might be expected — if not applauded — the closer we come to the Nov. 8 election, the more debates and divisions have appeared in discussions about the headlines of the moment.

From Oct. 16 to 23, those headlines included additional revelations from WikiLeaks’ trove of Podesta emails regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as various Truthdig writers’ takes on how to vote this time around, and news of the ongoing Dakota Access pipeline protest.

As for the how-to-vote issue, Jonathan Mitchell posted a short and direct comment under this story about Clinton’s famous hawkishness when it comes to envisioning and enacting American foreign policy on the world stage:

Reader Helen Hanna, like many others who took in Robert Reich’s piece titled “The Incalculable Damage of Doing Whatever It Takes to Win,” remarked upon Reich’s gloss-over of Democratic Party leaders’ (and in particular Hillary and Bill Clinton’s), proclivity for doing damage in the interest of maintaining power:

That said, it’s not as though commenters were about to give Donald Trump a pass, either. Take Ignatius J. Reilly’s rejoinder to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway’s “5-point plan to defeat Islam,” as Trump and his team conceived of it (and Juan Cole wrote of it):

Touché.

Another point of contention on the comment boards last week had to do with how to evaluate WikiLeaks’, and by extension Julian Assange’s, latest release of documents in the Podesta emails. Though some commentators like Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald have spoken up about particular aspects of WikiLeaks’ current M.O., in the thread under Alexander Reed Kelly’s Truthdigger of the Week column on Assange, reader JJG noted how, like him or not, Assange and his organization are providing a public service that professionals working in the mainstream press (who are supposed to be skilled in curating and redacting sensitive material) are not generally delivering on these days:

We’ll give Opa Westphal the last word this time, ending on both an up note (in terms of the shout-out to other commenters) and a cautionary note. This one was posted under Chris Hedges’ latest column, “How Power Works”:

–Posted by Kasia Anderson