Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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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Kara Swisher: Tom Cotton’s Whitewashing
A news organization is not a public square any more than Facebook or Twitter is.
If your drunken self should agree with your sober self, should your online personality agree with your analog personality?
Not if you’re Tom Cotton. The Republican senator from Arkansas managed last week to pull off what I thought was pretty hard in these twitchy digital times: Forget about Dr. Jekyll; he showed us both a Mr. Hyde and a marginally less fiendish version of Mr. Hyde.
The latter persona was on display last week in The New York Times Opinion section, where Mr. Cotton tried to cast himself — in an essay jaw-droppingly titled “Send In the Troops” — as your basic law-and-order type. Certainly not all protesters were lawless, he wrote, but the military should be brought in for those who were, since the country, according to him, was on fire.
As it turned out, anarchy was not loosed upon the world. It’s mostly been just peaceful people protesting police brutality aimed at African-Americans, making Mr. Cotton’s suggestion of siccing U.S. troops on them look itchy-trigger-fingery in hindsight. Since Mr. Cotton launched his essay like a metaphorical tear-gas canister into a tense national crisis, you can certainly argue about the shamelessness of it — it was shameless and also shameful — and whether he should have been given such a prime platform to air his views. (I don’t run anything but my mouth at The Times, but I would not have given him this opportunity, largely because the article was meant to shock and scare, and not to illuminate a difference of opinion.)
Joshua A. Geltzer and Dahlia Lithwick : Donald Trump’s Increasingly Elaborate Bid to Create His Own America
The lies and the degradation of reporting have been constant, but as we head toward the election, something more sinister is afoot.
On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump, whose unsurprising character defects still never fail to surprise, tweeted a Russian-sourced conspiracy theory claiming that the 75-year-old peace activist who remains hospitalized after his head was smashed open by Buffalo, New York, law enforcement officers was in fact a tech-savvy “ANTIFA provocateur” who “fell harder than was pushed.” The president also linked to a report from a conservative cable news outlet, One America News Network, for support. That report claimed, with no supporting evidence, that the man “was attempting to capture the radio communications signature of Buffalo police officers.”
The problem for Trump—but actually the problem for all the rest of us—is that we all saw the video. We all saw a peaceful 75-year-old approach the Buffalo police officers, who then push him to the pavement and walk past his bleeding body. In fact, the existence and wide circulation of that video are what forced the Buffalo Police Department, which originally claimed that a person “was injured when he tripped & fell” during a “skirmish involving protestors,” to suspend the two officers. The existence of the video, for all intents and purposes, closed the case, at least in the court of most sentient public opinion. [..]
When authoritarians construct their own unreality, they try to stop actual reality from intruding. Trump’s now trying that, too. Recall that the Trump campaign has been suing news organizations for publishing op-eds the campaign finds too critical of Trump—despite the statements targeted in those op-eds actually being true—for a while now. On Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign went further. It sent a cease-and-desist letter to CNN demanding that the network retract and apologize for a poll that CNN aired, showing Trump trailing Joe Biden badly in the polls. Never mind that CNN’s poll was quite similar to polling from other leading media platforms and universities. Never mind that the Trump campaign failed to identify what made CNN’s purportedly defective. Never mind any of that. As Trump increasingly concocts his own unreality, he seeks to banish the unwanted intrusion of actual reality. He also sends the message that none of us can trust ourselves to make judgments; his word is reality, instead.
Michael Tomasy: Why Does Trump Lie?
He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that exist to keec presidents in check.
The lies and obfuscations pile up. No, it wasn’t tear gas used to clear Lafayette Park for President Trump’s Bible-waving photo-op last Monday night, Attorney General William Barr said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Rather it was “pepper balls,” he said. “Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It’s not chemical.” Wrong, according to The Washington Post; pepper balls are very much a chemical irritant. The paper awarded the nation’s top law enforcement officer four Pinocchios for his claim.
The president himself keeps at it, too. On the morning of June 4, he tweeted: “[Robert] Mueller should have never been appointed, although he did prove that I must be the most honest man in America!”
As of May 29, the most honest man in America had uttered 19,127 false or misleading claims in his 1,226 days in office, according to Glenn Kessler of The Post, who has been tracking them since Day 1. That’s 15.6 falsehoods a day, or roughly one per waking hour, every hour, every day. That puts him on track to hit 20,000 lies by Wednesday, July 29; by Nov. 3, at this pace, he’ll be north of 22,000 — but of course that period will constitute the heat of the campaign, when the frequency seems likely to increase.
All right, some still say; Yes, Mr. Trump is worse than normal, but they all lie. What’s the big deal, really?
Here’s the big deal. Mr. Trump’s lies are different. Not just in quantity, but also in quality. He lies for a different purpose than every other president — yes, even, I would argue, Richard Nixon, the biggest presidential prevaricator until Mr. Trump came along. [..[
So, far from respecting the institutions enough to sneak around them or appear to conform with their rules, he is perfectly happy to destroy those institutions that might expose him (the press, Congress, the courts, the inspectors general). He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that check him, so he has no urge to hide anything. And of course — maybe the most frightening part of all — he has not a moment’s concern for what endures after he’s gone.
So this is what makes his lies worse. They threaten the foundations of the republic in a way that even Mr. Nixon’s did not. And they will only get worse. If we’ve learned one thing about the president, it’s certainly this: It will always get worse. It’s mortifying enough to imagine the damage he can do in the next five months, let alone the following four years if he’s re-elected.
Paul Waldman: Why Donald Trump is standing up for the Confederacy
In the midst of a pandemic, an unprecedented economic crisis and a national reckoning with racist police practices, the president of the United States is planting his flag in the ground and proclaiming that he will not be moved.
Unfortunately, it’s the flag of the Confederacy.
President Trump always knows a good culture-war flash point when he sees one, and as the protests over police brutality have led to a new effort to remove racist symbols from public places and government installations, Trump has decided this is the fight he’s looking for. [..]
An important part of this equation is that the media outlets Trump relies on, particularly Fox News and conservative talk radio, love arguments about cultural symbols. They’re fueled by anger, their audiences are old and white, and “This country is going to hell because of the liberals, the young people and the minorities” is such a foundational theme that it might as well be cast in 20-foot-high bronze letters atop their headquarters.
Which means that Trump will tune in for his daily multi-hour sessions watching Fox and be told that he’s on exactly the right track, persuading him to keep it up even as smarter Republican politicians would prefer to talk about something else. They realize that while a core of their constituency might want to hold on to the Confederacy, it’s not where the GOP needs to go if it wants to be competitive in the future.
But Trump won’t listen to those saner voices. Much like the neo-Confederates themselves, he’s fighting a war that has already been lost.
Charles M. Blow: The Civil Rights Act of 2020
Feel-good gestures from politicians and the police shift no power. Real change lies within a system overhaul.
There are images of police officers joining protesters in dancing the Cupid shuffle, taking knees and hugging little girls.
There have been images of members of Congress donning kente cloth stoles, Joe Biden taking a knee and Mitt Romney marching with protesters.
There have been images of a rainbow of races and ethnicities marching through streets with Black Lives Matter posters held high, of them kneeling in moments of silence, of defaced and beheaded statues.
All of these are feel-good gestures that cost nothing and shift no power. They create no justice and provide no equity.
The Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate are pondering separate legislative reactions. It is not yet clear if Donald Trump would agree to any of the provisions.
The Democrats’ bill predictably goes further than the Republican’s plan, but both primarily focus narrowly on police training, accountability, record keeping and punishment.
But, these bills, if they pass as conceived, would basically punish the system’s soldiers without altering the system itself. These bills would make the officers the fall guy for their bad behavior while doing little to condemn or even address the savagery and voraciousness of the system that required their service.
This country has established a system of supreme inequity, with racial inequity being a primary form, and used the police to protect the wealth that the system generated for some and to control the outrages and outbursts of those opposed to it and oppressed by it.