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.

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: Trump Tries to Kill Covid Relief

Is it ignorance, or is it cynicism?

The next few months will be terrible. Several thousand Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day; given the lag between cases and deaths, the daily toll will almost certainly rise through the end of this year, and if people are careless over Christmas it could surge even higher in the new year. Economic recovery has stalled, with employment still down almost 10 million from pre-pandemic levels.

The most we can hope for at this point are policies that mitigate the suffering, getting us through the horror while we wait for widespread vaccination. And a few days ago it seemed possible that we would in fact get some good news on the economic front. A bipartisan group of senators seemed close to agreement on a Covid relief bill that would fall far short of what we should be doing, but would be much better than nothing.

Then the lame-duck Trump administration intervened — destructively.

Richard A. Friedman, MD: We Must Do More to Stop Dangerous Doctors in a Pandemic

Some have crossed the line from free speech to medical practice — or something akin to malpractice.

It’s bad enough when our political leaders promote quack theories about coronavirus and its treatment; but what do we do about the doctors who enable them and use their medical authority to promote pseudoscience?

Take Scott Atlas, a former Stanford University radiologist with no training or expertise in public health or infectious disease. As President Trump’s special adviser on coronavirus, he cast doubt on the efficacy of face masks, long after science had confirmed their efficacy. He was a staunch proponent of herd immunity — a recommendation that would almost certainly have resulted in vast mortality.

And on Dec. 8, Ron Johnson, the Republican senator of Wisconsin, known for his allegiance to fringe theories, called two doctors with such beliefs to testify before his committee.

One was Ramin Oskoui, a cardiologist in Washington who said that “masks do not work” and that “social distancing doesn’t work.” In fact, there is indisputable scientific evidence that both are effective in preventing or limiting the spread of coronavirus. [..]

When doctors use the language and authority of their profession to promote false medical information, they are not simply expressing their own misguided opinions. Rather, they have crossed the line from free speech to medical practice — or, in this case, something akin to malpractice.

Amanda Marcotte: Republicans want more than a coup: Trump’s loyalty test exposes their hatred for democracy

More than half of House Republicans and 17 GOP attorneys general have outed themselves as traitors

When Texas attorney general Ken Paxton first filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court demanding that all the votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — 10.4 million votes in total — be thrown out completely, the general media response was to call it a stunt. Paxton is under investigation for an alleged bribery scheme, and observers speculated that, by filing this ridiculous lawsuit, he is trawling for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, whose recent pardon of his crony Michael Flynn has instilled hope among other GOP lowlifes that they can bribe Trump to do the same for them.

Yet even though this suit is widely dismissed as a joke, a slew of other elected Republicans joined the lawsuit on Thursday, lending support to Paxton’s argument that red states should be able to overturn the results of an election that didn’t end well for Republicans. So far, 17 Republican state attorneys general and 106 Republicans in the House of Representatives — more than half the GOP caucus — have signed onto amicus briefs supporting Paxton’s absurd demands that all the votes of the residents of these four states be destroyed. Six states have asked to join Paxton’s lawsuit directly. On Monday, only a couple of House Republicans — mainly Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama — were willing to openly support Trump’s efforts to steal the election. Now it’s the majority of the House GOP caucus.

In doing so, these Republicans have outed themselves as opponents of democracy. There is no other way to read this, and no wiggle room to pretend otherwise. This isn’t about “voter fraud” or any of the other bad-faith gambits that Trump and his supporters are throwing out as distractions. It’s about throwing out entire state elections because they favored a Democrat.

Jamelle Bouie: The ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny Anymore

Republicans are now seriously arguing that elections are legitimate only when their side wins.

To tell a joke to a crowd is to learn a little something about the people who laugh.

For our purposes, the “joke” is President Trump’s ongoing fight to overturn the election results and hold on to power against the wishes of most Americans, including those in enough states to equal far more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.

“#OVERTURN,” he said on Twitter this week, adding in a separate post that “If somebody cheated in the Election, which the Democrats did, why wouldn’t the Election be immediately overturned? How can a Country be run like this?”

Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for the country, he has not been able to bend reality to his desires. Key election officials and federal judges have refused his call to throw out votes, create chaos and clear a path for the autogolpe he hopes to accomplish. The military has also made clear where it stands. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech not long after the election.

But there are others who — out of partisanship, opportunism or a simple taste for mayhem — have chosen to support the president’s attack on American democracy. They refuse to acknowledge the president’s defeat, back lawsuits to throw out the results, and spread lies about voter fraud and election malfeasance to Republican voters. They are laughing at Trump’s joke, not realizing (or not caring) that their laughter is infectious.

Michelle Goldberg: Covid Meds Are Scarce, but Not for Trump Cronies

Rudy Giuliani got monoclonal antibodies. You probably can’t.

According to a document from the Department of Health and Human Services, a total of 108 doses of Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail have been allocated to Washington, which had 265 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday alone. Somehow Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, got one of those doses. In an interview with a New York radio station on Tuesday, Giuliani did us all the favor of explaining why he qualified for privileged treatment. [..]

In October, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and an informal adviser to the president, got a different monoclonal antibody treatment, one produced by Eli Lilly. Housing Secretary Ben Carson wrote on Facebook that Trump “cleared” him to receive monoclonal antibody therapy when he was hospitalized with Covid-19 last month.

Some of these men received their treatments before they were available to the public. Giuliani may have got his instead of a member of the public. His case sheds light on two kinds of corruption. There’s the corruption of an administration that appears to be using government power to procure potentially lifesaving favors for the president’s friends. And there’s the corruption of a for-profit medical system in which V.I.P. patients can receive extraordinary levels of care, sometimes at the expense of the less connected.

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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Eugene Robinson: Trump is causing a crisis of faith in our democracy

We need to believe in our elections or the nation will pay a terrible price.

Democracy requires faith. President Trump and his unscrupulous enablers — including most Republican elected officials — are cynically destroying that faith for millions of Americans, and I fear the nation will pay a terrible price.

I’m talking to you, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and most of your caucus. I’m talking to you, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and the great majority of your colleagues. Motivated by a combination of cowardice and ambition, you are refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden’s election as president and, in the process, doing grievous harm to the country and the Constitution you swore an oath to serve. Shame on you all.

This is a moment when attention should be focused on the emerging contours of President-elect Biden’s White House and Cabinet. Instead, the new administration is too often competing for attention with Trump’s histrionic and nonsensical claims about the election somehow having been stolen from him — wild and self-contradictory allegations that are, in every sense of the word, insane.

George T. Conway III: Trump’s last-ditch effort to steal the election is the biggest farce of all

The state of Texas is asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise voters in other states.

“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” tweeted the soon-to-be-ex-president of the United States. A filing at the Supreme Court soon followed.

President Trump needs an intervention these days all right — but not of the kind he was talking about. And it’s he who desperately needs a victory, not the country.

That’s because Trump and his allies have lost just about every lawsuit they’ve brought to try to keep him in office. By one Democratic election lawyer’s count, they have just one win and 55 losses to show for their efforts (a ratio that would be even more lopsided if he counted multiple losses in each case). Adding insult to injury, the Trumpistas’ solitary victory was a piddling, technical one that affected just a tiny number of ballots, nowhere near enough to change the result. Sad! [..]

They’ve already lost a case in the U.S. Supreme Court — and are about to lose there again, very, very soon.

It’s hard to imagine that any alliance of litigants and lawyers has ever lost more cases for more reasons — and in less time — than this sorry bunch has.

Their problem is they have nothing to sue about, and never did. The words of a Trump-appointed member of the federal appeals court in Philadelphia pretty much sum things up: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Paul Waldman: Why Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx met different fates

If you worked for Trump and didn’t wind up in a fight with him, you may have damaged yourself too much to get another administration job.

If you’re looking for an excellent case study in the trickiness of transitioning from one administration to another — particularly when one is President Trump’s — look no further than the differing fortunes of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.

It’s easy to see why both these experienced public health experts would have put aside their feelings about Trump to join his coronavirus task force. We were facing a terrifying pandemic, and like it or not, this president was going to be in charge of it. Better to influence him to move in a sane direction, they surely decided, especially if you had the experience and knowledge to do so effectively, than to refuse. [..]

Fauci was rewarded with an offer from President-elect Joe Biden to be his chief medical adviser and a member of his covid-19 response team (in addition to retaining his old position as head of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases).

Birx, on the other hand, succeeded in maintaining a relationship with Trump, and you could argue (as she surely would) that she was able to do more good from there, even if it meant every now and again trying gingerly to explain it away when Trump promoted unreliable treatments or suggested injecting bleach.

Amanda Marcotte: A new civil war? It’s here: The right’s grievance politics is killing thousands every day

Right-wingers express their hatred by waving guns around, but spreading the virus was a much deadlier assault

On Wednesday, the United States set a devastating new record in the coronavirus pandemic: 3,124 people dead in one day. This was the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded 3,000, but it’s the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded a dark benchmark that so many people have invoked, over and over again, since the beginning of the pandemic: It’s more people lost in one day to COVID-19 than were lost in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

There’s been criticism from various corners of those who make this comparison, but it’s understandable why it comes so readily to mind. The startling juxtaposition is meant to jar people out of the tendency to let all those COVID-19 deaths become a faceless statistic. The idea is to get people to take the virus seriously, since it’s far more likely to kill you than a random attack by terrorists.

But there’s a political side to this, as well: Liberals or leftists who draw this comparison are trying to draw attention to conservative hypocrisy. The Republicans who are pooh-poohing mask-wearing and social distancing are the very same Republicans whose panicked and partisan overreaction to 9/11 led us into two disastrous wars. If the deaths of 2,977 people in one day from a terrorist attack was so world-changing , why do conservatives refuse to treat the death toll of this pandemic seriously? As difficult as this is to process, the coronavirus has killed nearly 100 times as many people as died on 9/11.

The answer, unfortunately, is because of the American culture war, which is getting uglier and more uncontrollable all the time. While the right used to mock “identity politics,” the tribal sense of identity among conservatives seems to trump all other considerations these days. Displaying such tribal loyalty by attacking and antagonizing liberals matters more to many conservatives than their own health and safety. That’s doubly true in the face of a disease that is disproportionately affecting poorer people and people of color, allowing white conservatives to imagine that their “tribe” is not being hurt by the pandemic.

Alan D. Blotcky and Seth D. Norrholm: Forty-one days of pure hell: How do we survive the end of the Trump presidency?

Alan D. Blotcky, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Alabama and Seth D. Norrholm is an associate professor of psychiatry in the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

Donald Trump cannot handle the emotions called up by his defeat. His narcissistic response is painful and dangerous

Donald Trump has 41 days to go before his presidency is over. Instead of assisting with the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden, he has chosen to spend his final days exhibiting his psychiatric disorder. His rhetoric and his behavior are manifestations of his pathology. He shows every day that he has no self-control, no insight and no capacity to function effectively at his job.

Trump lost the election fair and square. But he cannot handle the defeat because his narcissistic injury has triggered outrage, hostility, accusations and victimhood. Despite his loud proclamations of a rigged election, there is absolutely no evidence of it. Trump has been rejected by a majority of the American people, and now he is an angry, miserable and destructive loser.

Trump is not capable of experiencing true depression. His psyche is not equipped for such a normal response. Rather, he responds to loss or disappointment by becoming enraged and accusatory. He feels and acts as if he were a victim. Trump’s response is primitive and pathological. It is pathognomonic of personality pathology. It is entirely outside the realm of normalcy. It is dangerous.

Trump’s “alternative universe” is being threatened by the reality of his election loss. He is desperate to maintain the persona of being smart, superior, strong and almighty. This is his “false self,” a fantasy created to cover up the truth: that he is not very smart, that he is lazy, that he is disinterested, that he is not as rich as he claims, that he does not care about people, that he is corrupt and that he is cruel. That is Trump’s “true self.” He has spent his entire life spinning a fake web of grandiosity and superiority with enablers along the way to keep the ruse alive. As president, he has convinced millions that his false persona is more true than observable reality. That, my friends, is a skilled con man, an accomplished grifter, an unabashed criminal.