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: Republicans Couldn’t Care Less About the Unemployed

Their cruelty and ignorance are creating another gratuitous disaster.

In case you haven’t noticed, the coronavirus is still very much with us. Around a thousand Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, 10 times the rate in the European Union. Thanks to our failure to control the pandemic, we’re still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment; a brief recovery driven by premature attempts to resume business as usual appears to have petered out as states pause or reverse their opening.

Yet enhanced unemployment benefits, a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, have expired. And negotiations over how — or even whether — to restore aid appear to be stalled.

You sometimes see headlines describing this crisis as a result of “congressional dysfunction.” Such headlines reveal a severe case of bothsidesism — the almost pathological aversion of some in the media to placing blame where it belongs.

For House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess two and a half months ago. The Trump administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn’t even focus on the issue until days before the benefits ended. And even now they’re refusing to offer anything that might significantly alleviate workers’ plight.

This is an astonishing failure of governance, right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself. But what explains it?

Well, I’m of two minds. Was it ignorant malevolence, or malevolent ignorance?

George T. Conway III: Trump’s name should live in infamy

If there’s one thing we know about President Trump, it’s that he lies and he cheats. Endlessly. And shamelessly. But still, mostly, incompetently.

So it should have come as no surprise that Trump finally went where no U.S. president had ever gone before. In a tweet last week, he actually suggested that the country “Delay the Election.”

That trial balloon was a brazen effort to see if he can defraud his way into four more years in the White House. And why not try? After all, Trump has managed to swindle his way through life, on matters large and small, essential and trivial. [..]

Trump’s sanction must come at the polls, and beyond. For the sake of our constitutional republic, he must lose, and lose badly. Yet that should be just a start: We should only honor former presidents who uphold and sustain our nation’s enduring democratic values. There should be no schools, bridges or statues devoted to Trump. His name should live in infamy, and he should be remembered, if at all, for precisely what he was — not a president, but a blundering cheat.

Michelle Cottle: Disenchanted Seniors for Biden

The pandemic is particularly dangerous for older Americans, and Trump is losing their support.

The ad opens with amateur footage of an older, white-haired woman, smiling and chatting with the toddler snuggled in her lap. In a voice-over, a younger woman reminisces about how her grandmother’s home had always been “the safe place.”

Then came the coronavirus. [..]

In recent decades, older voters have tilted conservative. “No Democrat has won or broken even with seniors in two decades, since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much of his general-election campaign to warning that Republicans would cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare,” The Times recently noted.

This was certainly the case in 2016, when Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points among voters 65 and up, according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Along with his xenophobic scaremongering and culture-war revanchism, the Donald Trump of 2016 explicitly promised older voters that he would protect Social Security and Medicare. He assured them that he had their backs.

Four years on, many seniors aren’t feeling all that reassured and are wondering if maybe the president has turned his back on them. A growing pile of polls show this crucial cohort slipping from his grasp.

Charles M. Blow: Trump Forecasts His Own Fraud

In the president’s world, he is never to blame for failure.

This election is in danger of being stolen. By Donald Trump.

Trump is a win-at-all-costs kind of operator. For him, the rules are like rubber, not fixed but bendable. All structures — laws, conventions, norms — exist for others, those not slick and sly enough to evade them, those not craven enough to break them.

Trump is showing anyone who is willing to see it, in every way possible, that he is willing to do anything to win re-election, and will cry foul if he doesn’t, a scenario that could cause an unprecedented national crisis. [..]

In Trump’s world, he is never to blame for failure. He is the best, the greatest ever, like no one has ever seen before. He doesn’t fail. In reality, his life is chock-full of failure.

At the same time Trump is attacking voting by mail, he is undermining the mechanism by which it would be done: the United States Postal Service. This is fueling concerns by many that the Postal Service is being damaged precisely because of Trump opposition to mail-in voting.

Elizabeth Drew: Let’s Scrap the Presidential Debates

They’ve become unrevealing quip contests.

Nervous managers of the scheduled 2020 presidential debates are shuffling the logistics and locations to deal with the threat of the coronavirus. But here’s a better idea: Scrap them altogether. And not for health reasons.

The debates have never made sense as a test for presidential leadership. In fact, one could argue that they reward precisely the opposite of what we want in a president. When we were serious about the presidency, we wanted intelligence, thoughtfulness, knowledge, empathy and, to be sure, likability. It should also go without saying, dignity.

Yet the debates play an outsize role in campaigns and weigh more heavily on the verdict than their true value deserves. [..]

The better way to pay attention to and choose among the presidential candidates is to follow the long campaign that so many complain about. The reason for such moaning has always been a mystery, because unless the campaign is taking place in your living room, you can simply switch it off.

The key words are “pay attention to,” because over the stretch of 2015-2016 it wasn’t impossible to see the implications of a Trump presidency. Not just the vulgarity but the ignorance and insensitivity and extreme narcissism were apparent more than a year before Election Day.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump is getting truly desperate — and that means he’s increasingly dangerous

Maybe Trump can’t successfully steal the election — but he’ll do as much damage as possible on his way out the door

One of the first things that activists and educators who work to stop domestic violence learn is this: The most dangerous time for the victim is when she tries to leave the abusive relationship. The abuser, desperate to keep his power and control over the victim, will drastically escalate the threats and violence if he senses that she’s looking for an escape route. If she does get out, the abuser will often track her down and try to force her to return through violence. This is why advocates for victims emphasize the importance of careful planning to escape an abusive relationship, since abusers rarely just let a victim walk away.

The parallels between the situation of many abuse victims and the nation’s dilemma when it comes to removing Donald Trump from power have not been lost on feminists. As sex educator Twanna Hines noted on Twitter on Friday, Trump “knows his time is up.” She predicted that he will lash out the way that abusers do “when the relationship is ending.” [..]

But even though we’re likely to see a situation where former Vice President Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021, that doesn’t mean we’re in anything like a position to relax. Like the abusive husband who would rather see his wife injured or dead than let her move out in peace, Trump will, as Election Day nears, increasingly turn to schemes to keep power that will pose real threats — not just to our democracy, but to the immediate safety and well-being of Americans.

Even if Trump is successfully removed from office, the amount of damage he could well do to punish the American people for rejecting him is, frankly, terrifying.

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

Alexander Vindman: Coming forward ended my career. I still believe doing what’s right matters.

After 21 years, six months and 10 days of active military service, I am now a civilian. I made the difficult decision to retire because a campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation by President Trump and his allies forever limited the progression of my military career.

This experience has been painful, but I am not alone in this ignominious fate. The circumstances of my departure might have been more public, yet they are little different from those of dozens of other lifelong public servants who have left this administration with their integrity intact but their careers irreparably harmed.

A year ago, having served the nation in uniform in positions of critical importance, I was on the cusp of a career-topping promotion to colonel. A year ago, unknown to me, my concerns over the president’s conduct and the president’s efforts to undermine the very foundations of our democracy were precipitating tremors that would ultimately shake loose the facade of good governance and publicly expose the corruption of the Trump administration.

Eric Boehlert: Hillary Clinton Was Right About The Deplorables: Pandemic Edition

The press crucified her, but she was right, as usual.

Looking back, “Clinton’s comments about Trump’s human deplorables were overly generous,” Salon’s Chauncey DeVega noted in January. “Trump’s reign has encouraged a wave of lethal hate crimes and other violence against nonwhites, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians. Trump’s foot soldiers have engaged in acts of political violence and terrorism against Democrats and others deemed to be the “enemy.””

And then came the pandemic.

With the GOP’s Southern strategy of aggressively reopening red states now proving to be public disaster as daily confirmed Covid-19 cases skyrocket into the tens of thousands in states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, Trump supporters have shifted from gloating about beating the virus, to refusing to help combat it. Staging public tempter tantrums over wearing masks, Trump’s deplorables are keeping America down and wrecking the economy in the process.“ [..]

The American right wing has created the most politicized and partisan pandemic the world has ever seen. And that’s deplorable.

Paul Rosenberg: On the de-Trumpification of America: It definitely won’t be easy, but it must be done

Defeating Donald Trump might be the easy part. Uprooting the toxic movement he represents could take decades

Despite the deep hole he’s in, Donald Trump could still win re-election, as we are constantly reminded. If he loses, some observers warn, there could be considerable trouble, even violent resistance. But perhaps the biggest problem facing us in the medium-to-long term is what happens if Trump loses. In particular, what do we do to undo Trumpism? Not just to counter the destruction Trump has wrought, but the decades-long preconditions that made his election possible, if not almost inevitable.

This question was raised recently by Foreign Policy in Focus editor John Feffer, whose 2017 book, “Aftershock: A Journey Into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams” I reviewed here. That book was deeply steeped in the difficult challenges of rebuilding democratic culture and, unsurprisingly, Feffer’s recent column cited several historical signposts to illuminate the challenge we face — the end of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. All those efforts to rebuild were “flawed in various ways” he wrote — the first and last most dramatically. But learning from them “might help us avoid repeating the mistakes of history.”

Robert Reich: The painful truth about Covid and the economy – Trump is to blame

Lies about the economy are as dangerous as lies about the virus. Thanks to the Republicans, millions are about to be hurt

“The recovery has been very strong,” Donald Trump said on Monday. Then the commerce department reported the US economy contracted between April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out five years of economic growth.

But pesky facts have never stopped Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.

The comeback “won’t take very long”, he reassured Americans on Thursday. But every indicator shows that after a small uptick in June, the US economy is tanking again. Restaurant reservations are down, traffic at retail stores is dwindling, more small businesses are closing, the small rebound in air travel is reversing.

What’s Trump’s plan to revive the economy? The same one he’s been pushing for months: just “reopen” it. [..]

Lies about the economy are harder to spot than lies about the coronavirus because the virus’s grim death count is painfully apparent while the economy is complicated. But Trump’s economic lies are no less egregious, and they’re about to cause a great deal of unnecessary suffering.

Trump and Senate Republicans may not like it, but that’s the painful truth.

Bryce Covert: Biden’s Quietly Radical Care Plan

The candidate is talking about child care and elder care in the same breath, and making them part of his economic package. Both changes are long overdue.

Joe Biden’s recent policy proposal to address the country’s crisis of care didn’t garner major headlines. There were no haphazardly capitalized Trump tweets in response, nor congressional Republicans denouncing it as socialism. But make no mistake: His plan is quietly radical in both its comprehensiveness and its framing.

Mr. Biden’s plan incorporates a lot of ideas that are not his own. His pledge to give all 3- and 4-year-olds access to preschool? President Barack Obama initiated an effort to ensure universal preschool in 2013. His promise to help parents afford child care? It piggybacks on Senator Patty Murray and Representative Bobby Scott’s Child Care for Working Families Act. His argument that caregivers deserve better pay and more rights? To get there, he says he’d sign the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights bill put forward by Senator Kamala Harris and Representative Pramila Jayapal in 2018.

But by bringing all of these pieces together in one place and by talking about them in the same breath with his other economic policies, he is pushing this conversation into new territory. No longer is the struggle to care for our families while earning a living something relegated to kitchen tables and curtained-off hospital beds. These challenges affect all of us, rippling throughout the entire economy. And Mr. Biden is the first presidential candidate to drag them out of the shadows and into the public conversation in such a sweeping way.

Reverend William Barber and Bernice King: Removing monuments is the easy part. We must make America a real democracy

Flags and statues may fall, but the real struggle is for genuine voting rights, equal healthcare and truly integrated schools

One hundred and fifty-five years after Confederate troops surrendered at Appomattox and Bennett Place, their battle flag has finally come down in Mississippi and their statues are retreating from courthouse squares and university quads. As the children of generations of Black southerners who fought against the lies of the Lost Cause, we celebrate this most recent surrender and look forward to walking down streets that are not shadowed by monuments to men who claimed to own our ancestors. But we cannot understand why these monuments lasted so long without challenging the inequities they were erected to justify. In fact, many who support flags and statues coming down today also advocate voter suppression, attack healthcare and re-segregate our schools. We must attend to both the systems of injustice and the monuments that have justified them if we are to realize “liberty and justice for all”. [..]

In this moment when millions of Americans are suffering from a triple crisis of poverty, Covid-19 and police brutality, we need more than a conversation about monuments. We need concrete action to address the incredible disparities in death rates among Black, brown and poor people. This pivotal moment for our nation and our world is beckoning us to dismantle injustice and rebuild with love as the foundation. We can build a more just, humane, equitable and peaceful world. But, as King so prophetically admonished us: “The hour is late. And the clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now before it is too late.” We must act now, America.