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

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s fascist crackdown is a political stunt — Democrats should impeach him again

Trump is injuring and terrorizing Americans to create campaign ads — maybe another impeachment can stop him

For the past week or more, many folks in media and politics, including those of us at Salon, have been accusing Donald Trump of sending federal police into Portland, Oregon — and now a bit further north in Seattle — almost entirely to stoke violence that he thinks will help him win re-election. Not that such speculation was a big reach, of course. It was plainly obvious that politics, not any real concern about “law and order,” was driving Trump’s decision.

For one thing, while protests against police brutality have been ongoing in those cities since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, they were largely winding down — until Trump’s goons showed up and started snatching people without cause, beating protesters and tear-gassing peaceful crowds. For another thing, local and state politicians in Oregon have pleaded with Trump and his minions — especially acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf — to pull out the federal police, who are geared up to look like an invading army. Oregon’s attorney general has filed suit against the federal government over this abuse of power, although a federal judge denied her request for a restraining order. Third, if Trump actually gave a crap about protecting Americans, he would be focused on fighting the coronavirus, not a bunch of young people setting off fireworks and spray-painting buildings.

But now White House aides have come right out and admitted that the reason Trump is waging war on American cities and terrorizing peaceful protesters is because he thinks it will look awesome in his campaign ads.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Why Biden may follow through on a bolder agenda

With Joe Biden’s polling lead growing, more attention is being paid to what he might do as president. The signals have been contradictory to say the least. After positioning himself as a resolute moderate to win delegates for the nomination, he announced that this was “a real inflection in American history” not unlike “what Roosevelt [faced].” When the six task forces he set up with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hammered out a party platform, Sanders announced that “the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR.” But as the New York Times’s Michelle Cottle pointed out, Biden’s closest advisers are veteran Democratic Party operatives from the Clinton and Obama eras, not known for original, much less radical, thinking. So, the question remains — what will Biden do?

The Sanders-Biden working groups’ recommendations, which will largely define the official 2020 Democratic Party Platform, are certainly bolder than anything Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ran on. Even as Biden has consistently rejected some of Sanders’s signature issues — Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, etc. — he’s now backing a relatively far-reaching series of reforms.

Fred Kaplan: Don’t Pick a Cold War You Can’t Win

Trump and Pompeo are ratcheting up tensions with China, but have no way to back up their threats.

If you have any doubt that the Trump administration has embarked on a Cold War policy against China every bit as hostile as the U.S. stance toward the Soviet Union at the height of that showdown, check out Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Thursday speech at the Richard Nixon Library.

Redolent of the sort of speeches that Nixon himself gave in the 1950s (during his red-hunting days, before the opening to Beijing), it calls for ending engagement with China, rolling back its fledgling empire, and rallying the Chinese people to overthrow their regime.

Combined with other recent speeches by Trump officials and a number of actions by Trump himself, it amounts to a cry for war. But it is a senseless cry—implausible, infeasible, and heedless of the damage that further escalation will inflict on our own country and its allies.

Portions of Pompeo’s speech, detailing the rising dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party, are spot on. Under Xi Jinping’s rule, the CCP has steadily taken control of every national institution, suppressed dissent, imprisoned a million Uighur Muslims, militarized the South China Sea beyond its internationally recognized borders, exploited trade arrangements, stolen intellectual property, and infiltrated the West with industrial spies.

But what should we do about this? Pompeo says there’s nothing to do except cut China off. Engagement with China, sought by every president beginning with Nixon, has been a “failure,” he says. The CCP hasn’t changed its stripes since the days of Mao Zedong. The clash isn’t just America vs. China but freedom vs. totalitarianism. The solution is to egg on the forces of freedom—the oppressed people—inside China, and to call on other nations to do the same.

This is a fantasy, and a dangerous one, on several levels.

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: The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America

The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.

America’s response to the coronavirus has been a lose-lose proposition.

The Trump administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis insisted that there was no trade-off between economic growth and controlling the disease, and they were right — but not in the way they expected.

Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: Adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from Covid-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada. Yet the “rocket ship” recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: Job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.

So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?

On the face of it, the answer is that Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.

And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.

Eugene Robinson: Republicans’ long-term vote heist matters more than Trump’s tantrums

Don’t waste time and energy fretting over President Trump’s self-important threat not to accept a defeat in November. Worry instead that he and the Republican Party will try to steal the election through a multifaceted campaign of voter suppression.

When Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Trump earlier this month if he would commit to accepting the result of the coming vote, Trump’s answer was typically full of bluster and divorced from reality. “I have to see,” he said. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”

Those nonsensical words prompted a wave of needless angst over how the president might behave if voters give him the boot. It’s safe to assume, given what we’ve seen over the past four years, that Trump will react to losing with the emotional maturity of a bratty toddler at bedtime. But it’s also safe to assume that whatever tantrum he throws will be a meaningless sideshow.

Trump has many powers as president, but accepting or rejecting the outcome of a national election is not one of them. That responsibility falls to election officials in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They will certify the winner in their jurisdictions; the electoral college will meet and vote accordingly; and the nation will choose a president — preferably a new one. If Joe Biden wins at least 270 electoral votes, he will be sworn in by the chief justice of the Supreme Court next Jan. 20.

Trump can — and probably will — spend the intervening time fuming, fulminating, howling at the moon. He can further strain the ties that bind our fragile democracy. But if he loses, and polls predict that’s likely, then he’s outta here. Look for him on Trump TV, I guess.

The thing to watch is what Trump and his enablers do before and during the election. If there is to be an attempted heist, that’s when it will take place.

Norman Eisen: Trump wanted his Roy Cohn. In William Barr, he found his John Mitchell instead.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” That was President Trump’s famous lament after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. But in Sessions’s eventual replacement, William P. Barr, Trump may have done even better — by his standards — than Cohn, the notoriously unscrupulous defense lawyer.

As Barr prepares to testify before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time as Trump’s attorney general, he has instead come to resemble another disgraced lawyer of the past: former attorney general John Mitchell, whose misplaced loyalty to President Richard M. Nixon outweighed the duty he owed to the Justice Department and the country.

Mitchell lied incessantly about Nixon’s role in Watergate and other misconduct, no matter the consequences — which in Mitchell’s case eventually included disbarment and prison. Barr’s long series of distorted, dishonest and false statements in defense of the president may not land him in criminal jeopardy, but they are familiar steps on that same crooked path — steps that the Judiciary Committee should press Barr to explain.

They begin with Barr’s misleading declarations about the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in the interregnum before its release, including minimizing powerful evidence of obstruction of justice. A Republican-appointed federal judge ruled that Barr’s statements were “distorted” and showed a “lack of candor.”

I was preparing to serve as an impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee at the time. As I write in a new book, my colleagues and I were astonished that Barr would sacrifice his reputation to protect Trump. Yet that episode turned out to be just the start of Barr’s service in defense of the president.

Michelle Goldberg: Twilight of the Liberal Right

Conservatism always contained the seeds of authoritarianism.

Anne Applebaum’s new book, “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,” begins cinematically, with a party she threw at a Polish manor house to mark the dawn of the new millennium. [..]

In “Twilight of Democracy,” Applebaum tries to understand why so many of her old friends — conservatives who once fancied themselves champions of democracy and classical liberalism — have become paranoid right-wing populists. “Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians?” she asks. “Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades?”

To Applebaum, today’s right, in both America and Europe, “has little in common with most of the political movements that have been so described since the Second World War.” Until recently, she writes, the right was “dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and speech, economic integration, international institutions, the trans-Atlantic alliance and a political idea of ‘the West.’” What happened?

Like Applebaum, I’m astonished to see erstwhile Cold Warriors abase themselves before Vladimir Putin. But I think she’s working from a mistaken premise about what once constituted conservatism. Liberal democracy per se was never the animating passion of the trans-Atlantic right — anti-Communism was. When the threat of Communist expansion disappeared, so did most of the right’s commitment to a set of values that, it’s now evident, were purely instrumental.

Peter Beinart: The Real Reason Biden Is Ahead of Trump? He’s a Man

It’s a lot easier to run a cautious, inoffensive campaign when you’re not up against a culture of misogyny.

A narrative has formed around the presidential race: Donald Trump is losing because he’s botched the current crisis. Americans are desperate for competence and compassion. He’s offered narcissism and division — and he’s paying the political price.

For progressives, it’s a satisfying story line, in which Americans finally see Mr. Trump for the inept charlatan he truly is. But it’s at best half-true. The administration’s mismanagement of the coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter protests only partially explain why the president is trailing badly in the polls. There’s another, more disquieting, explanation: He is running against a man. [..]

What has changed radically over the past four years isn’t Americans’ perception of Mr. Trump. It’s their perception of his opponent. According to Real Clear Politics’s polling average, Joe Biden’s net approval rating is about -1 point. At this point in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s net approval rating was -17 points. For much of the 2016 general election, Mr. Trump faced a Democratic nominee who was also deeply unpopular. Today, he enjoys no such luck.

Why was Mrs. Clinton so much more unpopular than Mr. Biden is now? There’s good reason to believe that gender plays a key role. For starters, Mrs. Clinton wasn’t just far less popular than Mr. Biden. She was far less popular than every male Democratic nominee since at least 1992. Neither Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry nor Barack Obama faced overwhelming public disapproval throughout their general election campaigns. Hillary Clinton did.

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

Robert Reich: Trump can’t shift public attention from coronavirus to the streets of America

The president shows no leadership on public health but wants to be a strongman on law and order. Voters won’t buy it

Donald Trump has said he has “no responsibility” for the coronavirus pandemic, fobbing it off on governors and mayors whose repeated requests for federal help he’s denied. Yet he’s now sending federal troops into cities he says are controlled by the “radical left”, whose mayors and governors don’t want them there

The president wants to shift public attention from the virus, which he can’t “dominate”, to the streets of America, which he and his secret police can.

It’s an especially cynical re-election strategy because coronavirus deaths are rising again. More Americans are on track to be hospitalized with the virus than at any other point. Rates of new infections repeatedly shatter single-day records. As a result, the US economy is backsliding.

Trump has never offered a national strategy for testing, contact tracing and isolating those who have the disease. He has provided no standards for reopening the economy, no plan for national purchasing of critical materials, no definitive policy for helping the unemployed, no clear message about what people and businesses should do. He rushed to reopen without adequate safeguards. [..]4

It’s been an abominable, chaotic mess – which is why the virus is back.

Yet when it comes to assaulting Americans, Trump has been asserting strong leadership. He’s deploying unidentified federal agents against protesters in Portland, Oregon: attacking them, pulling them into unmarked vans, detaining them without charges.

 
Charles M. Blow: Trump’s Nakedly Political Pandemic Pivot

This is how the president operates when he is desperate and in trouble.

After mocking people for wearing masks, refusing to publicly wear one himself and holding rallies and gatherings where social distancing was not required, President Trump has shifted his tone.

He has canceled his convention activities in Jacksonville, Fla., after moving the events from North Carolina when that state’s governor raised public health concerns about such a large indoor gathering.

He has resumed briefings, ostensibly about the coronavirus, after canceling them and trying to move on to other matters, as if the virus would simply vanish if he sufficiently ignored it.

Trump is in real trouble. With the election passing the 100-day-away milestone, he is down in the polls, people don’t trust or approve of his handling of the pandemic and he faces a real uphill battle to re-election.

Apparently, the reality of his dire straits has begun to pierce his inner circle of perpetual affirmation. There is a reality lurking that can’t be lied away. If the election were held today, he wouldn’t win.

Karen Tumulty: What century does Trump think American women are living in?

In what century is President Trump living? Or perhaps the better question: In what century does he believe American women are?

“Housewives” is a word you don’t hear all that often these days. When women are described that way in popular culture — in TV show titles, for instance — it is generally done with a wink to how different their outlandish escapist plotlines are from real life.

This was not the first time that Trump has revealed that his view of daily existence for most women and their families is stuck in the 1950s. In a May interview with the New York Post, he singled out two female journalists who had annoyed him — Weijia Jiang and Paula Reid, both of CBS — and added: “It wasn’t Donna Reed, I can tell you that.”

The president was likely referring to the saintly Mary Bailey character that actress Donna Reed portrayed in the 1946 movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Or the wife and mother she played on her sitcom, “The Donna Reed Show,” which ran from 1958 to 1966. Her character, Donna Stone, had a pediatrician for a husband and was always perfectly coifed, wearing an impeccably styled dress as she went about her housework and put dinner on the table. [..]

The opinion column that Trump believed would scare the bejeezus out of “The Suburban Housewives of America” criticized Biden’s housing plan — which is neither a new one (he released it in February) nor all that radical. It builds upon a desegregation rule that was put in place under President Barack Obama and that Trump is moving to repeal.

But then, Trump’s tweet wasn’t really about zoning policy at all. It was about stirring racial fears. His increasingly frequent claims Biden would “destroy the beautiful suburbs” is not a dog whistle. It is an air-raid siren.

Mara Gay: Rich New Yorkers, How’s That Census Coming?

Some neighborhoods where wealthy residents skipped town during the pandemic have among the lowest response rates in the city.

You’re a wealthy New Yorker who fled the city during the coronavirus pandemic, and you haven’t yet filled out the census.

Listen, I understand why you left. We were all scared. Maybe you’re older, or you have a compromised immune system. Maybe you have kids and needed access to schools, reliable child care and a backyard where they can run and play. Maybe you’d just rather be at your house in the Hamptons.

I’m not judging. I’m just asking you to do your civic duty and fill out the census. [..]

The census, which takes place every 10 years, secures vital federal dollars for the city’s public schools and free lunch programs, public housing and senior centers, and transit infrastructure. The poorest and most vulnerable New Yorkers already are suffering right now. They will suffer more unless all of us do our part and fill out the census — correctly.

Completing the census generally takes less than 10 minutes. Go to my2020census.gov and follow the steps from there.

It’s the least you can do.

Lawrence Douglas: What if Trump loses but refuses to leave office? Here’s the worst case scenario

The risk of an electoral meltdown is ordinarily rather small, but this November promises a combination of stressors that could lead to epic failure and chaos

What if Trump loses but refuses to leave office? Here’s the worst case scenario
Lawrence Douglas

The risk of an electoral meltdown is ordinarily rather small, but this November promises a combination of stressors that could lead to epic failure and chaos

While working on a book about the peaceful succession of power, I came to realize that built into our system of presidential elections is a Chernobyl-like defect: placed under the right conditions of stress, the system is vulnerable to catastrophic breakdown. The risk of such an electoral meltdown ordinarily is rather small, but this November promises – in a manner last seen in 1876 –to present a combination of stresses that could lead to epic failure.

The problem begins – but does not end – with President Trump, who, in his recent interview with Chris Wallace, once again reminded the nation that losing is not an option. He will reject any election that results in his loss, claiming it to be rigged. Alarming as this may be, Trump alone cannot crash the system. Instead, an unusual constellation of forces – the need to rely heavily on mail-in ballots because of the Covid-19 pandemic; the political divisions in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; and a hyper-polarized Congress – all work together to turn Trump’s defiance into a crisis of historic proportions.