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: Reactionaries Are Having a Bad Month

But they’ll be dangerous in the months ahead.

What is Braxton Bragg to Donald Trump, or Trump to Braxton Bragg?

It was always strange (and outrageous) to have U.S. military bases named for traitors — for Confederate generals who rebelled against the Union to defend slavery. And military leaders seem willing to change those bases’ names. But Trump says no. [..]

But Trump evidently can’t bring himself to make even a symbolic show of sympathy. And trying to understand his incapacity helps explain what Trumpism — and, indeed, modern conservatism as a whole — is all about.

Trump himself says that it’s about honoring “a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” Really?

These bases honor men who stood for slavery, the opposite of freedom; and as it happens, two of the biggest bases are named for generals famed not for victories but for defeats. Bragg, whose army suffered an epic rout at Chattanooga, was one of the Civil War’s worst-regarded generals. John Bell Hood squandered his men’s lives in futile attacks at Atlanta and Franklin, then led what was left of his army to annihilation at Nashville.

Trump obviously doesn’t know about any of that. But why should a guy who grew up in Queens care about Confederate tradition in the first place?

The answer is that Trump, and most of his party, are reactionaries. That is, as the political theorist Corey Robin puts it, they are motivated above all by “a desire to resist the liberation of marginal or powerless people.” And Confederate iconography has become a symbol of reaction in America.

Michelle Goldberg: Trump’s Grotesque Tulsa Trip

A racist president trolls his enemies with a rally on Juneteenth.

Most people — or, at any rate, most readers of The New York Times — remember Donald Trump’s response to the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., as a particularly low point in a presidency full of them. After a rambling, aggrieved news conference in which he defended some of those marching with neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” Trump’s already dismal approval rating hovered below 38 percent. Staffers voiced shame and disgust to journalists (anonymously, of course). Senator Susan Collins was “concerned.” [..]

It’s important to keep Trump’s instinct for escalation in mind when considering his decision to hold his first post-shutdown rally in Tulsa, Okla., next Friday — which is Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates the end of American slavery. Tulsa was the site, 99 years ago, of a white rampage in the thriving commercial district known as Black Wall Street; with as many as 300 people killed, it was one of the worst incidents of racist violence in American history.

“The president’s speech there on Juneteenth is a message to every black American: more of the same,” tweeted Representative Val Demings, a Florida Democrat reported to be on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist.

As soon as the rally was announced, people started asking a question that Trump often forces: Was the president being stupid or evil? After all, it’s highly unlikely that Trump, who reportedly didn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor when he visited in 2017, is familiar with the Tulsa massacre. But there are people around Trump who are sophisticated enough to understand the message the rally is sending, including Stephen Miller, one of the president’s closest aides and an out-and-out white nationalist.

Eugene Robinson: Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy

He may be losing the “Lost Cause” of white supremacy.

It should have happened 155 years ago, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but maybe — just maybe — the Civil War is finally coming to an end. And perhaps Donald Trump, not Jefferson Davis, will go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.

Symbols like flags and monuments matter, because what they symbolize is our vision of ourselves as a nation: the heroes, battles, movements, sacrifices and ideals we honor. So when I see multiracial crowds toppling the statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians, when I see respected military leaders arguing that Army posts should no longer bear the names of Confederate generals, when I see NASCAR banning displays of the Confederate battle flag at its races — witnessing all of this, I let hope triumph over experience and allow myself to imagine that this may indeed be a transformational moment. [..]

When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

Trump claimed, ridiculously, that the names are somehow part of the nation’s “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” He may be historically ignorant enough not to know that the generals in question were traitors as famous for the battles they lost as for any of their triumphs; that ultimate victory went to the Union, not the Confederacy; and that the whole point of the rebellion was to deny freedom to African Americans. Or he may know these facts but believe his political base doesn’t.

Catherine Rampell: Trump is so set on harassing immigrants that his immigration agency needs a bailout

The immigration agency admonishing immigrants to pull themselves up by their bootstraps seems to have destroyed its own boots.

For three years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the federal agency that processes visas, work permits and naturalizations — has lectured immigrants about how they should become more self-sufficient. It has alleged, without evidence, that too many immigrants are on the dole. (Actually, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in federal benefits, and the foreign-born use fewer federal benefits than do their native-born counterparts.)

The agency implemented a broad, and likely illegal, rule allegedly designed to weed out immigrants who might ever be tempted to become a “public charge” and try to benefit from taxpayer largesse.

Well, now USCIS is broke — and is trying to become a “public charge” itself, by begging Congress for a bailout.

The agency is funded almost entirely by user fees, rather than congressional appropriations. But under President Trump’s leadership, it has mismanaged its finances so badly that it has sought an emergency $1.2 billion infusion from taxpayers.

Unless it get a bailout, the agency will furlough three-quarters of its workforce next month, Government Executive reported Thursday.

The agency claims it’s a novel coronavirus victim. No doubt, the covid-19 pandemic has disrupted operations. But USCIS was in financial trouble long before the virus’s outbreak.

Ana Navarro: 19 ways to fight racism

George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers. We all saw it on video. It triggered something in most of us. Maybe it was how long the torture lasted, 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Maybe it was the nonchalant attitude of former officer Derek Chauvin, as he kept his knee on Floyd’s neck, despite the crowd’s pleas that he let him go. Maybe it was George Floyd’s last words. “I can’t breathe.” Words we’ve heard before from Eric Garner, another black man whose death became a hashtag and a rallying cry.

Maybe it was Floyd calling out for his “mama,” who had died three years before. Maybe it was the sequence of hashtags as a result of racism that happened in such a short time: #AhmaudArbery, #BreonnaTaylor, #BirdingWhileBlack. Maybe it was the combination of all of those things and more.

Whatever it was, it led to a collective realization that spread around the country and around the globe that America has a systemic racism problem. We have been carrying it around since our country was born. It is killing us — some of us, literally.

What happens now? What comes beyond the hashtag? Some of my black friends have told me — sometimes with an eye roll and a chuckle — that they’ve been getting random calls and texts from white people they know, asking them how they’re doing, asking what they can do. It borders on the ridiculous for people to be asked how to fix a problem they didn’t create and are instead the victims of.

But still, it’s a question that deserves a serious answer.

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

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.