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

Karen Tumulty: Political smear campaigns aren’t new. But Trump takes them to a whole new level.

Conspiracy theories and smear campaigns are as old as our politics. [..]

If the nature of these vile tactics is not new, their potency has reached a point never seen before. Part of that is the power of social media. But the real force behind it is a president with a knack for branding and no capacity for shame. Even before he officially became a candidate, Donald Trump built a following by trafficking in racist, baseless lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace.

No longer does a conspiracy theory require an actual conspiracy behind it before it can take flight. It needs only a few taps on Trump’s smartphone or an unhinged Instagram post by one of his adult sons, Don Jr. or Eric. [..]

Smear campaigns will presumably always be with us, to one degree or another. But the brazenness with which Trump practices them is something entirely novel in our politics. Only by defeating him in the fall will Americans be able to stand up and say they deserve something better than this.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: It’s Trump’s party now — and will be even after he’s gone

Discussing the risks of reopening his state last month on Fox News, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) declared, “There are more important things than living.” The comment was revealing. President Trump’s manic, malicious and mismanaged presidency constantly captures our attention, and he’s often treated as some kind of grotesque outlier. But while Trump emits his own unique forms of venom, he is a reflection of, not a contrast to, today’s Republican Party. On the central challenges facing the country, the Republican Party, like Trump, is unending in its cruelty. [..]

The problem isn’t Trump alone. The media reports that Republican legislators privately shake their heads and roll their eyes at Trump’s outrages. But with rare and noble exceptions, Republican politicians in general defend the indefensible and promote the problematic. On the emergency, the economy, our security, our democracy, they simply are wrongheaded. Whether because of tribalism, excessive partisanship, their money sources, the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh right-wing media frenzy or a combination of all those factors, the Republican Party of Eisenhower, much less Lincoln, is gone. Now it is Trump’s party and will be, even after he’s gone.

Amanda Marcotte: Is Trump taking hydroxychloroquine? Who cares? It’s another right-wing snake-oil scam

Right-wingers have long fantasized they have access to medical “miracles” unavailable to us pathetic normies

With the rising scandal over Donald Trump’s mass firing of inspectors general who are threatening to uncover widespread corruption in his administration, the president is clearly desperate for some delicious culture-war bait that will distract cable news pundits and lure his supporters and his critics into pointless arguments. So he coughed up one such juicy nugget on Monday afternoon, bragging to reporters that he had started taking hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug with no proven benefits for COVID-19 — 10 days ago. [..]

Trump’s “evidence” that hydroxychloroquine works is, of course, that he hasn’t gotten the virus yet. Assuming that’s true, the likelier explanation is the more scientific one: The White House has instituted a rigorous testing and tracing system, which the Trump administration has deliberately made unavailable to the rest of us. Reports that multiple members of the administration have tested positive for the coronavirus are a direct result of this testing regimen. This isn’t evidence that Trump “should” have gotten the coronavirus by now. It’s actually evidence that he’s been kept safe, because rigorous testing means that people who are positive are identified and quarantined before they have a chance to infect him.

That’s the most galling thing about this entire hydroxychloroquine gambit. In fact, Trump does have access to an “elite” form of health care that isn’t available to the public at large: Testing and tracing. He’s all too happy to use this scientific strategy while hyping snake oil to the public, rather than pursue sensible scientific measures on a large scale to protect the entire population.

Michelle Cottle: Why Did Mike Pompeo Want His Watchdog Fired?

His vague explanations for asking President Trump to dismiss the State Department’s inspector general don’t add up.

Three years in, President Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp” stands as one of his more ludicrous campaign promises. That said, his spring cleaning of inspectors general has exposed a patch of grime that threatens to make life awkward for one of his staunchest allies, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Late on Friday, Mr. Trump informed Congress that he was ousting yet another internal watchdog — the fourth in six weeks. His latest target: Steven Linick of the State Department. The president offered no explanation for the firing, saying only that he no longer had “the fullest confidence” in Mr. Linick.

Pressed on his decision on Monday, the president insisted that he personally had no problem with Mr. Linick. “I never even heard of him,” he told reporters. “But I was asked to by the State Department, by Mike.” Stressing repeatedly that he has the “right to terminate” as many pesky I.G.s as he wants to — especially those appointed by President Barack Obama — Mr. Trump professed ignorance of the details: “You’d have to ask Mike Pompeo.”

Democratic lawmakers, journalists and even some Republicans are now lining up to do just that. Because as it turns out, Mr. Pompeo asked the president to ax Mr. Linick while the inspector general was in the midst of investigating potential misconduct by … Mr. Pompeo.

Susan E. Rice: Trump Is Playing the China Card. Who Believes Him?

He attacks Joe Biden to deflect blame for his terrible handling of Covid-19 and record of appeasing Beijing.

There is a long history of American presidential candidates using China as a campaign cudgel — from Bill Clinton blasting President George H.W. Bush in 1992 for dealing with a Chinese premier known as the “Butcher of Beijing” to Donald Trump’s 2016 attack that the Obama administration had allowed China to “rape” the United States while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. This election year, China-bashing will reach a new level, as Mr. Trump seeks to capitalize on high voter disapproval of China, Beijing’s failure to contain the coronavirus and persistent bilateral tensions between our countries.

Desperate to obscure the reality of more than 90,000 American deaths and 36 million unemployed amid Mr. Trump’s utterly incompetent handling of the pandemic, Republicans have no better strategy than to play the China card. The Republicans are executing a 57-page campaign memo that recommends branding opponents “soft on China” and reveals their rationale for repeated refrains of the “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan lab.” [..]

On China, Mr. Trump has much to fear from his own record.

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: We Should Help Workers, Not Kill Them

Unemployment benefits: an unheralded success story.

As far as I can tell, most epidemiologists are horrified by America’s rush to reopen the economy, to abandon much of the social distancing that has helped contain Covid-19. We know what a safe reopening requires: a low level of infection, abundant testing and the ability to quickly trace and isolate the contacts of new cases. We don’t have any of those things yet.

The epidemiologists could, of course, be mistaken. But at every stage of this crisis they’ve been right, while predictions of a quick end to the pandemic by politicians and their minions have proved utterly wrong. And if the experts are right again, premature opening could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths — and backfire even in economic terms, as a second wave of infections forces us back into lockdown.

So where is the push to reopen coming from?

Some of it comes from right-wing crazies. Only a small minority of Americans believes that freedom includes the right to endanger other people’s lives (which is what congregating in large groups in the midst of a pandemic does); that wearing a mask is un-American, or unmanly, or something; that Covid-19 is a hoax perpetrated by liberals. But that minority has huge influence within the Republican Party.

Some of it comes from Donald Trump’s obsession with the stock market. His initial refusal to do anything to prepare for the pandemic reportedly reflected concern that any acknowledgment of the threat would “spook the market.” And the push to reopen may similarly reflect a belief that going back to normal life would be good for the market, even if it kills many people. Let’s die for the Dow!

Michelle Goldberg: The Phony Coronavirus Class War

Defiance of public health directives has become a mark of right-wing identity.

“Yeah, I’m going to do the laser and the filler,” said a woman at a wine bar, looking forward to cosmetic dermatology. “When you start seeing where the cases are coming from and the demographics — I’m not worried,” said a man lounging in a plaza.

Only one person was quoted expressing trepidation: a masked clerk in a shoe store. “I live an hour away and was driving in this morning, only me on the road, and I was thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’” she said.

Lately some commentators have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns pit an affluent professional class comfortable staying home indefinitely against a working class more willing to take risks to do their jobs. [..]

Donald Trump and his allies have polarized the response to the coronavirus, turning defiance of public health directives into a mark of right-wing identity. Because a significant chunk of Trump’s base is made up of whites without a college degree, there are naturally many such people among the lockdown protesters.

But it’s a mistake to treat the growing ideological divide over when and how to reopen the country as a matter of class rather than partisanship. The push for a faster reopening, even in places where coronavirus cases are growing, has significant elite support. And many of those who face exposure as they’re ordered back to work are rightly angry and terrified.

Eugene Robinson: Trump’s attempts to smear Obama could backfire spectacularly

President Trump’s increasingly frantic attempts to smear former president Barack Obama reek of panic. As disgusting as these efforts are, they are likely to backfire, perhaps in spectacular fashion.

Late last month, according to widely published reports, Trump’s campaign aides presented him with internal polling that showed him losing to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the key swing states. The aim was to get Trump to curtail his unhinged daily novel coronavirus briefings, and he grudgingly complied. But he also launched an all-out attack on Obama and his legacy — a gambit that should cause GOP candidates nationwide to lose sleep.

Polls show the Republican Party in danger of losing not only the presidency but also the Senate in November. A key element of the party’s strategy for remaining in power is using the made-up specter of “voter fraud” to depress Democratic turnout. You will recall that if Hillary Clinton had squeezed just a total of 80,000 more votes out of three Democratic strongholds — Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — she would now be campaigning for reelection and Trump would be just another Twitter troll.

In those cities, and across the nation, African American turnout in 2016 was lower than Democrats had hoped for and expected. But there is one political figure who has demonstrated an unprecedented ability to bring black voters to the polls in tidal-wave numbers: Obama.

Charles M. Blow: Obama Lives in Trump’s Head

The president feels the need to shower lies and blame upon his predecessor.

No one irritates Donald Trump quite like Barack Obama.

Trump’s run for president was in part triggered by his enmity for Obama, his desire to one-up him, and he has performed his presidency as a singularly focused attempt at Obama erasure, dismantling what he can of what Obama built and undoing policies Obama instituted.

Obama is everything that Trump is not: intellectual, articulate, adroit, contemplative and cool. He also happens to be a black man. The fact that he could not only ascend to the height of power but also the heights of celebrity and adoration vexed Trump.

Trump set about to demonstrate that none of that mattered, none of it could supersede the talents of a confident counterfeit. He convinced himself that Obama was the convenient recipient of affirmative action adulation from a world thirsty for racial recompense, an assuaging of white guilt. [,,]

Trump is trying to make Obama his Willie Horton, the black criminal George Bush successfully used as a racial cudgel in his race against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump believes that there is a seesaw mechanism to his political fortunes: If he can drag someone down, it will lift him up.

For now, that person is Obama, the man who lives in Trump’s head, who stalks his dreams, the countervailing symbol to Trump’s deficiencies.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s war on masks: It’s working — at least with his base

Trump supporters are eagerly trashing masks and social-distancing rules. Will we all pay the price for this folly?

On Saturday night, Eric Trump appeared on Fox News and, ignoring the nearly 1.5 million people who’ve been infected and the nearly 90,000 dead — more than that, by the time you read this — made a startling declaration: “After Nov. 3, coronavirus will magically, all of a sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.” He added, “They’re trying to deprive [Donald Trump] of his greatest asset … the fact that he can go out there and draw massive crowds.” [..]

But it’s no surprise to hear the president’s second son going all-in on rhetoric meant to minimize the threat of the coronavirus. While the White House officially recognizes that the coronavirus is real — for a time, Trump even tried to play “wartime president,” before he found out that controlling a pandemic was real work and gave up — the president’s true feelings are clear: He wants everyone to pretend this pandemic isn’t happening, because he thinks that’s his best bet for re-election. So he showily refuses to wear a mask in public, inflames protests against stay-at-home orders and whines in public that coronavirus testing makes him “look bad” by recording the spread of the virus.

For a short while, there were reasons to hope, that the threat of being illness or death might outweigh the devotion to Trump among his base of supporters. Polls showed that despite Trump flirting openly with virus trutherism, Republican voters were taking the virus seriously and taking measures to stay safe. But after weeks of daily pressure from Trump, Fox News and other media outlets, Trump voters are getting the message: To show their loyalty, they must act like this pandemic is no threat at all.

At the center of this fight is the refusal to wear masks. Most Americans now wear face masks in public, out of a reasonable, science-based concern that asymptomatic people are spreading the virus. But Trump loyalists are increasingly making a big deal out of how anti-mask they are, both to show contempt for those who believe the virus is serious and to demonstrate their personal fealty to Trump, who himself never wears a mask.

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: America’s corporate elite must stop treating coronavirus as an obstacle to profit

It’s up to CEOs to rise above their arrogance and place the health of their workers before revenues

As America reopens for business, you might expect Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, and his Amazon corporation, the most profitable corporation in America, to set the standard for how to protect the health of American workers.

Think again.

Amazon’s warehouses have become Covid-19 hot spots, yet Amazon has repeatedly fired workers who sound the alarm – including, just recently, a warehouse worker in Minnesota who spoke out against unsafe conditions, and, earlier in the pandemic, a worker who led a walkout at Amazon’s huge JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island after several employees tested positive for the virus. [..]

At Amazon’s AVP1 fulfillment center near Hazleton, Pennsylvania – under federal investigation because of an early surge in cases – workers say Amazon stopped sharing information about Covid-19 cases, so they started their own unofficial tally, which at last count was 64 and rising. [..]

Amazon doesn’t even provide hourly workers paid sick leave. It had allowed warehouse workers with pre-existing conditions to take leave without pay if they feared infection, but that policy expired last Thursday.

The company now says anyone who doesn’t return to work will be fired, and it’s about to eliminate an extra $2 per hour hazard pay it had given warehouse workers.

Why have Bezos and Amazon set the bar so low for the rest of corporate America? It can’t be the cost. Amazon can afford the highest safety standards in the world. Last quarter, its revenue surged 26% and its profits soared to $75.5bn. Since March, Jeff Bezos’ net worth has jumped $24bn.

So, what is it? Perhaps it’s the arrogance and indifference that comes with extraordinary power.

Jamelle Bouie: Trump Is Following in Herbert Hoover’s Footsteps

And we know how that worked out.

Additional economic assistance is the only thing that can keep the U.S. economy from falling into a second Great Depression, and with interest rates near zero, the government has all the fiscal capacity it needs to borrow the trillions necessary to relieve the pain. But Congress, or rather congressional Republicans, won’t budge. After backing the $2 trillion CARES Act in March, they believe they’ve done enough for now. [..]

And President Trump appears unmoved by the prospect of economic devastation, except insofar as it affects his chances for re-election. The White House halted talks with Congress over any further stimulus.

All of this — the passivity, the indifference, the refusal to embrace the tools at hand for ideological reasons — is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover, who also presided over a catastrophic economic downturn, the mismanagement of which plunged the United States into a crisis that tore at the seams of American society. [..]

It would be nearly four years after the stock market crash in 1929 before the federal government, under Roosevelt’s administration, began to do anything to meaningfully alleviate the pain of the Great Depression. By then, nearly a quarter of working Americans were unemployed and tens of millions of people struggled to find food and shelter.

Not only are we not that far gone, but we have a chance to remove our modern-day Hoovers before they can lead the country to further disaster. With luck, we’ll make good on that opportunity in November.

Michelle Goldberg: Obamagate Is a Fake Scandal. Rick Bright Described a Real One.

“The darkest winter in modern history” may soon be upon us, while Trumpists are obsessed with a new conspiracy theory.

Recently people on the right have started pushing a ludicrous pseudo-scandal they’re calling Obamagate. It holds that investigations by Barack Obama’s administration into Russia’s attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election were a form of illicit sabotage of Donald Trump and his team. The story doesn’t really make sense, which is why, when asked about Obamagate, President Trump couldn’t describe it. But at the heart of the conspiracy theory is “unmasking,” the routine practice by which national security officials find out the names of Americans who appear on intelligence intercepts of foreign actors. Trumpists have tried to turn this into a sinister and portentous term.

Obamagate exists to rewrite the history of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference to make Trump the victim, rather than someone who actively sought Russia’s help and then took steps to reward the nation’s president, Vladimir Putin, for providing it. Trump often accuses others of misdeeds that he is guilty of; recall his sputtering response to Hillary Clinton calling him a Putin puppet in a 2016 debate: “No puppet! No puppet! You’re the puppet!” In Obamagate, he is accusing his opponents of politicizing intelligence because of a political vendetta, which is what his administration is currently doing. [..]

This sub-Benghazi conspiracy theory could be cropping up now because the right hopes to use it against Joe Biden, who as vice president requested one of the unmaskings that turned up Flynn’s name. It’s even possible that Trump’s lawless attorney general, Bill Barr, might use Obamagate as a pretext to open an investigation into Biden. But Obamagate is also a way to distract at least some segment of the country from a very real and very grave scandal: Trump’s calamitous mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, exemplified by suspected political retaliation against Dr. Rick Bright, one of the government’s foremost vaccine experts.

Paul Waldman: Michael Flynn isn’t a martyr. He’s a crook and a crackpot.

For anyone with a memory that stretches all the way back to 2016, it is positively bizarre to see Republicans suddenly claiming that Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, is a martyr. It’s obvious why and how they’re doing it: In an effort to distract from Trump’s spectacular failure on the coronavirus pandemic, they are attempting to create a new fake “scandal” that will send us all down an endless rabbit hole chasing absurd lies and conspiracy theories.

But Michael Flynn? He’s the one they want to portray as a victim? What’s next — Jeffrey Epstein was framed? Bernie Madoff was a humanitarian? Al Capone was misunderstood?

Here’s the truth: Flynn should never have been allowed within 10 miles of the White House. He was a dangerous, dishonest and shady operator who was also kind of a loon. For a moment, it appeared that everyone in the Trump administration realized it, which was why he was booted from his position as national security adviser after only 24 days on the job.

Yet now they’re treating him like a hero. [..]

Trump has always gathered around him the most morally repugnant people he could find, an endless collection of grifters, liars and thieves. Flynn fit right in, even if he was discarded when he became an embarrassment.

But the real problem is that he was ever given a position of responsibility in the first place. As you watch Republicans make the ludicrous claim that he’s the victim of an anti-Trump conspiracy, keep that in mind.

Gretchen Whitmer: States have taken the lead in fighting the coronavirus. Now we need aid.

Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is the governor of Michigan.

Since the first positive cases of covid-19, Michigan has been aggressive to slow the spread of the virus. Governors in other states such as Ohio, Illinois, Maryland, Wisconsin, New York and many others have also taken the lead, and our actions are starting to pay off. But this crisis will damage states’ budgets for years to come, threatening everything from education to public safety to health care. Neither the virus nor the economic distress stops at state or party lines. The nation’s governors, Democratic and Republican, have worked tirelessly to protect our people. Right now, we need our partners on both sides of the aisle in Washington to come together and pass a plan to aid states in our recovery. [..]

Recent estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that state budget shortfalls alone could total $650 billion over the next three years. Right now, we need our federal partners to provide sufficient and flexible aid to mitigate the economic crisis that every state is going through. None of us can afford for this to devolve into a partisan issue. President Trump called this a war, and it is exactly that. So we must act like it. In World War II, Americans dropped everything they were doing to build planes and tanks. They rationed food and took care of one another. They worked together and sacrificed until we had beaten the enemy.

Now, we are called again to act, put aside political differences, protect our families and loved ones, and beat this virus.