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

Frank Bruni: They Didn’t Drink the Bleach, but They’re Still Drinking the Kool-Aid

Is the Republican indulgence of the president bottomless?

One of the most widely read articles in The Times last weekend was a report by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman that Republican leaders are dreading the potential consequences of President Trump’s “erratic handling” of the coronavirus crisis.

Consequences like a higher death toll and more fitful recovery than America might otherwise experience? No. Trump’s re-election is party leaders’ focus. They fear that if he rants, rages and stumbles around too outrageously and too much, he won’t get the chance to rant, rage and stumble around for four more years. If his madness is too naked, there’s a ticking clock on how long he can inflict it on the rest of us.

Forget about his damage to the country. They’re concerned about his damage to the party — and about not having one of their own in the White House, no matter how ill suited for it he is. Republican officials confessed additional anxiety that Trump might hurt the re-election prospects of Republican senators, who have abetted his worst behavior by excusing and even laundering it. God forbid they too don’t get an encore, so that they can perpetuate their shameful performances.

In a political ecosystem as partisan as ours, Republicans protect fellow Republicans and Democrats do likewise with their own. Those are the rules. That’s the game.

But the degree to which this impulse is indulged makes all the difference, as does the nature of the offenses and inadequacies being forgiven. For the sake of decency and of our increasingly fragile democracy, there must be a limit. And when it comes to Trump, Republicans don’t seem to have one.

Steven Rattner: The Coronavirus Stimulus Package Is a Mess

Congress gets an A+ for speed but a B- for quality.

The next round of economic stimulus has now emerged from Congress’s sausage factory, with more rescue efforts inevitably to follow.

Hats off to Congress for moving quickly, particularly in passing the gargantuan $2.2 trillion package late last month. But even amid a crumbling economy, we need more attention to the details — less rough justice and fewer special-interest pleadings — and more effective administration.

Most prominent have been the flaws in the wildly underfunded Payroll Protection Program, which has left many small businesses without help. Even the $320 billion added this week won’t be nearly enough; an additional $400 billion or more is likely to be needed.

The underfunding and a poor rollout led to businesses in some of the least affected states receiving a disproportionately large share of the funds compared with harder-hit states like New York.

Meanwhile, loopholes in the legislation are allowing millions of dollars in aid from the program to flow to undeserving public companies and others with deep-pocketed shareholders. Huge restaurant groups and hotels managed by large chains also qualify, as long as individual locations employ fewer than 500 workers.

That’s just one of the myriad problems. [..]

More rescue programs are inevitable. For example, the small-business Payroll Protection Program is still too small and covers only eight weeks of payroll, a far shorter time period than the likely period of high unemployment.

In addition, with the economy in deep recession, longer-term initiatives, like the long-awaited infrastructure program, are need to reduce high unemployment and restore economic growth.

Congress and the administration need to do a better job with both design and administration.

Jamelle Bouie: Another Way the 2020s Might Be Like the 1930s

The strikes at Amazon and elsewhere over working conditions and low pay have been small, but they may spark a new movement.

Class consciousness does not flow automatically out of class identity. Being a worker does not necessarily mean you will come to identify as a worker. Instead, you can think of class consciousness as a process of discovery, of insights derived from events that put the relationships of class into stark relief.

Or as the political theorist Cedric J. Robinson observed about the Civil War and Emancipation,

Groups moved to the logic of immediate self-interest and to historical paradox. Consciousness, when it did develop, had come later in the process of the events. The revolution had caused the formation of revolutionary consciousness and had not been caused by it. The revolution was spontaneous.

We aren’t yet living through a revolution. But we are seeing how self-interest and paradox are shaping the consciousness of an entire class of people. The coronavirus pandemic has forced all but the most “essential” workers to either leave their jobs or work from home. And who are those essential workers? They work in hospitals and grocery stores, warehouses and meatpacking plants. They tend to patients and cash out customers, clean floors and stock shelves. They drive trucks, deliver packages and help sustain this country as it tries to fight off a deadly virus.

The close-quarters, public-facing nature of this work mean these workers are also more likely to be exposed to disease, and many of them are furious with their employers for not doing enough to protect them. To protect themselves, they’ve begun to speak out. Some have even decided to strike.

Amanda Marcotte: The Republican dilemma: They could have dumped Trump! But now they’re stuck with him

Facing a tough election year, embattled Republicans made their choice: Down the slippery slide with President Lysol

Donald Trump’s approval ratings over the coronavirus pandemic are in free fall, having tumbled 10 points over the last month, to 39% in a new Emerson poll. This comports with the FiveThirtyEight tracking of Trump’s overall approval, which shows that after a short rally-round-the-flag response to the coronavirus, the public is starting to understand that the man who goes on TV and suggests injecting household cleaning products is a complete imbecile. Moreover, he’s the principal reason the U.S. has a massive shortfall in testing and four times as many official cases of COVID-19 as the second most hard-hit country, Spain. (This is without taking into account, unfortunately, how much the Chinese government may have fudged that nation’s numbers.)

That said, Trump’s overall approval numbers still aren’t dipping below his baseline of about 42%, which appears to be immovable. That’s because Trump’s base voters care about sticking it to the liberals more than they care about anything else, including their own health, their jobs or protecting our country from total collapse.

That puts Republicans running in 2020, especially endangered incumbents in swing states, in quite a bind. Yes, we’re talking about you, Susan Collins — along with other precarious GOP senators like Cory Gardner of Colorado, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Martha McSally of Arizona. To align themselves fully with the orange overlord is to alienate the possible swing voters who aren’t too keen on the “inject disinfectants” platform. But if they try to distance themselves from President Clorox Chewables too much, they risk bringing down Trump’s Twitter wrath unto them and alienating those base voters they will absolutely need to have any hope of surviving what looks to be a tough election cycle for their party.

Dahlia Lithwick: Can’t Stop Thinking About Trump’s Bleach “Joke”? Me Neither.

The horror of the past few days is worth marking for its breathtaking failure of leadership—even after everything this president has put us through.

Last week, after Donald Trump announced at a live press briefing that he was having his top medical advisers investigate whether light could be brought “inside the body,” or if, perhaps, people might clean out their lungs with disinfectant “by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” the memes soon overtook the news itself. Bleach companies and reputable news operations were forced to warn Americans not to ingest disinfectant. Twitter melted down, more than it usually does. The insanity of this particular escapade threatened to end the daily press extravaganzas altogether. (That ended up only lasting until Monday night.)

Trump responded to the uproar with his customary deflection: It had all been a huge joke—a joke aimed at a vicious press that has been unkind to him. Or, as he put it on Friday, because he wanted to “see what would happen,” he was actually just being hilarious when he suggested this. “I was asking a sarcastic—and a very sarcastic question—to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” he said. “But it does kill it.” He repeated the word sarcasm four times just in case anyone missed it. Then, after an incomparable Twitter rant against the press again on Sunday, in which he seems to have confused the Pulitzer Prize with the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Prize with something he called the “Nobles,” he dragged all of us back to his well of hilarity with a tweet asking, “Does anybody get the meaning of what a so-called Noble (not Nobel) Prize is, especially as it pertains to Reporters and Journalists? Noble is defined as, ‘having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals.’ Does sarcasm ever work?” [..]

Mel Brooks once said “tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” It captures perfectly why Trump’s attempts at nasty put-downs sting—the differences between “you” and “me” are immaterial right now, because this lethal virus threatens us all. The heartbreak here isn’t that Donald Trump now says he told a joke. That’s an old, old play, one that barely registers as noteworthy anymore. The heartbreak is that even in the midst of global suffering, he still finds scraps of joy in the suffering of those he despises.

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

Katie Porter: Americans are in the dark on one of the Trump administration’s key coronavirus response tools

Katie Porter, a Democrat, represents California’s 45th Congressional District in the U.S. House.

President Trump’s announced orders of medical supplies using the Defense Production Act (DPA) should be a source of relief. To reopen the country, we’ll need tests to detect the presence of both the coronavirus and possible signs of immunity, and DPA orders can provide those tests. However, unlike most government contracts, DPA orders are not public documents, leaving Americans in the dark about one of the administration’s key tools in its covid-19 response.

In any future coronavirus relief legislation, Congress must make the administration’s DPA orders public. What little we do know about the president’s use of this Truman-era law is not encouraging. [..]

Most government contracts are made public because transparency with taxpayer dollars is the best way to deter waste, fraud and abuse of federal resources. DPA orders, which were designed for wartime and normally concern sensitive military technology, are understandably secret.

Congress passed the DPA at the height of the Korean War to accelerate the production of war materials. For much of its history, the DPA has lain dormant, used only for narrow needs, such resolving shortages of rare earth metals. Yet it exists for exactly the type of situation we find ourselves in — where an organized response from industry is vital to our national security.

The DPA empowers a president to go to the front of the line with private manufacturers and tell them what products to prioritize. It also allows the government to seize shipments of key items — such as personal protective equipment — from hoarders and importers.

But a law passed in 1950 did not anticipate a moment when every country was scrounging for medical gowns, masks and other protective equipment or was in the hunt for a cure to a new virus.

Amanda Marcotte: Quit telling your MAGA parents to take the coronavirus seriously — they’ll never listen

It’s no good browbeating Trump fans about social distancing. It will never work, and is likely to backfire

Despite Donald “Why Not Shoot Up Lysol?” Trump’s unsubtle yearning to “reopen” the economy (which won’t work) and let the novel coronavirus run rampant, a new poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland shows that strong majorities of Americans think that’s a really stupid idea. Eight out of ten Americans took one look at the yahoos protesting the lockdowns in various state capitals and said, nah, living is more important than being able to order that 400-calorie vanilla-hazelnut frappuccino inside the Starbucks instead of from the drive-through window. Despite the mighty efforts of Republicans to create a false dichotomy between saving lives and saving the economy, it appears most Americans understand that Americans can’t go back to work if they’re laid up or dying from COVID-19.

These poll numbers are likely cold comfort, however, to those who have family members, especially parents, among the 17% of Americans who think the social distancing orders are too restrictive. It’s a group that’s largely composed of Fox News addicts and Trump superfans, who are more inclined to believe the coronavirus is being exaggerated — or is even a hoax — because their beloved cable “news” channel has been telling them just that.

(To be clear, this group is a minority even among Republican voters, only 27% of whom oppose the coronavirus restrictions.)

Anyway, these folks are often indifferent or even hostile to the social distancing recommendations, and are engaging in all kinds of behavior that put them at a higher risk of contracting the coronavirus. So right now, a lot of adult children and other relatives of Fox News addicts — who tend to be senior citizens — are stressing out badly, fearful that their family members will catch a disease that tends to kill older people at a much higher clip.

Susan E. Rice: It’s Not Enough to ‘Get Back to Normal’

We can rebuild better. Here’s how.

A hallmark of America’s strength and resilience has been our ability to seize opportunity amid our greatest crises.

After the Civil War, we adopted constitutional amendments to end slavery and enshrine the concept of equal protection under the law. In the Great Depression, we established the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. After World War II, we had the G.I. Bill and founded NATO and the United Nations. During the Vietnam War and civil rights era, Congress abolished segregation, secured the right to vote for all Americans, and reinforced our social safety net through the Great Society.

As we struggle through the Covid-19 crisis — the greatest challenge to global health, national security and our economy since World War II — we must ask again how we can emerge a more just, equitable and cohesive nation.

Unfortunately, we are today condemned to be led by a president who has no conception of the national interest apart from his personal interest. Donald Trump is obsessed with his image and poll numbers and the Dow Jones average, but sadly none of the ambitious questions that inspired his predecessors — chiefly, how can we exit this crucible of death and hardship as a more decent America?

Yet, as destructive and lethal as Mr. Trump’s failings are, we cannot afford to miss this moment of reckoning. The coronavirus has laid bare our domestic divisions, unequal economy, and glaring racial and socio-economic disparities as well as the fragility of our democracy. To recover from this crisis, it will not suffice to contain the carnage, reopen our economy and “get back to normal.” “Normal” is too costly and deadly for all Americans.

Now is the time to rebuild better — our economy, our health care and education systems, our democratic institutions — so that we cure the root causes of our collective disease. While one can hope we soon will be blessed with new leadership committed to national unity, human dignity, and respect for democracy, we cannot afford to wish and wait.

There are two steps Congress should take now to lay the foundation for national renewal by providing seed capital for transformative change.

Michelle Cottle: Joe Biden Is Not Hiding. He’s Lurking.

Never get in the way of an incumbent who is digging his own grave.

Rarely has America been in greater need of competent, reassuring leadership. The pandemic has brought out the worst in President Trump, who continues to behave as if he’s presiding over a sick spinoff of “The Apprentice” during sweeps week. His misinformation briefings are such a disgrace that his advisers have sought to downsize them. His hawking of drugs of unproven efficacy and potential lethality is grossly irresponsible. His call for citizens to “LIBERATE” certain (Democratic-led) states from his own administration’s social-distancing policies was nuts. And just when you thought his performance could not get more erratic, there he was, musing about “cleaning” Covid-19 patients with a shot of disinfectant.

A majority of Americans, polling shows, are unimpressed.

For many Democrats, the remedy is obvious: Former Vice President Joe Biden, the party’s presumptive nominee for president, should be elbowing his way into the conversation. He should be doing more interviews, issuing sharper critiques, proffering better plans — basically presenting himself as a smarter, steadier alternative to Mr. Trump. Since the pandemic took hold, there has been much discussion about Mr. Biden’s having become “invisible” and what it will take for him to break through. (Even he is said to be growing twitchy.) Why, frustrated supporters fret, won’t he fight for a higher profile?There are plenty of good answers to this question. Some speak to the basic political reality of national crises and some to Mr. Biden’s particular quirks. [..]

Much can happen in six months. But there’s no reason to believe that having Mr. Biden more in the president’s face at this time would help him in November. Better for now to keep the election a referendum on Mr. Trump.

As one former Democratic operative put it, “When a guy is digging his own grave, you don’t fight him for the shovel.”

Karen Tumulty: Trump missed an opportunity to prove himself. Governors show it.

When the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination got underway last year, there were four current or former governors in contention.

Three of them — Steve Bullock (Mont.), Jay Inslee (Wash.) and John Hickenlooper (Colo.) — didn’t last as far as the first contest in Iowa. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts hung in longer, though it wasn’t clear many Americans were even aware he was running.

Maybe the problem was that competence seemed, well, boring. The pragmatism and managerial ability that it takes to run a state successfully were not qualities that voters seemed to find appealing in this divisive and partisan political environment.

Not, that is, until the coronavirus came along. A new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll is the freshest evidence that governors have emerged as the heroes of the deepest national crisis in recent memory.

Sure, there have been scattered protests outside of capitols across the country as conservative activists have sought to generate a backlash against state-issued stay-at-home orders. But the Post-U. Md. survey found that an astounding 77 percent of Americans view their governor’s response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 57,000 Americans thus far, as “good” or “excellent.”

The poll number had grown by five percentage points in the past week alone and was consistent across party lines. For Democrats, Republicans and independents to find they agree upon anything is the rarest — and most welcome — of situations these days.

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: Peacocks and Vultures Are Circling the Deficit

The only fiscal thing to fear is deficit fear itself.

Almost a decade has passed since I published a column, “Myths of Austerity,” warning that deficit alarmism would delay recovery from the Great Recession — which it did. Unfortunately, that kind of alarmism seems to be making a comeback.

You can see that comeback in the gradually increasing number of news analyses emphasizing how much debt we’ll run up dealing with the Covid-19 crisis. You can also see it in the rhetoric of politicians like Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who is blocking aid to beleaguered state and local governments because, he says, it would cost too much.

So this seems like a good time to emphasize two key facts. One is economic: While we will run very big budget deficits over the next couple of years, they will do little if any harm. The other is that whatever they may say, very few prominent figures in politics or the media are genuine deficit hawks, who are actually worried about the consequences of rising government debt. What we mainly have, instead, are deficit peacocks and deficit vultures.

António Guterres: A Time to Save the Sick and Rescue the Planet

With closer cooperation among nations, the head of the United Nations argues, we could stop a pandemic faster and slow climate change.

World War II. There is a natural tendency in the face of crisis to take care of one’s own first. But true leadership understands that there are times to think big and more generously. Such thinking was behind the Marshall Plan and the formation of the United Nations after World War II. This is also such a moment. We must work together as societies and as an international community to save lives, ease suffering and lessen the shattering economic and social consequences of Covid-19.

The impact of the coronavirus is immediate and dreadful. We must act now and we must act together. Just as we must act together to address another urgent global emergency that we must not lose sight of — climate change. Last week, the World Meteorological Organization released data showing that temperatures have already increased 1.1 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels. The world is on track for devastating climate disruption from which no one can self isolate.

Now, on every continent and in every sea, climate disruption is becoming the new normal. Human conduct is also leading to severe biodiversity loss, changing animal-human interaction and distorting ecosystem processes that regulate our planetary health and control many services that humans depend on. Science is screaming to us that we are close to running out of time — approaching a point of no return for human health, which depends on planetary health.

Charles M. Blow: For Trump, Lying Is a Super Power

He will use deception to keep his bungled response to Covid-19 from ruining his re-election chances.

After Donald Trump’s ridiculous and dangerous suggestion last week that household disinfectants injected into people’s bodies might be a treatment for Covid-19, Republicans intensified their hand-wringing over whether his daily briefings were doing more harm — to his political fortunes and theirs — than good.

The coronavirus has completely reshaped the coming election. The economy is in dire straits. Trump’s polls have taken a dip. People are anxious and afraid. The outlook isn’t good … at the moment.

As The New York Times reported last week, some in the Republican Party see similarities to 2006:

“In 2006, anger at President George W. Bush and unease with the Iraq war propelled Democrats to reclaim Congress; two years later they captured the presidency thanks to the same anti-incumbent themes and an unexpected crisis that accelerated their advantage, the economic collapse of 2008. The two elections were effectively a single continuous rejection of Republican rule, as some in the G.O.P. fear 2018 and 2020 could become in a worst-case scenario.”

But I would caution all those who take this fear as encouragement that Trump is weakened and vulnerable: Trump is not George W. Bush. This is not the Republican Party of 2006. This is not a cultural environment in which social media is in its infancy.

Trump, as a person and politician, is riddled with flaws. But he also has an ignominious super power: He is completely unencumbered by the truth, the need to tell it or accept it. He will do and say anything that he believes will help him. He has no greater guiding principles. He is not bound by ethics or morals. His only alliances are to those who would support and further his devotion to self-promotion.

I don’t look back to the 2008 campaign for parallels, but to the 2016 one.

Amanda Marcotte: Gaslighting on Lysol-gate: Now Trump is denying he said what we heard him say

Gaslighting isn’t just a fancy word for lying — it’s an assault on truth, evidence and our perception of reality

It’s gone mainstream in recent years, but the word “gaslighting” used to be an esoteric term from the world of psychology and domestic abuse counseling. The word refers to the 1944 film “Gaslight,” in which Ingrid Bergman plays a woman whose husband tries to drive her insane by hiding her belongings and otherwise manipulating her environment, and telling her that the changes she perceives are all in her head. Experts in domestic violence developed the term to describe the way that abusers in real life try to manipulate victims. The gaslighter works by denying reality, often when the facts are plain as day, with such conviction and repetition that the victim starts to question themselves and the evidence of their own senses.

For instance, this might take the form of the abuser denying that he hit his victim or falsely claiming that she provoked it, and then browbeating her until she accepts the lie and even starts to wonder whether she imagined the whole thing.

Under Donald Trump’s administration, however, the term has ventured into politics. It’s become a way to talk about how Trump and his defenders won’t merely tell lies, but will stand by even the dumbest and most obvious lies, holding their ground until the defenders of reality simply give up fighting. This started from the very beginning of the administration, when Trump and his administration claimed his inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s, and insisted on repeating that lie and intimidating government agencies into backing it up. Needless to say, this has continued throughout the coronavirus pandemic, dialed up to an extreme.

One might wonder why we need a term with such a complicated back story, when the word “lying” is right there for the taking. The reason is that Trump lies so frequently and in such varying ways that it’s useful to have a taxonomy of Trump lies to understand the various ways his lies work and how best, perhaps, to resist them.

Eugene Robinson: We should be worried about Trump’s rants

It is time to ask once again, in all seriousness, whether the president of the United States is of sound mind.

Even by his own standards, President Trump’s weekend ranting and raving on Twitter was bizarre and disturbing. I know there are commentators who see his eruptions as some kind of genius-level communications strategy, a way of bonding himself to his loyal base by sending messages at dog-whistle frequencies others cannot hear. Others justify these tantrums as a way for an embattled president to blow off steam. But there is a simpler and more disturbing interpretation: What you see is what you get.

And what we got Sunday was a whole lot of crazy. It’s not good for the country, and it doesn’t seem very good for the president, either. [..]

I’m not making a diagnosis, but rather just stating the obvious. If a loved one were raging in such a manner, you’d worry about his or her well-being. You’d hope it was just a bad spell. You might attempt to investigate, if only with a text reading: “R u ok?” We can only hope someone in Trump’s life is doing the same for him.

I can understand why Trump would be frustrated, seeing his plan to run for reelection on the strength of the economy ruined. I understand why he might be impatient for things to get back to normal. I’m impatient, too.

But it is objectively worrisome how much time the president spends venting his frustration and impatience. It is worrisome that he seems to engage in magical thinking about a miracle cure that will suddenly make everything better. It is alarming that a man with so little apparent self-control has so much power.

And there’s nothing we can do about it until November.