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: Trump Tells Coronavirus, ‘I Surrender’

The president plays the climate-denial playbook on a pandemic.

As we head into the final stretch of the election, Covid-19 is on a roll.

Coronavirus cases keep hitting records — among other things, five aides to Vice President Mike Pence have tested positive. Hospitalizations, which lag behind cases, are soaring. And deaths, which lag even further behind, are starting to rise, too. Put it this way: Just between now and Election Day, we’re likely to lose almost twice as many Americans to Covid-19 as died on 9/11.

So how is the Trump administration responding? Actually doing anything about the pandemic is apparently off the table. What we’re getting instead is a multilevel public relations strategy: We’re doing a great job. Anyway, there’s nothing anyone can do. And besides, doctors are faking the numbers so they can make more money.

These are, of course, inconsistent stories, and the smearing of health care workers who put their lives on the line to save others is just vile. But none of this should surprise us.

This is, after all, Donald Trump. Also, we’ve seen this combination of denial, declared helplessness and conspiracy theorizing before: Trump and company are following the same strategy on Covid-19 that the right has long followed on climate change.

Ruth Marcus: Amy Coney Barrett joins a Supreme Court that’s largely out of step with the national consensus

In adding a sixth decidedly conservative justice, the court is slipping further out of sync with the national consensus.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett joins a court dangerously out of sync with the country. The nation is roughly evenly divided politically and has been for decades. Yet the court — now even more so with Barrett’s arrival — is dominated not only by Republican-appointed justices but also by muscularly conservative ones. [,,]

The court serves an important counter-majoritarian role in preserving constitutional protections; we don’t want it to slavishly follow the election returns. But neither is it good for the court to be sharply out of step with the national consensus. That’s bad for the institution and bad for the country.

The court’s makeup is determined by the electoral landscape (control of the presidency and the Senate). But its rulings — on gerrymandering, on campaign finance, on voting rights — help define the contours of that landscape.

As Lederman put it, “there’s a strong — and not coincidental — symbiosis between the Republicans’ long-term, successful efforts to shape the Court and the ability of the GOP to secure success in the political arena beyond what its popular support would naturally produce: the entrenchments are mutually reinforcing.”

Mutually reinforcing, and distinctly unhealthy.

Eugene Robinson: The Trump administration’s covid-19 message: You’re on your own. Try not to die.

The White House’s surrender to the pandemic is the most urgent reason to vote Trump out.

“We’re not going to control the pandemic.”

There you have it from President Trump’s chief of staff, announcement of failure, incompetence and cold indifference. You’re on your own, America. Try not to die.

When Mark Meadows said those words on Sunday morning to CNN’s Jake Tapper, he was stating the obvious: The Trump administration never mounted more than a halfhearted attempt to limit the spread of covid-19, and now has simply given up. Daily reporting of new cases has reached an all-time high, yet Trump flies around the country holding superspreader campaign rallies and claiming that we are somehow “rounding the turn” on the virus. What is that even supposed to mean? What could he possibly be talking about, except a turn for the worse?

There are many, many reasons Americans should vote Trump out of the White House, but perhaps the most urgent is his refusal — or perhaps his inability — to face the reality of covid-19. This election is literally a choice between life and death.

Amanda Marcotte: With one week left, Trump team rolls out new campaign message: Let the coronavirus win

Over 225,000 are dead, but Trump is still committed to his March theory that it’s all a hoax aimed at hurting him

In the last week before Election Day, Donald Trump and his team have decided the best possible message on the coronavirus pandemic is the same one Trump wanted back in the spring.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Bob Woodward in a taped conversation on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” [..]

Now, with more than 225,000 people dead and 8.6 million infected, all trends make clear that the situation is getting worse, as the U.S. sets new records in transmission rates, dwarfing earlier peaks in the spring and summer. The virus has torn through the White House, infecting Trump and his wife and his son and dozens of others close to the president, including five aides to Vice President Pence whose diagnoses were announced over the weekend.

Despite this, Trump is still committed to the same lie he rolled out in February: The panic is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats and the media to hurt him.

Dean Obeidallah: Obama gives us one of the best reasons to dump Trump

There are just so many reasons why millions want to defeat Donald Trump this election. And now former President Barack Obama, who was back on the campaign trail last week in support of his former Vice President Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, has served up one more.

In his speeches, Obama highlighted an array of issues that merit dumping Trump, including Trump’s incompetent response to the deadly pandemic and the questions about his business empire. Obama used humor to drive the point home: “Listen, can you imagine, if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for reelection? You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that?” Obama quipped, “They would have called me ‘Beijing Barry,'” eliciting a wave of car horns beeping in approval at his drive-in rally.

But the moment that deeply resonated with me — and I’m betting with so many others — was when the former President told the crowd that with Biden in the White House, “It won’t be so exhausting.” With Biden and Harris at the helm, said Obama, “you’re not going to have to think about the crazy things they said every day.”

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: When Libertarianism Goes Bad

Liberty doesn’t mean freedom to infect other people.

A long time ago, in an America far, far away — actually just last spring — many conservatives dismissed Covid-19 as a New York problem. It’s true that in the first few months of the pandemic, the New York area, the port of entry for many infected visitors from Europe, was hit very hard. But the focus on New York also played into right-wing “American carnage” narratives about the evils of densely populated, diverse cities. Rural white states imagined themselves immune. [..]

Even as New York contained its pandemic, however, the coronavirus surged out of control in other parts of the country. There was a deadly summer spike in much of the Sunbelt. And right now the virus is running wild in much of the Midwest; in particular, the most dangerous places in America may be the Dakotas.

Last weekend North Dakota, which is averaging more than 700 new coronavirus cases every day, was down to only 17 available I.C.U. beds. South Dakota now has a terrifying 35 percent positivity rate. Deaths tend to lag behind infections and hospitalizations, but more people are already dying daily in the Dakotas than in New York State, which has 10 times their combined population. And there’s every reason to fear that things will get worse as cold weather forces people indoors and Covid-19 interacts with the flu season.

But why does this keep happening? Why does America keep making the same mistakes?

Donald Trump’s disastrous leadership is, of course, an important factor. But I also blame Ayn Rand — or, more generally, libertarianism gone bad, a misunderstanding of what freedom is all about.

Heather Digby Parton: Will Trump supporters accept defeat? If he loses, it could get really ugly

Trump’s been telling his fans for weeks that there’s no way he can lose. So they’re primed for a vicious backlash

One of the more interesting (and somewhat confounding) polling results in this election cycle has been the belief among members of both parties that Donald Trump will win re-election, regardless of who they’re actually planning to vote for. His approval rating has been stuck in the low 40s throughout his term, which is unprecedented, and he’s been behind in the polls from the beginning of the campaign. Yet most Americans still remain convinced that he is going to win. [..]

How can this be? Well, of course it all depends on what the definition of “win” is.

The explanation for the Democrats and many Independents is obvious. With all of Trump’s talk about mail-in voter fraud and lawsuits and promises of intimidation at the polls, they believe it’s possible that he will pull out all the stops to create or fake a victory regardless of the legitimate electoral outcome. With his statements to the press that he wants the ninth Supreme Court seat filled in order to ensure a victory, it’s not being all that paranoid to assume it could happen.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are living in an alternate universe in which Trump holds a massive lead in all the polls and is heading for a landslide. They believe this because he tells them that every day.

It’s unlikely we will have full results on election night next week, since some states won’t even begin counting mail-in votes until that day, while others allow ballots to arrive some time after Election Day. There’s certainly the possibility of lawsuits if contests are close. Nonetheless, we will probably know the winner within a few days — Trump’s scenario that it could take “months” is hot air — and it’s worth pondering how the two sides will react.

Charles M. Blow: Trump’s Army of Angry White Men

This group will continue to fight for Trump and he knows that.

This election will test the country’s core.

Who are we? How did we come to this? How did this country elect Donald Trump and does it have the collective constitution to admit the error and reverse it? [..]

Trump is the president of the United States because a majority of white people in this country wanted him to be. Perhaps some supported him despite his obvious flaws, but others undoubtedly saw those flaws as laudable attributes. For the latter, Trump’s racism was welcome in the coven.

Still, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll, more white people support Trump than Biden. This is primarily a function of white men who prefer Trump over Biden 57 percent to 36 percent. Most white women support Biden, which is a reversal from the last election, when a plurality voted for Trump.

The white racist, sexist, xenophobic patriarchy and all those who benefit from or aspire to it are in a battle with the rest of us, for not only the present in this country but also the future of it.

Jennifer Rubin: The media never held Trump responsible for a mass atrocity

This administration has shown reckless indifference to human life on a massive scale.

The mainstream media have fallen short in covering President Trump in many respects — from playing along as if he were sane and coherent, to perpetuating false moral equivalences between Trump and his opponents, to refusing to call his lies “lies.” That’s how we get coverage of the final presidential debate that praises Trump for not interrupting rather than making clear that Trump showed indifference to the deaths of more than 222,000 Americans because of covid-19. Somehow that accurate, verifiable statement is verboten in straight news coverage.

The most extraordinary failure in presidential history — the attempt to disguise and downplay the deaths of more Americans than all the U.S. military deaths from World War I, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined — has not been laid at Trump’s feet. Put aside criminal law for now; this is a moral crime of unimaginable dimensions that should never be erased from the records of Trump and his enablers. What’s more, it is still going on. [..]

We talk about presidential blunders that lead to unnecessary wars, holding them politically and morally account for massive loss of life. Yet in peacetime, we do not apply that same exacting judgment to Trump. You would think the death of thousands upon thousands of Americans would top every story and be addressed in every interview with an administration figure and fellow Republicans. The failure to hold Trump accountable for one of the worst instances of civilian mass deaths in U.S. history stands among the greatest failures of American media.