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.
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Paul Krugman: The Right Sends In the Quacks
Covid-19 highlights the conservative reliance on fake experts.
Over the past few days there have been noisy, threatening demonstrations at various statehouses demanding an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.
The demonstrations haven’t been very big, with at most a few thousand people, and involve a strong element of astroturfing — that is, while they supposedly represent a surge of grass-roots anger, some of them have been organized by institutions with links to Republican politicians, including the family of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education.
And polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including half of Republicans — are more worried that restrictions will be lifted too soon than that they will be kept in place too long.
But the demonstrators have received huge favorable coverage from right-wing media; Donald Trump called them “very responsible people”; and they were praised by White House economic adviser Stephen Moore, who compared them to Rosa Parks.
That last bit caught my eye, and not just because some of the demonstrators were waving Confederate flags. The grotesqueness of the comparison aside, why are we still hearing from Stephen Moore?
Catherine Rampell: Trump has almost nothing to lose. That’s why he wants to reopen the economy.
Public health experts worry that “reopening” the country too soon will be bad for public health. Economists worry it will be bad for the economy. The general public worries it will bad for, well, everyone.
So why is President Trump agitating to do so anyway, even encouraging insurrection against his own administration’s stay-at-home guidance?
Because it’s the only Hail Mary chance he has at reelection. And, sure, it probably won’t pay off. But just as he’s done his entire life, Trump has no problem gambling with other people’s money and well-being — even if the stakes could be fatal.
Pre-pandemic, Trump’s case for reelection could be summed up as: “But the economy.” Ignore the racism, misogyny, abuses of power, environmental destruction, kids in cages, the siphoning of taxpayer funds into Trump-owned golf cart rentals. The economy has been good! And, rightly or wrongly, voters credit him. So long as stocks are high and unemployment is low, Americans might be willing keep him in charge.
Now, of course, that political strategy has collapsed.
Michelle Goldberg: A Biden Presidency Could Be Better Than Progressives Think
Campaign promises matter, and his platform shows a distinct leftward drift.
Lawrence Mishel, a well-known labor economist, has been a critic of centrist Democrats for decades. “My adult lifetime has covered the Carter, Clinton and Obama years, and labor policy has never been a priority,” Mishel, the former president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, told me. In the 2016 primary, he voted for Bernie Sanders. This year he supported Elizabeth Warren. (So did I.)
But when Mishel saw Joe Biden’s labor policy, he was thrilled. “I think that if you had asked me in 2016 whether we would ever see an agenda like this, this is beyond my hopes,” he said.
Biden’s proposals go far beyond his call for a $15 federal minimum wage — a demand some saw as radical when Sanders pushed it four years ago. While it’s illegal for companies to fire employees for trying to organize a union, the penalties are toothless. Biden proposes to make those penalties bite and to hold executives personally liable. He would follow California in cracking down on companies like Uber that misclassify full-time workers as independent contractors who aren’t entitled to benefits. He’d extend federal labor protections to farmworkers and domestic workers.
Mishel said that no Democratic nominee in his lifetime has presented “as robust and fleshed out a policy suite on labor standards and unions.”
The anticlimactic end of the Democratic primary has left many progressives depressed, if not despairing. Instead of a fresh face or a revolutionary, the party has chosen a man who seems to embody the status quo, at least as it existed before Donald Trump. Yet should Biden become president, progressives have the opportunity to make generational gains.
Eugene Robinson: Reporters shouldn’t play Trump’s self-serving game
In theory, regular updates from the commander in chief at a time of grave crisis could help forge national unity and resolve. In practice, Donald Trump is president.
Trump’s daily “briefings” on the covid-19 pandemic offer an unprecedented challenge to both the media and the general public. If journalists take seriously our responsibility to report truth rather than falsehoods, we need to devise some sort of filter — a mental analog to the face masks that so many Americans now wear to keep from contaminating others. [..]
Broadcast media should consider either taping the briefings and airing only newsworthy excerpts, or providing some means of fact-checking Trump’s statements in real time. Split the screen, if necessary. Cut away altogether when things go completely off the rails.
Should the White House correspondents walk out en masse? No, because covering the president is their job. Making a pact to follow up on questions Trump refuses to answer truthfully won’t work: Trump can back up a lie with another lie, or just walk away.
But the correspondents do have another option: When Trump finishes a fact-free opening harangue, they should direct their questions to Fauci and the other experts — not to the president. Reporters are there to seek reliable information on behalf of the public, not to play Trump’s self-serving game.
Karen Tumulty: The tea party is back — and endangering lives
The tea party is back. I was wondering where they had gone.
You remember them, right? When Barack Obama was in office, these self-styled defenders of limited government and individual liberty took to the streets to protest federal debt, corporate bailouts, government-sponsored health care and a president who they said governed like the king our forefathers rebelled against.
We haven’t heard from them much in the past 3½ years. Not that they shouldn’t have found plenty of fodder for outrage: record deficits and debt; an autocrat in the White House who regularly claims extra-constitutional authority; economic policies that tilt heavily in favor of the wealthy and big business.
Tea party activists have looked the other way on all of these things throughout the presidency of Donald Trump. But now they are appearing again in state capitals across the country, screaming and waving their “Don’t Tread on Me” banners to vent at the lifesaving measures that governors have taken in the face of an epidemic that has already caused upward of 40,000 deaths in the United States.
There is a legitimate — and reasonable — debate to be had about how much economic pain the country should be willing to bear to bring the epidemic under control.
But that is not what we are hearing in their nihilistic fury. Some of them carry Confederate flags and assault weapons as they protest. Theirs is a doctrine fueled not by high-minded principles, but by conspiracy theories and populist resentment.
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