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: A Republican Senate Would Be Bad for Business

What’s bad for America would be bad for corporations, too.

So the blue wave fell short of expectations. Joe Biden will be the next president, but unless Democrats pull off an upset in the Georgia Senate runoffs — which, to be fair, they might, given the remarkable strength of their organizing efforts there — Mitch McConnell will still be the Senate majority leader.

Big business seems happy with this outcome. The stock market was rising even before we got good news about prospects for a coronavirus vaccine. Corporate interests appear to imagine that they will flourish under a Biden presidency checked by Republican control of the Senate.

But big business is wrong. Divided government is all too likely to mean paralysis at a time when we desperately need strong action.

Why? Despite the vaccine news, we are still on track for a nightmarish pandemic winter — which will be made far worse, in human and economic terms, if a Republican Senate obstructs the Biden administration’s response. And while the economy will bounce back once a vaccine is widely distributed, we have huge long-term problems that will not be resolved if we have the kind of gridlock that characterized most of the Obama years.

Eugene Robinson: Republicans are wrong. Trump has no ‘right’ to cause this chaos.

While Trump pursues his ‘rights,’ he neglects his duty and abuses the country

Don’t listen to lying Republicans, like Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who say President Trump “has every right to look into allegations” in an attempt to overturn the election. This is nonsense.

Trump has no “right” to file frivolous lawsuits in bad faith and demand recounts that have no chance of changing the outcome. He has no “right” to make wild claims of fraud without presenting a shred of credible evidence. He has no “right” to delay and disrupt the most important performative act in our democracy — the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. But he does have a duty to his country, and, like with so many other obligations, Trump is neglecting it to the point of abuse.

Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris won an election that was not all that close, and GOP quislings McConnell, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) know it. They know this is nothing like the cliffhanger of 2000, which hinged on a few hundred votes in a single state. Trump is trying — or pretending to try — to somehow change or nullify hundreds of thousands of votes in at least six states. [..]

The symbolism of a graceful concession is more important than the nuts and bolts of the handoff, especially for a president-elect with Biden’s vast experience, though especially in this pandemic, the nuts and bolts do matter. The Biblical book of Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Trump is petulantly weakening a divided nation’s faith in its hoped-for and unseen foundational ideals — and of all the terrible things this awful man has done to our country, this could be the worst.

Catherine Rampell: Trump has deliberately made our government more dysfunctional. Here’s how Biden can fix it.

Biden must focus on policy, people and public trust.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to “restore the soul of America.” It is a worthy, poetic goal. Another, more prosaic objective also lies before him: fixing America’s plumbing.

By which I mean repairing the machinery of government, which has been corroded by Trumpian incompetence and malevolence. In the months ahead, there are at least three areas that need the Biden transition team’s urgent attention: policy, people and public trust.

The federal government is a massive, slow-moving ship. Even in the best of times it is often dysfunctional. But for the past four years, the Trump administration has deliberately made parts of government more dysfunctional, throwing sand in the gears in order to sabotage programs the president doesn’t like that are nonetheless required by statute.

The processing of various immigration applications has slowed, for instance; the number of enforcement actions against polluters, white-collar criminals and even child-sex traffickers has plummeted.

Where agencies still remain at least superficially functional, they have been steered toward helping the president’s own political and financial interests — by awarding contracts to cronies, say, or weaponizing antitrust and other state powers against perceived enemies. Indeed, arguably the biggest contrast in governing philosophy between President Trump and Biden is not over government size, per se; it’s whether government should serve the interests of the governed.

Amanda Marcotte: The far right is cracking up, as their violent fantasies of Trump’s fascist takeover evaporate.

QAnon, the Proud Boys and white nationalist groups flail around helplessly as twilight falls on the Trump era

The far right had a dream: That one day, people who had been exiled to the unacceptable margins of American political life could play the role of Donald Trump’s brownshirts. [..]

Then came the election. Trump lost. This has been very difficult for those people to accept.

People with fanatical and delusional beliefs famously don’t give them up just because they’ve been hit over the head with reality, of course. The various subcultures of crackpots that have sprung up under Trump are no exception.

Still, the election results have sent these groups reeling. All of them have spent the past four years growing their ranks and orbiting around Trump, convinced that he was a savior figure who would crush their perceived enemies.

For believers in QAnon, that belief manifested in a fantasy that Trump was going to round up all the members of the “deep state,” their imaginary shadowy conspiracy of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and progressive activists that they believe both secretly runs the world and is also a network of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles. Trump, they told themselves, was secretly organizing “the storm” to round up and destroy this sinister global conspiracy.

But since Trump’s election,  Q — a user account that started on 8chan and drifted over to 8kun after 8chan was disbanded — has fallen silent. QAnon faithful believe the account is run by a current or former U.S. intelligence agent and Trump loyalist. In fact, it’s probably run by the father-and-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins, who are conspiracy theorists and definitely not U.S. intelligence agents. Without Q’s guidance, the QAnon cult appears to be confused and angry.

Richard Wolff: Trump’s refusal to concede follows his pattern of incompetence and delusions

The Trump administration has been living in a state of denial for the last four years – this is just the latest incident

Like all good seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the end of the Trump era is a heady mix of sweet melancholy.

There will come a time, soon, when world leaders look back on the last four years with a wry smile and a shake of the head. Instead of the sheer blood-draining horror of sitting beside a sociopathic maniac with the power to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust.

For now, we must savor the last oozings of this Fall of Donald.

He cuts a tired and bloated figure, to be sure. He tweets less, but he does so in ALL CAPS. All the time. He promises the most amazing revelations and achievements, coming very soon, just like he said they would. [..]

But next week is when some states begin certifying their votes. The electoral college meets in one month. Now isn’t the time for making progress, or for recycling the slogans of losing campaigns long gone. A week after losing the election, now is the time to deliver the goods, or be delivered for good.

As all good Arsenal fans know, it’s the hope that kills you. And Trump has likely killed more than 700 fans (or their friends) with his awesome campaign rallies.

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

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s coup is morphing into a grift — but Mitch McConnell sees it as a power grab

Trump can’t steal the election now — but McConnell is seizing the chance to undermine Biden before he takes office  

Donald Trump’s attempted coup started as a clown show. Over the weekend as Joe Biden was declared the winner by the mainstream media, and then by the entire world, it morphed into an outright grift. In a hilariously weird press conference outside a Philadelphia landscaping company on Saturday, Rudy Giuliani and other Trump flunkies — including a registered sex offender — pushed the idea that they could somehow invalidate Biden’s robust electoral victory. On Twitter, Trump continued to hype the utterly false notion that there’s some pathway to invalidating openedand counted ballots in various states he has clearly lost, and somehow reverse the results of this election in the courts.   [..]

Trump’s attempted coup, to be clear, has zero chance of working. His election lawsuits are pathetic and keep getting thrown out, including by Republican judges. All the whining about “illegal” voters — which is mostly code for voters whose skin color or political leanings are not to Trump’s taste — amounts to nothing, since the votes he’s complaining about are already opened and counted. At this point, the main purpose of all the false promises that the courts will invalidate the election appears to be money — the fine print on the solicitations for Trump’s “legal defense fund” makes clear that the money will mostly be used to pay down Trump’s campaign debts. Since Election Day, more than 130 such emails begging for cash have gone out to gullible marks — sorry, I mean Republican voters. Considering what a practiced con artist Trump is, he’s probably already working out how to leverage his fake victim status to squeeze his hapless supporters for more cash down the road.

The problem, unfortunately, is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has decided to back Trump’s play, as I predicted he would a year and a half ago.

Thomas Edsall: What Is Trump Playing At?

The president’s refusal to concede that he lost the election is taking us into dangerous territory.

As newspapers and media across the country and around the world reported Joe Biden’s victory and Donald Trump’s defeat in last week’s election, Trump himself — along with his Republican allies in Congress, including the entire Senate majority leadership and the Republican House minority leadership — remained defiant.

I queried a number of American historians and constitutional scholars to see how they explain what should be an inexplicable response to an election conducted in a modern democracy — an election in which Republican victories up and down the ballot are accepted unquestioningly, while votes for president-elect Biden on the same ballots are not.

Many of those I questioned see this discrepancy as stemming from Trump’s individual personality and characterological deficiencies — what they call his narcissism and his sociopathy. Others offer a more starkly political interpretation: that the refusal to accept Biden’s victory stems from the frustration of a Republican Party struggling to remain competitive in the face of an increasingly multicultural electorate. In the end, it appears to be a mixture of both.

Many observers believe that the current situation presents a particularly dangerous mix, one that poses a potentially grave danger to American democracy.

Heather Digby Parton: How many different ways will Trump poison the ground on his way out the door?

Trump is “burrowing” right-wing loyalists into government positions. And what the hell’s his plan at the Pentagon?  

I don’t think anyone who has been following Donald Trump’s administration for the past four years can say they’re surprised that he is refusing to concede defeat after the election, or that nearly all Republican elected officials are either backing him to the hilt or quivering in the corner like a bunch of cold chihuahuas. I predicted this puerile reaction some time ago, which wasn’t exactly a great feat of prognostication since Trump was doing everything but running full-page ads in every newspaper in the country announcing his intentions. [..]

But what’s he doing with the Intelligence services and the Pentagon? The Washington Post reported on Monday that the administration had installed Michael Ellis, a hardcore right-wing operative best known as one of California Rep. Devin Nunes’ top henchmen, as head lawyer at the NSA. (You may remember Ellis as one of those involved in the infamous “midnight run.”) This job is not a political appointment, which means Ellis will now have career government employee protections and be more difficult to move out.

This is a practice known as “burrowing,” in which an outgoing administration moves some of their cronies into permanent jobs. In Trump’s case this is particularly concerning because his cronies are such overwhelmingly unethical loyalists and partisan hacks. Considering their characters and vocation, it’s hard to believe they don’t have a hidden agenda. And we have no idea how many of these people are being placed within the government at lower levels.

Jesse Wegman: The Republican Party Is Attacking Democracy

Our survival as a nation depends, above all, on the loser accepting the results of an election.

It turns out there was a coordinated attack on the 2020 election after all. It began several years ago and accelerated in the last several months. Now that Election Day has passed, it has launched into overdrive.

Its weapons are baseless insinuation and evidence-free charges, deployed solely to sow chaos and undermine the results of a free and fair election — one that produced a clear winner and an even clearer loser.

But the most dangerous attackers of American democracy aren’t the Russians or the Chinese. They are the leaders of the Republican Party.

In the face of a commanding national triumph by President-elect Joe Biden — not just an Electoral College victory but a popular-vote margin that is approaching five million — President Trump and top Republicans are behaving like spoiled children refusing to let go of their toys.

Jill Filipovic: Enough is enough: Republicans’ fealty to Trump imperils America itself

When the president refuses to concede, it has a tangible impact on the nation’s future. Why are Republicans enabling this?

Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 5 million. He was handily trounced in the electoral college, too. There is no real question that he lost the election and Joe Biden won.

And yet, predictably, the president who has spent his entire time in office denying the facts that are in front of his face is insisting that the clear results of this election must be the result of malfeasance. We know that to assuage his own ego and maintain his position, he will say and do just about anything. We know that he is not a statesman or a person who cares about anything beyond himself; we know he is happy to tear the nation apart at the seams if it means he gets what he wants. And we know that many members of the Republican party have thus far aided and abetted him.

But there was some question of when enough would be enough. Surely there was some line the president could cross that would directly imperil America itself and make Republicans finally say: enough. Now, the president is mounting what in any developing country would be called an attempted coup. He is spreading outright lies about America’s system of free and fair elections, claiming he won when he didn’t. His sycophantic legal team is pulling issues out of thin air to undermine the American system of voting. He is wielding his power to try to install himself as an unelected leader. He is refusing to concede so that he might find some way to illegally grab power. And Republicans are letting him.