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

Michelle Goldberg: Trump’s Shredding of Civil Liberties Won’t Stop With Antifa

An American was killed by federal agents and the president called it “retribution.” We are so far gone.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the killing, early this month, of Michael Forest Reinoehl.

Reinoehl, a self-described antifa supporter, was a suspect in the shooting of Aaron J. Danielson, a backer of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, during an August street confrontation in Portland, Ore. Prosecutors charged him with murder. Reinoehl, speaking to Vice News, said he acted in self-defense. There will be no trial to sort out what happened, because the federal marshals sent to arrest him gunned him down. [..]

If it’s the official posture of the government that the antifa movement constitutes a major security threat, that will influence how individual agents behave. Trump has repeatedly sent American law enforcement the message that members of antifa are terrorists who should be treated with extreme violence, and that protests against racial injustice and his administration are dominated by antifa.

There are many ways the presidential election could go sideways, leading to mass demonstrations over ballot counting. In the same Fox News interview in which he gloated over Reinoehl’s death, Trump was asked what he would do if his opponents “riot” on election night.

“We’ll put them down very quickly,” he said. All those who’ve demonstrated against this president should know that what’s done to antifa today can be done to them tomorrow.

Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s disastrous town hall shows he should never have made mental acuity an issue

Trump’s performance was embarrassingly bad.

It was not simply that President Trump resorted to obvious lies at the ABC News town hall Tuesday night, or that he was rude and ineffective in addressing the terrific, substantive questions from real, undecided voters. His campaign’s bigger worry is that he came across as confused, lost and incoherent. He really should not have gone down the road of challenging his opponent’s mental acuity. [..]

Imagine how much worse it will be for Trump when he has a prepared opponent willing to deliver a tongue-lashing for such silly lies and excuses. Biden could ask when we can finally expect Trump’s magic health-care plan and demand he bring it to the next debate. Biden could laugh and roll his eyes when Trump blames him for not assuming the duties of president (“C’mon, man — you are president, not me!”). We saw in Trump’s devastating interview with Axios’s Jonathan Swan that Trump short-circuits whenever confronted with a new piece of information outside his limited frame of reference. When he tosses up another word salad, Biden surely can say, “You just talked for a minute and said nothing. Answer the question.” There might be less fact-checking, but the Biden team can put out a split-screen version of the debate with a rolling fact check. More important, the Biden team stands to receive a bountiful gift of soundbites for its next round of ads.

Erin N. Marcus: A Roger Stone protege is interfering in important CDC reports. It’s appalling.

Erin N. Marcus is a professor of clinical medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and a Public Voices fellow.  

In 1981, a report appeared in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) about five previously healthy young men in Los Angeles who had developed a severe pneumonia caused by an unusual organism, Pneumocystis carinii. None of the men knew each other. Their main shared trait was that they had each engaged in sex with men.

The article was the first case series in the medical literature to describe the syndrome that we now call AIDS. It was extremely important — both clinically, in that it alerted doctors to think about Pneumocystis carinii when evaluating pneumonia in men who have sex with men, and scientifically, in that it spurred researchers to investigate why these otherwise healthy men were suddenly dying.  [..]

This is characteristic of the MMWR, known as a trustworthy scientific publication. Its high standards of evidence and its reliability have made it an important source of data for clinicians and public health researchers for decades.

That reputation is now at risk. According to recent news reports, the spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, Michael Caputo — a political appointee and protege of Roger Stone who worked as a consultant for President Trump — has tried to force the CDC to delay the MMWRs and coerce the CDC into altering wording on its findings. He has also demanded that the CDC retract published MMWR articles. Caputo’s rationale has been that CDC scientists are part of a “deep state” opposed to Trump’s reelection and that the reports contradict Trump’s statements about covid-19 and make him look bad.

Caputo’s manipulation is appalling. If left unchecked, it could have disastrous consequences for the reputation and reliability of the CDC, which has already been battered by the U.S. response to covid-19. It could also prove devastating for medical practice in the United States more broadly.

Amanda Marcotte: Dr. Bleach-Injector and his death cult want you to get “herd developed”

Don’t expect Trump’s latest idiocy to lose him followers — they’d rather get COVID-19 than admit they were wrong

Donald Trump was doing spectacularly bad science again, this time during a town hall in Philadelphia hosted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday night. The event went about as well for the president as anyone who has been awake during the past four years could have predicted, which raises the important question: Wasn’t his new campaign manager supposed to be competent?

When asked about an audio clip captured by journalist Bob Woodward in which Trump talks about the coronavirus pandemic and how much he “wanted to always play it down,” Trump slid right into his don’t-believe-your-lying-ears mode, claiming that he, in fact, “up-played it.” Whatever that means. Then the “very stable genius” currently squatting in the Oval Office rolled out his brilliant plan to lick the coronavirus problem (as transcribed by the invaluable Aaron Rupar of Vox):

TRUMP: It is going away.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Without a vaccine?

TRUMP: Sure. Over a period of time.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And many deaths.

TRUMP: It’s gonna be herd developed.

He also used the phrase “herd mentality.” [..]

Right now, somewhere around 2% of Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus — which is still a whopping 6.6 million people, more than any other nation on Earth — and of that group, just over 196,000 have died as of Wednesday afternoon. I leave it to readers — who, unlike Trump, didn’t pay someone to take their SATs for them — to figure out how many more people are likely to die if we go with Trump’s brilliant plan of infecting perhaps 35 times as many people with the virus as have now tested positive.

(Or, skip the algebra and read this article from the Washington Post, which estimates that Trump’s “good brain” plan would kill nearly 3 million people.)

Here I thought that Trump had crammed thousands of his followers, without masks, into an indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, just because he’s a terminal narcissist who prioritizes his insatiable need for applause over the lives of the very swing-state voters he would need to win the election. But hey, it might also be that he’s using the bodies of his own supporters — who tend, on average, to be older and likelier to die of COVID-19 — for his grand experiment in “herd development.”

Move over, Burning Man: It’s time for a new desert festival! Donald Trump’s Coronafest 2020: The drugs aren’t as good, and you’re way likelier to end up dead.

Heather Digby Parton: With no end in sight, Trump’s lies just keep making the pandemic worse

Trump has risked his followers’ lives and damaged the credibility of science — and for what? It’s not nearly over

With the release of Bob Woodward’s book “Rage,” we’ve been given the opportunity to revisit the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic with the added insights of comments the president made in private at the time. Unsurprisingly, we have learned that Donald Trump was lying to the public every step of the way. Day after day, we hear more of the Woodward tapes, and each one reveals Trump to have been even more reckless and self-centered than we knew, leaving Woodward and millions of others unable to tell “whether he’s got it straight in his head what is real and what is unreal.”

The president had the presence of mind to tell Woodward in April that the virus is “a killer if it gets you,” but shortly after that told the public, “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!” By July, he had stopped even trying to explain away his failure. [..]

Trump likes to say that “nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” and in this case, at least, he’s right. The consequences of the president’s psychological and intellectual shortcomings, which led him to downplay the pandemic, are so devastating that it led Scientific American to endorse a candidate for president for the first time in the magazine’s 175-year history:

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment.

It is hard to see how any rational person could come to any other conclusion.

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: The G.O.P. Plot to Sabotage 2021

Republicans are already acting as if there’s no next year.

Nobody knows for sure who will win in November. Joe Biden holds the advantage right now, but between the vagaries of the Electoral College and whatever October surprises the Trumpists cook up — you know they’re coming — who knows?

One thing that’s clear, however, is that Republicans — not just Donald Trump, but his whole party — are acting as if there’s no tomorrow. Or, more precisely, they’re acting as if there’s no next year.

And this means that if Biden does win, he will have to govern in the face of what amounts to nonstop policy sabotage from his political opponents.

To see what I mean about acting as if there’s no next year, consider the large (and illegal) indoor rally Trump held Sunday in Nevada.

Before the release of Bob Woodward’s new book, you might have argued that Trump doesn’t believe the science and didn’t realize that his event might well sicken and kill many people. But we now know that he’s well aware of the risks, and has been all along. He just doesn’t care.

Eugene Robinson: The world is burning and drowning. We have to vote for the planet’s future.

Don’t let the urgent obscure the existential.

The sky over the San Francisco Bay area glowed red-orange last week, as though the region had been transplanted to Mars. People along much of the West Coast sheltered indoors because the air was filled with smoke from unprecedented, hellish wildfires that so far have claimed dozens of lives. More than 10 percent of all Oregon residents were told to evacuate their homes, and the state’s chief emergency management planner warned of a possible “mass fatality incident.”

Fire wasn’t the only element turning against us. For only the second time on record, five tropical cyclones are swirling in the Atlantic Ocean at the same time — including Hurricane Sally, which is gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico and aiming at vulnerable New Orleans and Mississippi.

These catastrophes horribly illustrate the stakes in the coming election: at risk is the future of our beautiful, fragile planet. The choice facing voters who care about that future could not be more stark. Democratic nominee Joe Biden accepts the scientific consensus about climate change and wants the United States to lead the world in a transition to clean energy. President Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and encouraged greater production and burning of “beautiful, clean coal.”

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s big lies reveal a truth: Right-wing science denial was never about ignorance, just cruelty

Conservatives have been gaslighting the public about science for decades. Now we’re reaping the consequences

Are they stupid or evil?

When I first started writing about politics, way back in the George W. Bush era, this was a legitimate question when it came to trying to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially when it came to their stubborn refusal to accept scientific truths. Republicans have denied or cast doubt on science in so many ways — denying that condoms are effective, that evolution is real, that climate change is actually happening and largely caused by human activity — and many liberals and progressives have felt legitimately confused about exactly why.

Was it that right-wingers were too ignorant or benighted to accede to scientific realities? Or was it more sinister than that: They knew full well what the science said, but were too selfish and cruel to care, and also selfish and cruel enough to lie about it to our faces?

Well, with the West Coast on fire, a pandemic spreading across the land, and a pathological liar in the White House as the Republican standard-bearer, I think we can consider that debate settled: It’s not ignorance. It’s malice.

The cruelty, as Adam Serwer of The Atlantic famously wrote, is the point.

Jamelee Bouie: Trump’s Perverse Campaign Strategy

If the president’s allies are talking about the moment “shooting will begin” and “martial law,” it’s not by accident.

On Sunday, Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, warned of left-wing insurrectionists and “sedition” within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during a video he hosted live on his Facebook page. After predicting victory for President Trump in the upcoming election, Caputo warned that Joe Biden wouldn’t concede. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

Ordinarily, in a presidential election year, the main story of American politics is the election — its twists and turns, its ups and downs. This year, that story is hard to convey. Part of the reason for this is that the race itself is unremarkable, despite everything else that’s happening around it. Biden is ahead, most voters have made up their minds and Trump has a narrow path to re-election, with few opportunities to recover lost ground.

The larger, more important factor is that Trump isn’t actually running for re-election — or at least, not running in the traditional manner. He has a campaign, yes, but it is not a campaign to win votes or persuade the public outside of a few, select slivers of the electorate. Instead, it’s a campaign to hold on to power by any means necessary, using every tool available to him as president of the United States. Caputo, in that sense, is only taking cues from his boss.

Paul Waldman: Why even a Biden presidency might see a period of heightened violence

Trump glorifies violence and says authority is illegitimate if exercised by Democrats. So what happens if Biden wins?

Many election observers are terrified about what will happen as we try to determine who won the presidential election, as the counting drags out for days or even weeks and President Trump claims that he won and any result that indicates otherwise could only be produced by fraud.

That is indeed something to worry about. But even if Trump loses, and even if he departs the White House without having to be frog-marched out the door by federal officers, we could very well be in for an extended period of division, chaos, and even deadly violence under a Joe Biden presidency.

Whether it was his intention or not, Trump may have prepared the ground for an absolutely nightmarish period in American history, one that will make the angry divisiveness of the past few years seem civil by comparison.

Trump has done this by propagating an ideology that characterizes institutional authority as legitimate only when it is controlled by him and those sympathetic to him; insists that any outcome of the democratic process should be rejected if it is not the one you wanted; paints the other party as not merely opponents but as a force that literally wants to kill you and destroy your country; and valorizes individual violence.

Trump glorifies violence and says authority is illegitimate if exercised by Democrats. So what happens if Biden wins?