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

Kara Swisher: Tom Cotton’s Whitewashing

A news organization is not a public square any more than Facebook or Twitter is.

If your drunken self should agree with your sober self, should your online personality agree with your analog personality?

Not if you’re Tom Cotton. The Republican senator from Arkansas managed last week to pull off what I thought was pretty hard in these twitchy digital times: Forget about Dr. Jekyll; he showed us both a Mr. Hyde and a marginally less fiendish version of Mr. Hyde.

The latter persona was on display last week in The New York Times Opinion section, where Mr. Cotton tried to cast himself — in an essay jaw-droppingly titled “Send In the Troops” — as your basic law-and-order type. Certainly not all protesters were lawless, he wrote, but the military should be brought in for those who were, since the country, according to him, was on fire.

As it turned out, anarchy was not loosed upon the world. It’s mostly been just peaceful people protesting police brutality aimed at African-Americans, making Mr. Cotton’s suggestion of siccing U.S. troops on them look itchy-trigger-fingery in hindsight. Since Mr. Cotton launched his essay like a metaphorical tear-gas canister into a tense national crisis, you can certainly argue about the shamelessness of it — it was shameless and also shameful — and whether he should have been given such a prime platform to air his views. (I don’t run anything but my mouth at The Times, but I would not have given him this opportunity, largely because the article was meant to shock and scare, and not to illuminate a difference of opinion.)

Joshua A. Geltzer and Dahlia Lithwick : Donald Trump’s Increasingly Elaborate Bid to Create His Own America

The lies and the degradation of reporting have been constant, but as we head toward the election, something more sinister is afoot.

On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump, whose unsurprising character defects still never fail to surprise, tweeted a Russian-sourced conspiracy theory claiming that the 75-year-old peace activist who remains hospitalized after his head was smashed open by Buffalo, New York, law enforcement officers was in fact a tech-savvy “ANTIFA provocateur” who “fell harder than was pushed.” The president also linked to a report from a conservative cable news outlet, One America News Network, for support. That report claimed, with no supporting evidence, that the man “was attempting to capture the radio communications signature of Buffalo police officers.”

The problem for Trump—but actually the problem for all the rest of us—is that we all saw the video. We all saw a peaceful 75-year-old approach the Buffalo police officers, who then push him to the pavement and walk past his bleeding body. In fact, the existence and wide circulation of that video are what forced the Buffalo Police Department, which originally claimed that a person “was injured when he tripped & fell” during a “skirmish involving protestors,” to suspend the two officers. The existence of the video, for all intents and purposes, closed the case, at least in the court of most sentient public opinion.  [..]

When authoritarians construct their own unreality, they try to stop actual reality from intruding. Trump’s now trying that, too. Recall that the Trump campaign has been suing news organizations for publishing op-eds the campaign finds too critical of Trump—despite the statements targeted in those op-eds actually being true—for a while now. On Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign went further. It sent a cease-and-desist letter to CNN demanding that the network retract and apologize for a poll that CNN aired, showing Trump trailing Joe Biden badly in the polls. Never mind that CNN’s poll was quite similar to polling from other leading media platforms and universities. Never mind that the Trump campaign failed to identify what made CNN’s purportedly defective. Never mind any of that. As Trump increasingly concocts his own unreality, he seeks to banish the unwanted intrusion of actual reality. He also sends the message that none of us can trust ourselves to make judgments; his word is reality, instead.

Michael Tomasy: Why Does Trump Lie?

He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that exist to keec presidents in check.

The lies and obfuscations pile up. No, it wasn’t tear gas used to clear Lafayette Park for President Trump’s Bible-waving photo-op last Monday night, Attorney General William Barr said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. Rather it was “pepper balls,” he said. “Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It’s not chemical.” Wrong, according to The Washington Post; pepper balls are very much a chemical irritant. The paper awarded the nation’s top law enforcement officer four Pinocchios for his claim.

The president himself keeps at it, too. On the morning of June 4, he tweeted: “[Robert] Mueller should have never been appointed, although he did prove that I must be the most honest man in America!”

As of May 29, the most honest man in America had uttered 19,127 false or misleading claims in his 1,226 days in office, according to Glenn Kessler of The Post, who has been tracking them since Day 1. That’s 15.6 falsehoods a day, or roughly one per waking hour, every hour, every day. That puts him on track to hit 20,000 lies by Wednesday, July 29; by Nov. 3, at this pace, he’ll be north of 22,000 — but of course that period will constitute the heat of the campaign, when the frequency seems likely to increase.

All right, some still say; Yes, Mr. Trump is worse than normal, but they all lie. What’s the big deal, really?

Here’s the big deal. Mr. Trump’s lies are different. Not just in quantity, but also in quality. He lies for a different purpose than every other president — yes, even, I would argue, Richard Nixon, the biggest presidential prevaricator until Mr. Trump came along. [..[

So, far from respecting the institutions enough to sneak around them or appear to conform with their rules, he is perfectly happy to destroy those institutions that might expose him (the press, Congress, the courts, the inspectors general). He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that check him, so he has no urge to hide anything. And of course — maybe the most frightening part of all — he has not a moment’s concern for what endures after he’s gone.

So this is what makes his lies worse. They threaten the foundations of the republic in a way that even Mr. Nixon’s did not. And they will only get worse. If we’ve learned one thing about the president, it’s certainly this: It will always get worse. It’s mortifying enough to imagine the damage he can do in the next five months, let alone the following four years if he’s re-elected.

Paul Waldman: Why Donald Trump is standing up for the Confederacy

In the midst of a pandemic, an unprecedented economic crisis and a national reckoning with racist police practices, the president of the United States is planting his flag in the ground and proclaiming that he will not be moved.

Unfortunately, it’s the flag of the Confederacy.

President Trump always knows a good culture-war flash point when he sees one, and as the protests over police brutality have led to a new effort to remove racist symbols from public places and government installations, Trump has decided this is the fight he’s looking for. [..]

An important part of this equation is that the media outlets Trump relies on, particularly Fox News and conservative talk radio, love arguments about cultural symbols. They’re fueled by anger, their audiences are old and white, and “This country is going to hell because of the liberals, the young people and the minorities” is such a foundational theme that it might as well be cast in 20-foot-high bronze letters atop their headquarters.

Which means that Trump will tune in for his daily multi-hour sessions watching Fox and be told that he’s on exactly the right track, persuading him to keep it up even as smarter Republican politicians would prefer to talk about something else. They realize that while a core of their constituency might want to hold on to the Confederacy, it’s not where the GOP needs to go if it wants to be competitive in the future.

But Trump won’t listen to those saner voices. Much like the neo-Confederates themselves, he’s fighting a war that has already been lost.

Charles M. Blow: The Civil Rights Act of 2020

Feel-good gestures from politicians and the police shift no power. Real change lies within a system overhaul.

There are images of police officers joining protesters in dancing the Cupid shuffle, taking knees and hugging little girls.

There have been images of members of Congress donning kente cloth stoles, Joe Biden taking a knee and Mitt Romney marching with protesters.

There have been images of a rainbow of races and ethnicities marching through streets with Black Lives Matter posters held high, of them kneeling in moments of silence, of defaced and beheaded statues.

All of these are feel-good gestures that cost nothing and shift no power. They create no justice and provide no equity.

The Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate are pondering separate legislative reactions. It is not yet clear if Donald Trump would agree to any of the provisions.

The Democrats’ bill predictably goes further than the Republican’s plan, but both primarily focus narrowly on police training, accountability, record keeping and punishment.

But, these bills, if they pass as conceived, would basically punish the system’s soldiers without altering the system itself. These bills would make the officers the fall guy for their bad behavior while doing little to condemn or even address the savagery and voraciousness of the system that required their service.

This country has established a system of supreme inequity, with racial inequity being a primary form, and used the police to protect the wealth that the system generated for some and to control the outrages and outbursts of those opposed to it and oppressed by it.

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: America Fails the Marshmallow Test

We lack the will to beat Covid-19.

The marshmallow test is a famous psychological experiment that tests children’s willingness to delay gratification. Children are offered a marshmallow, but told that they can have a second marshmallow if they’re willing to wait 15 minutes before eating the first one. Claims that children with the willpower to hold out do much better in life haven’t held up well, but the experiment is still a useful metaphor for many choices in life, both by individuals and by larger groups.

One way to think about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it poses a kind of marshmallow test for society.

At this point, there have been enough international success stories in dealing with the coronavirus to leave us with a clear sense of what beating the pandemic takes. First, you have to impose strict social distancing long enough to reduce the number of infected people to a small fraction of the population. Then you have to implement a regime of testing, tracing and isolating: quickly identifying any new outbreak, finding everyone exposed and quarantining them until the danger is past.

This strategy is workable. South Korea has done it. New Zealand has done it.

But you have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread. So it is, as I said, a kind of marshmallow test.

And America is failing that test.

Mara Gay: Good Riddance to One of America’s Strongest Police Secrecy Laws

In New York and elsewhere, street demonstrations are leading to police reform.

Protest works.

The large street demonstrations in scores of cities and towns across the country are bringing sudden and sweeping changes to police practices and accountability.

Minneapolis is preparing to disband and rebuild its police department.

California is poised to ban the use of police chokeholds.

Dozens of cities are considering redirecting millions in taxpayer funds from America’s heavily militarized police departments to education, health care, housing and other needs of black and Hispanic neighborhoods that have been underinvested in for generations.

New York took a step toward reform with the repeal Tuesday evening of a state law known as 50-a, a decades-old measure that has allowed the police to keep the disciplinary and personnel records of officers secret. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign the bill.

Susan E. Rice: Washington, D.C., Deserves Statehood

Trump transformed my hometown into a war zone, underscoring the imperative that the capital should be the 51st state.

For one long week, Mr. Trump transformed my hometown into a war zone to burnish his “law and order” credentials. Without statehood, Washington was virtually powerless to prevent Mr. Trump from using the capital as a petri dish to intimidate protesters, divide Americans and goad activists into ugly street battles to galvanize elements of his base.

America, beware. Washington was the testing ground, but Mr. Trump could yet find a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and send active-duty U.S. military forces into any state over the objections of its governor. He reportedly came close, only to be deterred by Pentagon officials.

Fortunately, when taunted by Mr. Trump’s abuse of power, the people of Washington refused to take the bait. The protests proceeded mostly peacefully, following some early, condemnable looting. Facing down federal forces, my hometown refused to give Mr. Trump any racially charged urban war scenes. So he gave up and ordered troops home.

But not before his actions underscored the imperative that Washington must finally attain statehood.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s peddling of a conspiracy theory about Antifa and protesters is part of a right wing trend

Baseless theories are being spread to derail the conversation about racism and police. Here’s how to push back

While some horrible tweets from Donald Trump are surely the result of impulsive decisions made during the president’s extensive “executive time” (read: sitting on the toilet, watching Fox News), there’s sadly good reason to believe that actual deliberation went into Tuesday’s tweet in which Trump smeared Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old peace activist who received a horrible head injury as a result of being pushed by police during a protest in Buffalo, New York.

The tweet, which accuses Gugino of being “an ANTIFA provocateur” trying to “black out” police equipment and who “fell harder than was pushed,” has one of the main hallmarks of being written by someone other than Trump, such as a White House staffer: It uses, and even correctly spells, a $5 word — “provocateur” — that is outside of Trump’s extremely limited vocabulary. So while the tweet masquerades as a Trumpian outburst, allowing Republican politicians and some media figures to pretend it’s not important, odds are this was not impulsive at all, but a calculated effort to float a conspiracy theory meant to discredit not just Gugino, but the larger protest movement against police brutality and racism that’s sweeping the nation. [..]

These conspiracy theories allow conservatives to downplay the legitimate concerns and organizing prowess of Black Lives Matter, a grassroots movement without centralized leadership. As the pressure mounts, expect to see more and more of these conspiracy theories proliferate through both right wing media and on social media platforms. It seems some conservatives would rather spend time on these conspiracy theories than talk about the larger problems being highlighted by the protests.

If you find yourself engaging with people who are citing conspiracy theories, avoid getting in a line-by-line argument with people over a narrative’s plausibility. Even getting into a fight over whether Floyd’s murder was “staged” is giving in to the desire to distract from the real issues.

Instead, the better approach is to go meta. Treat it as self-evident that the conspiracy theories are false (as they often are), and instead focus on calling out conspiracy theorists for repeating baseless claims in the service of a racist agenda.