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: Fighting Covid Is Like Fighting a War
Why Biden needs to go big and ignore the worriers.
There has been some pushback from progressive pundits — most notably Larry Summers, but he’s not alone — against President Biden’s proposal for a very large Covid relief package. Before I get into the reasons I believe this pushback is misguided, let me say that it’s refreshing to discuss good-faith criticism coming from people who actually have some idea what they’re talking about, as opposed to the cynical, know-nothing obstructionism that has become the Republican norm.
Nonetheless, the critics are wrong. No, the Biden plan isn’t too big. While the pundits’ concern that the size of the package might produce some economic stresses isn’t silly, it’s probably overwrought. And they have the implications of an expansive plan for the future completely backward: Going big now will enhance, not reduce, our ability to do more later.
To see where the criticism goes wrong, we first need to be clear about what the Biden administration and its allies in Congress are trying to accomplish.
Right from the beginning some of us tried to explain that the pandemic slump isn’t a conventional recession, and the required policy response isn’t conventional stimulus. What we’re dealing with is more like a natural disaster than a normal recession, and the appropriate policy response is mainly a kind of disaster relief.
After all these months, however, this remains a peculiarly hard point to get across; even some sophisticated economists sometimes fall into the trap of assessing policy in traditional stimulus terms.
Charles M. Blow: A Holistic View of Vaccine Hesitancy
From the perspective of Black people, particularly many young ones, the government is not to be trusted.
I recently had a conversation with a younger friend of mine — a Black man in his 30s here in Atlanta — about whether I was going to get the Covid-19 vaccine when it becomes available to me and whether I should.
My answer was clear: Absolutely.
So was his: Absolutely not. At least not yet, not until he was able to see over a longer period of time how others responded to it. In fact, he was somewhat astonished that I was eager to be vaccinated, treating it as a gullibility or naïveté on my part.
It wasn’t necessarily that he didn’t trust vaccines, it was that he didn’t trust the government that was pushing it. This mistrust, I believe, is an underappreciated part of vaccine hesitancy, particularly among younger Black people.
It is now a well-established fact that Black people are getting the vaccine less than their white counterparts and also express more doubt about it. But those numbers are more complicated than the top-line takeaways might suggest.
Jennifer Senior: The Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor Greene
She’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism.
When I was coming of age as a journalist, it was an article of faith — and political science — that female Republican politicians subdued their party’s excesses. It was a measurable phenomenon, even: Republican women voted to the left of their male counterparts in Congress.
But as the G.O.P. began to radicalize, becoming not just a small-government party but an anti-government party — a government delegitimization party — this taming effect ceased to be. Moderates of both sexes cleared out of the building. A new swarm of firebrands rushed in. Not only did female Republican elected officials become every bit as conservative as their male counterparts; they began, in some cases, to personify the party’s most outlandish tendencies.
This is the thought I keep returning to when I think about Marjorie Taylor Greene: That there is something depressingly familiar about her. She’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism, who delight in making trouble and in causing offense.
Amanda Marcotte: Republican Senators aren’t beholden to their base — they’ll acquit Trump because they agree with him
Republicans who claim they want to “move on” are lying, since the best way to do that is bar Trump from running
‘Tis the night before his second impeachment trial, and all through the Senate, cowardly Republicans are still grasping for some way to let Donald Trump off the hook while not looking complicit in his attempt to violently overthrow the government by sending a fascist crowd to storm the Capitol. (Hint: It’s impossible.) So Republicans are reaching for their most potent weapon in the battle to convince the D.C. cocktail party circuit that they’re still respectable statesmen: the welcoming arms of Politico, the beltway media outlet always willing to lend a sympathetic ear to pathetic excuses and amplify the silliest of GOP spin in the name of neutrality.
“Where Democrats and Republicans agree on Trump,” read a Monday morning headline at Politico. “Both parties want to be rid of him. They just differ on the means.”
Even without reading the full piece, one can tell this is hoary nonsense, as even the conventional wisdom holds that Republicans always make it a point to disagree with Democrats, even on basic questions of fact. “Always be ‘triggering‘ the liberals” has eclipsed any actual ideology as their main organizing principle. Still, we here at Salon buck the trends popularized by social media and make a point to actually read an article we deign to comment on. In this case, however, it does not improve the situation.
“Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in as many years has Democrats and Republicans in rare agreement: Most senators want to get it over with, and they want the former president to go away,” writes Andrew Desiderio.