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Last week’s Democratic convention sought to make four points: Joe Biden is a decent man, Donald Trump is horrible, the president bungled the pandemic and Mr. Biden would have handled it better because he grasped the threat from the start. Whatever you think of the first three, the last is a fabrication. But the former vice president likes to say it anyway. In June he claimed President Trump “did not listen to guys like me back in January saying we have a problem, a pandemic is on the way.” In May Mr. Biden said, “If he had listened to me and others and acted just one week earlier to deal with this virus, there’d be 36,000 fewer people dead.” The early comments of Mr. Biden and his advisers, however, show little evidence he was on top of anything. (Karl Rove, 8/26)

What a relief! I’d worried about the coronavirus, but we’re fine! I’ve been watching the Republican National Convention, and it turns out that while everyone else stood helpless before the pandemic, our national lodestar, President Trump, stepped up and saved millions of lives. Whew! “From the very beginning, Democrats, the media and the World Health Organization got the coronavirus wrong,” according to a G.O.P. propaganda film shown at the convention. Fortunately, “one leader took decisive action to save lives: President Donald Trump.” “We did the exact right thing,” Trump said in his speech on Monday. “We saved millions.” (Nicholas Kristof, 8/26)

What 176,000-plus deaths from covid-19? What devastating shutdown and recession? What double-digit unemployment? What mass uncertainty over whether and how to open the schools? What shocking police killings of African Americans? What long-overdue reckoning with systemic racism? Let me put it another way: What country does Vice President Pence live in?During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Pence sounded as though he lived in some kind of fantasyland that perhaps had encountered a few tiny little bumps in the road. (Eugene Robinson, 8/27)

Nicole Hemmer: After detailing her harrowing experiences with preventive mastectomy, Kayleigh McEnany delivered a fierce defense of the Affordable Care Act, explaining how vital it is that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. Weird that she did it at the Republican Convention, though, given that Trump is still trying to gut the A.C.A. Wajahat Ali: It takes a remarkable degree of chutzpah and shamelessness to trot out Black speakers to attack Black Lives Matter and promote Trump as the heir of Lincoln and steward of civil rights, while a Trump supporter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was arrested and charged with shooting and killing two people in Kenosha, Wis. People of color were brought out to launder Trump’s cruelty and racism and paint an upside-down version of reality that I thought only existed in the Twilight Zone. (8/27)

All presidents are tested by disasters, man-made and natural. Trump’s response seems always to be the same: denial. He pretends the virus will go away. He pretends the economy will come back like a “rocket.” He pretends climate change is a hoax. Among the busiest purveyors of such nonsense is Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, who told the convention on Tuesday that the pandemic and the recession were history. “It was awful,” he said. “But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the covid virus.” He claimed a booming economy and “a V-shaped recovery.” (Dana Milbank, 8/26)

But Democrats and their public health experts often manipulate data, and their dishonesty is more insidious because it gets a pass in the press. A case in point is a chart created by Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s Department of Health and Environment that purported to show her July 3 face-mask mandate has been a viral success. (Allysia Finley, 8/26)

The U.S. Census is broken. In the midst of a massive health crisis and a national equity crisis, the infrastructure behind the count that affects how much health-related funding is distributed has been suspended until various dates over the summer, with no guarantee that counts will approach previous levels of completeness or accuracy. But even before Covid-19, the chronically underfunded and underappreciated census was already undercounting disadvantaged groups. This year’s undercount, with implications spanning the entire coming decade, will most likely be worse. And now, more than ever, we need a complete and accurate census. (Mark A. Schuster, Artem Osherov, and Paul J. Chung, 8/27)

The tragedy unfolding in Kenosha, Wis., worsened overnight in ways that are at once shocking but also seemingly inevitable. Two people were shot dead and another wounded as protesters and self-styled militiamen faced off during a third night of street demonstrations after police on Sunday shot and gravely wounded yet another apparently unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake. Details of the latest violence remain sketchy Wednesday morning, but videos and photographs show verbal confrontations between protesters and heavily armed volunteers who said they were trying to protect a gas station in the area racked by vandalism, theft and arson the previous night. “They’re a militia,” Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth told reporters. “They’re like a vigilante group.” (8/26)