Hindu nationalists are making a hero of Gandhi's assassin

NYT:

Indians consider Gandhi one of the fathers of their nation. But the rise of a Hindu nationalist government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has uncorked many extremist beliefs, and admiration for Gandhi’s killer, among some, has become more open. It is a sign of how much India has changed in the five and a half years since Mr. Modi took power. 

“Gandhi was a traitor,” said Pooja Shakun Pandey, who blames Gandhi for partition and who participated in a recent ceremony worshiping Mr. Godse on the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. “He deserved to be shot in the head.”

If your ideological or religious beliefs lead you to admire assassins, your ideological or religious beliefs are evil and and should be discarded.

Oh, and: Sound familiar?

Prominent Hindu nationalists still invoke Gandhi, but in many cases they are trying to co-opt his legacy — presenting their policies, however divisive, as congruent with his beliefs. One example: a recent citizenship law pushed by Mr. Modi’s government that, critics say, discriminates against Muslims and threatens the secular state that Gandhi had envisioned.

A lot of that going around.

Did impeachment make President Trump more popular?

Seeing a lot of this on Twitter this afternoon:

It's probably good to note that 49 percent approval rating is still mediocre -- and, very technically (but barely) means that just more than half of the country is not in the segment that approves of the president.

Nitpicking aside, it's difficult to tell Democrats -- politicians all -- that they should ignore the political ramifications of impeaching Trump because they did the right thing.

However: They did the right thing. The president did the wrong thing.

And if a process meant to expose and cleanse that wrongness from government instead lodges the president more firmly in office, well, that sucks. But it's not a judgement on whether the president was right or wrong to try and subvert the 2020 election. (Again: He was wrong.) That increase in popularity is, instead, ultimately a judgment on the institutions that put and kept Trump in office, as well as the media and voter infrastructure that can look at his wrongdoing and make him more popular.

There was no perfect way to do impeachment. We will be litigating "what ifs" for decades, though, I suppose. But whatever problems you think there were with the process, Donald Trump deserved to be impeached. That it wasn't successful or isn't popular isn't the point. Sometimes, calling out wrong is the right thing to do, even if the incentives and payoffs indicate otherwise.