Republicans are Democrats now

Jamelle Bouie explains why President Trump did better than expected:

At the end of March, President Trump signed the Cares Act, which distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans, from stimulus checks ($1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households below a certain income threshold) to $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits. ... But voters, and especially the low-propensity voters who flooded the electorate in support of Trump, aren’t attuned to the ins and outs of congressional debate. They did not know — and Democrats didn’t do a good enough job of telling them — that the president and his party opposed more generous benefits. All they knew is that Trump signed the bill (and the checks), giving them the kind of government assistance usually reserved for the nation’s ownership class.

I think there's something to this, but I'm also kind of amused. The conservative critique of social spending has often been that amounts to Democrats buying political power -- votes -- by bribing voters with government goodies. Remember Romney's "47 percent"? Remember "Obamaphones?" Republicans have even argued against universal health coverage because it would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Trump tossed that line of thinking away, and honestly, maybe that's valuable in the long-term. Except: Republicans will rediscover their fiscal rectitude when Biden takes power, of course.

God help us

 

When America plays cop in the world...

...it can end up having the same effects that cops sometimes do at home.

WaPo:

Ahmad’s relatives are among the civilians killed in events that are being documented with an unprecedented level of precision in a new accounting of the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. Using U.S. military geolocation data being made public for the first time, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars has pinpointed locations, some of them to within a meter squared, for hundreds of strikes resulting in more than 1,400 civilian deaths.

Throughout the campaign, strikes took place in crowded urban environments, where it was more difficult to distinguish between civilian and Islamic State targets. They also occurred in remote or militant-controlled areas, which complicated intelligence gathering and target verification.

Let me explain myself.

When police officers in America shoot unarmed civilians, they frequently end up unpenalized because the law gives great leeway to agents of the state who use lethal force when they "reasonably" feel like their personal safety is under threat. As we have seen, that "reasonably" stretches a long way, to almost unreasonable lengths.

Similarly, it appears that in the fight against ISIS -- a genuinely terrible, deadly organization -- the United States has decided to err on the side of its own safety, the the degree that the safety of non-American innocents becomes, well, not nearly as high as a priority as it should be.

It is probably the case that each individual targeting decision can be individually justified. Taken together, though, this number of civilian deaths is unconscionable. 

Sen. Josh Hawley could make himself really useful....

...by proving his economic populism bona fides and putting real pressure on Sen. Mitch McConnell to do something about this.

NYT:

The Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research warned on Wednesday that there were “significant downside risks” to the nation’s financial stability from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic and predicted that many households and businesses might be unable to recover without additional government assistance.

The end of the pandemic may be in sight. But we'll get there faster, and with less damage, if we spend a lot of money now.

The "Live Not By Lies" guy....

...is notably silent about all the lying this president is doing in order to keep his job. 

I guess some lies are more equal than others.

'That's politics'

This part of Paul Waldman's column alarms me:

And unlike the zillions of investigations of Democrats that Republicans have mounted whenever they had the opportunity, these wouldn’t be undertaken solely to gain political advantage. But so what if they were? That’s politics. If there’s actual wrongdoing to be exposed, then the investigation is justified.

Investigations shouldn't be undertaken solely for political advantage. Period. There's plenty to investigate about the Trump years. But it's wrong to use the powers of government just to usurp your rivals. It was wrong when Trump tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden. It was wrong when Republicans investigated Benghazi forever. Democrats might help themselves by playing the same game, but it would still be wrong and corrosive to what's left of our idea of "the rule of law."

A note about grace

About a decade ago, when I was undergoing a series of surgeries that saved my life but also left me broken, I was struck that several people reached out to me -- people with whom I thought I had burnt bridges, people I didn't expect or have any right to expect to show me kindness -- to express well-wishes and a speedy recovery for me.

I received a lot of grace, in other words.

Grace isn't something you earn or deserve, as a recipient. But it is wonderful to receive, and it can relieve the burden of hurt feelings and wrongdoings left unrighted.

I mention this because I ran into an old friend on the river trail today -- somebody whose entrance into my life a few decades ago caused a lot of anguish for people I deeply cared about. And I realized that, as the recipient of grace, I also needed to try and give it.

There's a quasi-spiritual dimension to all of this, I realize, that not everybody will buy into. I recognize that my understanding of all this is probably shaped by my Christian upbringing. What's more, I'm not in a position to expect anybody to show grace to others, especially when they've been wronged. All I know is that receiving grace humbled me. And for me, the proper response to that is to pay it forward.