Liberal: Wrong Way To Win Back Voters
Democrats’ “unconditional defense of government bureaucracies does not appear to be a promising route” to recapturing the voters they’re losing, warns Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot.
Take their defense of USAID. “Most Americans know very little about USAID.”
And foreign aid, which it administers, is “one of the least popular parts of the federal budget.”
Plus, Dems “are blanket defending” this “obscure institution in an anti-institution era”: Voters “overwhelmingly” believe the US economic and political system needs “major changes,” at the very least.
Nor are Dems offering “any hint of what they would preserve and what they would get rid of.”
Dems need to “show some common sense in what they spend their political capital on.” As Rahm Emmanuel puts it, “Don’t swing at every pitch.”
Media watch: Ludicrous Denials of Gov’t Fraud
“The media spin-masters are gaslighting the public” by proclaiming that “government fraud is a mirage — a pretext for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to bulldoze vital programs,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley.
Last week, for example, The New York Times reported that Musk “offered no evidence for his sweeping claims” of fraud.
And “after the White House pushed back against” the piece, notes Finley, “Washington’s press corps circled the wagons.”
Indeed, Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake raced to debunk Musk’s fraud claims, except that in his piece, “Blake dismissed a 2024 Government Accountability Office report that projected $233 billion to $521 billion in federal fraud each year.”
“By dismissing and playing down what Americans can see with their own eyes, the press is giving Americans more reason to distrust it.”
Ukraine desk: Hegseth’s ‘Shock Therapy’
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has uttered “the uncomfortable truth that it is unrealistic to expect a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders,” notes Eliot A. Cohen at The Atlantic.
He also “ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a negotiated settlement — also unfair, but also inevitable.”
“The bottom line is that the administration will broker, and possibly coerce, a deal that is bad for Ukraine.”
Why? In no small part because American leaders have long “insisted to Europe as a whole that Americans will not indefinitely bear the burden of Europe’s security.”
And “their European counterparts have smiled politely and ignored them.” “Blunt truths” like those noted by Hegseth may be “shock therapy.”
And that, “however inexpertly administered, can be part of the cure.”
Law prof: ‘This Is What Democracy Looks Like’
“Not since Dorothy tossed her bucket of water on the Wicked Witch has shrinkage triggered such drama,” snarks Jonathan Turley at USA Today of the howling by congressional Democrats over Trump’s moves to downsize the federal government.
Yet “a strong majority of Americans say Trump is keeping his promises, including in his efforts to reduce government spending and waste.”
Trump’s “generous buyout offer” is the best way to shrink the government” — and he “has the authority to offer the buyouts.”
Unfortunately for the so-called “defenders of democracy,” “this is what democracy looks like,” and it’s “what Americans asked for in reelecting Donald Trump.”
Libertarian: Foreign Funds for US Farmers?
At Reason, Jack Nicastro blasts Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s argument that pausing USAID spending would hurt farmers, since it purchases grain from them and provides food for the world.
“Subsidizing foreign demand for American agricultural products misdirects resources from charity to self-dealing.”
The agency wasn’t established to aid farmers but to promote social and economic development in foreign countries, “in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.”
Anyway, the Department of Agriculture already does that, “to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.”
If USAID is going alleviate global hunger, “it should distribute nutritious food in the most efficient way possible — not in the way that provides the most rents for American farmers.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
