"Ultimately, it’s the right thing to do. Freedom. If smoking marijuana doesn’t hurt anybody else, why shouldn’t we allow people to do it and not make it criminal?”

Said Chuck Schumer, who is introducing a bill to decriminalize marijuana, as reported in Vice, which doesn't mention Trump's recent statements in support of getting the federal government out of the marijuana control business.

And here's a new article in The Atlantic by Reihan Salam, "Is It Too Late to Stop the Rise of Marijuana, Inc.?/America is on the path to legalization, but as pot becomes a big business, lawmakers aren't yet wrestling with how to regulate it effectively."

A phrase that shocked me — "downscale white guys" — spoken by Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post.

I am used to class politics and racial politics. I have 181 and 993 blog posts with these tags. I read elite media every day and watch the Sunday shows — often all 5 — nearly every week. I notice and focus on language in my writing here. It's what I do. When something jumps out at me as different — not the way they normally talk — it means something. I think: Whoa! That must be the way they talk behind the scenes. The mask slipped.

Yesterday, on "Face the Nation," John Dickerson was moderating a panel discussion. He'd asked Ruth Marcus about Donald Trump's efforts to reach out to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in the interest of party unity. Marcus said "some Republicans" were "getting to yes with Donald Trump" but a lot were "getting to OMG with Donald Trump."

There was some talk about GOP leaders plotting a 3rd party move or "piggybacking" on the ballot access of the Libertarian or Constitution Party. But even if that worked to keep Trump from winning the presidency, where would it leave the Republican Party going forward? Reihan Salam (of The National Review) observed that younger voters — 18-29-year-old voters — leaned toward Bernie Sanders, and:

The Republican Party needs to think around the bend. Donald Trump is - he's energized a lot of voters who are, frankly, not going to be the voters of the future.

"Frankly" = These people are old and therefore on their way off Planet Earth (if not quite soon enough to stop Trump).

Susan Page (of USA Today) revealed that the Republicans who are talking to her (off the record) assume they're going to lose the presidential election, and they're just trying to figure out "a way to lose the presidency but hold the Senate" or — at least — "lose the White House and the Senate but not have the party destroyed." With that as the goal, they can't agree on "whether Ted Cruz or Donald Trump is the smarter bet."

John Dickerson said he'd talked to Lindsey Graham about that and "the gap between what they say privately and what they're willing to do [in] public... is vast." Two other panelists — Page and Jonathan Martin (of the NYT) — back Dickerson up. The GOP leaders don't want to endorse Cruz. Martin says:

[I]'s hard for these folks in the party to get behind Ted Cruz. Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham are trying to make it easier, but it's - it's still very difficult.... But this is - this is - the state of the GOP in March of 2016 is, we have to lose with Cruz, it's important. That's astonishing, right, that they are trying to save their party by nominating somebody that they assume will lose the presidency.

This idea that Cruz is the preferable loser triggers Ruth Marcus. She thinks Trump would be "a less strong candidate against Hillary Clinton than Ted Cruz," but then she says "the Clinton campaign is quite nervous about the prospect of running against Donald Trump." Now, that seems contradictory, but it makes sense if you think that both Cruz and Trump will lose to Hillary, but Trump will be a much more unpleasant opponent for her.

Dickerson prods Marcus to explain:

DICKERSON: Because why?

MARCUS: Because who knows.

MARTIN: The unknowns. Yes.

MARCUS: Be - because the rustbelt. Because all those down scale white guys, who knows what - you know with Ted Cruz sort of where he's going and what he's going to say. You don't know that with Donald Trump and you don't know what voters he can energize.

The adjective "downscale" along with "white" and the too-casual "guys" felt so contemptuous to me. And that comes right after the inarticulate "be- because the rustbelt." So disrespectful, so revealing of waves of loathing roiling underneath. These people who should be dead already might get "energized" by Trump. He's the trumpet that blows on Judgment Day and wakes the dead. Could they just please remain in a state of suspended animation until they have the dignity to disappear? That's what I'm hearing in "all those down scale white guys." She's saying: Don't they know they're not needed anymore... how ridiculous they look heaving themselves up off their death beds and dancing to Trump's tune?

I didn't think I'd ever heard the adjective "downscale" to refer to a human being. It seems like something you'd say about a shopping mall or a neighborhood (if you were talking about a place where other people go). I searched the NYT archive to reinforce my impression, and it mostly did. But I found this July 2013 column by Paul Krugman, "Whites and the Safety Net" that used "downscale" to refer to human beings — white human beings — 3 times:

But if there really is a missing-white-voter issue — and I’d like to see some more analysis by serious political scientists before I completely buy in — what will it take to bring these people back out to play? Sean Trende, who has been making the missing-whites case, describes the missing as “downscale, rural, Northern whites”. What can the GOP offer them?

Wow! We know the answer in 2016. The GOP could offer Donald Trump. Krugman continues:

Well, the trendy answer now is “libertarian populism” — but the question is what that means. And for a lot of Republicans, as Mike Konczal notes, it seems to mean lower tax rates on the wealthy, tight money, and deregulation. And this is supposed to appeal to downscale whites because, um, because.

There's that "because" tic we saw in Ruth Marcus.

Krugman, of course, thinks the GOP really has nothing for these people. He doesn't buy the GOP's supply-side economics and doesn't think it has any power to win over anyone who's not already a believer. And what's worse for the GOP is that their attacks on safety-net programs threaten the downscale white people:

[N]ews flash: these programs don’t just benefit Those People; they’re also very important to downscale whites, the very people that will supposedly rescue the GOP.

There's the theory. "Downscale white guys" — or "downscale whites" if you're in print — are on the dole. They should belong to the Democrats, who empathize with the vulnerable. The GOP wanted them, but only if they bought an agenda that made no direct appeal to them. And the billionaire saw them and spoke to them: We don't win anymore! And they came alive. 

"What can we do to break the stranglehold of the upper middle class?"

"I have no idea," says Reihan Salam (writing for Slate and including himself in the category "conservative"):

Having spent so much time around upper-middle-class Americans, and having entered their ranks in my own ambivalent way, I’ve come to understand their power. The upper middle class controls the media we consume. They run our big bureaucracies, our universities, and our hospitals. Their voices drown out those of other people at almost every turn. I fear that the only way we can check the tendency of upper-middle-class people to look out for their own interests at the expense of others is to make them feel at least a little guilty about it. It’s not much, but it’s a start. 

Shaming, eh? Salam imagines guilt-tripping families that make $200,000 a year or so into sacrificing their mortgage interest and college savings tax breaks for the greater good. If we could only get the people who have gained some decent economic security to stop paying attention to their own self interest, we could avert the destruction of America — that's Salam's idea. I'm not exaggerating: the article accuses the upper-middle class of "ruining America."

Meanwhile, liberals are always fretting about the way less-than-upper-middle-class Americans are failing to pay attention to their own self interest. That's "What's the Matter with Kansas."

Exactly how selfish are we supposed to be? Promoting unselfishness is a strange business, but I don't trust the big shamers and guilt-trippers of this world. They have their own self-interests, and they're choosing to promote them by tromping about in the darker parts of our psyche.

"We will not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq."

Said President Obama, observing that what is happening now in Iraq is not simply a military problem and blaming the leaders of the Iraqi government for not doing enough to overcome sectarian differences.

ADDED: At Slate, Reihan Salam writes "We Never Should Have Left Iraq/A U.S. military presence could have mollified Sunnis and prevented the new civil war." Excerpt:

Under Saddam, Iraq’s Shia plurality was subjugated by its Sunni minority. The fear among Sunnis has long been that once the Shias come to power, they would be the victims of all manner of reprisals. A similar dynamic has long been at play in Syria, where the Assad regime, closely tied to the Alawite minority, rules over a Sunni majority. It also played a role in the Bosnian civil war, where various ethnic groups fought desperately to avoid minority status, which many believed would amount to a death sentence.

Let's get jacked up over jacking up taxes on "nonparents."

I'm just going to link to Instapundit, who links to Reihan Salam at Slate, where there are over 1,000 comments, evincing what an Instapundit commenter calls "horrifying Deep Fever Swamp Leftism."

I don't want to get too deeply into fever swamps on the left or the right. I just want to say:

1. The phrase "jacking up" normally goes with opposition to taxes, so it's a humorous flip to use it when you're actually in favor of more taxes. I'll never forget the time, back in 2010, when we watched the Obama rally from the TV set up on the Union Terrace, in a big enthusiastic crowd of mostly students. I wished I'd caught this one guy on video. Upon some mention of taxes, he stood up facing the crowd and yelled "Taxes?! I say jack 'em up!!!" He did this with a big, clownish, full-body gesture that ended with arms aloft and thumbs up. Meade and I have been imitating that guy for years. For the drunk-on-beer/drunk-on-Obama Terrace crowd, maybe it all seemed like a dream or a joke. Need money? Get money! Jack 'em up!

2. But Salam is doing the humorous flip in the humble-altruistic form that says: Jack up my taxes. I deserve it.  Except he's not just talking about himself. He's talking about a lot of other people too. He's saying people like me need to be punished/penalized/tapped. That gives some creditability to the demand, but only to a point. Years ago I got into a disturbing conversation with someone who became so impassioned over how evil human beings are that he declared that the nuclear holocaust — which he was certain was coming — ought to come soon because we deserved it! His presence in the category of those declared to deserve it did not do much to bolster his authority.

3. Who are "nonparents"? Some "nonparents" are people who don't want children and are relying on others to do the work of making the new generations that will carry on civilization and serve us and benefit and keep us company as the years pass. But some "nonparents" are people who don't have children yet, perhaps because they are careful and conservative controllers of reproduction. I was one of those people in my teens and twenties. I waited until I had reached a level of financial stability before I had my first child at the age of 30. If I had never reached that level, maybe I would never have had any children. Jacking up taxes on the childless would function as a way to shift childbearing to those who don't worry so much about home economics. Eventually these new generations will take over government power, and what economic policies will seem like a good idea to them? I picture a horde of millions making a big, clownish, full-body gesture and yelling "Taxes?! I say jack 'em up!!!"

The Wisconsin protesters "are exactly the people that the O.W.S. crowd should not learn from..."

"... if they aspire to appeal to a wider audience than left-wing activists usually reach," writes Ross Douthat in the NYT. They represent "the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole."

The Wisconsin protests didn’t defend American workers’ right to bargain for their fair share of company profits, as traditional union protests have. They defended government employees’ right to negotiate with elected officials over the division of taxpayer dollars — a recipe for profligacy that even liberal icons like Franklin Roosevelt and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s George Meany once opposed....

Whatever your politics, there’s arguably more to admire in the ragtag theatricality of Occupy Wall Street than in that sort of self-righteous defense of the status quo. Even if it has failed to embrace plausible solutions, O.W.S. at least picked a deserving target — what National Review’s Reihan Salam describes as the “moral rupture” created by Wall Street’s and Washington’s betrayal of the public trust.

"Who else thinks Beck is more of a tent revivalist than a political pitchman, and that his ultimate goal is to win souls for the L.D.S. Church?"

That's a question from Reihan Salam, which Ross Douthat answers in the most absurdly equivocal way:

I don’t know if the Fox News host actually has any soul-winning ambitions. But you could, if you were so inclined, regard him as a kind of ecumenical outreach coordinator, working to burnish Mormonism’s image among conservative evangelicals.