Cagle World

How sad it is that few Americans have heard of Bob Graham, who died Tuesday at 87, because this guy was truly a profile in courage when we needed it most. And how sad it was, at a pivot point in our history, that few of his fellow Senate Democrats heeded his prescient words of warning.

Graham was many things in life – a Florida senator and governor who connected with voters by creating what he called “workdays,” guest-laboring as a bellhop, plumber, tomato picker, citrus packer, and road paver – but most of all he deserves to be remembered for defying the litany of lies ginned up by the George W. Bush regime to justify an invasion of Iraq. If only we had more Grahams today, to cut a swath through our Orwellian disinformation culture.

War fever was rampant in October of 2002 – 9/11 was still raw – and Team Bush was busy smearing anyone who voiced any qualms about kicking butt. Dissent was deemed “unpatriotic.” But Bob Graham had qualms and refused to knuckle under.

The Senate, in a bipartisan capitulation, voted to give Bush the authority to launch his preemptive war against Saddam Hussein despite zero evidence the dictator had any weapons of mass destruction. Most Senate Democrats voted yes, clearly afraid of being tagged as “soft” on national security. The capitulators included virtually every Democrat with presidential ambitions: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Joe Biden.

Graham had presidential ambitions, too. But unlike the others, he told the unvarnished truth. When he sought the 2004 Democratic nomination (he dropped out early because he needed heart surgery), he said stuff on the campaign trail that was very uncool at the time. Such as: “The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created. (Bush has) knowingly deceived the American people.”

Only 21 Senate Democrats voted no on that fateful day back in 2002. Graham, chairman of the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, was arguably the most prominent naysayer. He thumbed his nose at the war mob because – unlike most of his Democratic colleagues – he actually did his homework.

Shortly before the big Senate vote, he was “stunned” (his word) to learn the Bush team had never asked the intelligence community to formally assess whether Hussein actually possessed WMDs. How are we supposed to know whether Hussein has such weapons, Graham asked, if there’s no official assessment? Are we supposed to just take Bush and Cheney at their word?

Graham invoked his senatorial authority to order an official assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Three weeks later, the intel community complied. Graham read the 90 classified pages and saw there was no hard evidence that Hussein had WMDs. Indeed, Graham said later, the report featured “vigorous dissents.” He also learned that the intel community had no sources inside Iraq, nobody on the ground who could verify the Bush-Cheney pre-war spin.

But most of his fellow Dems didn’t read the report. Instead they relied on a declassified 25-page version that was released to the public. Magically, none of the dissenting opinions appeared in the sanitized report.

On Oct. 11 the senators voted on whether to give Bush his blank check. But first, they debated. Graham’s words would stand the test of time. He said that invading Iraq, which had no role in 9/11, would detract from the mission to find 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. It is wrong, he said, “to focus our military and intelligence resources on the wrong target.” He quoted Churchill, who once warned that those who surrender to wrong-headed war fever become “the slaves of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” Graham said: “With sadness, I predict we will live to regret this day.”

And so we did. We spent $728 billion on the Iraq war (according to the Defense Department), we logged 4,492 Americans killed in action, we treated 32,292 wounded Americans (health costs not included in that $728 billion), we killed roughly 200,000 Iraqi civilians, and we destabilized that region of the Middle East.

Graham took no pleasure in being right about what he later called “one of the most serious security mistakes in the history of the United States.” The tragedy is that so few of his colleagues had the guts to follow his lead.

He once said, “We need to make a greater investment in human intelligence.” Given the pandemic of stupidity in our current political discourse, that strikes me as sound advice – and a worthy epitaph.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

An adjudicated rapist, who was recently held liable by a jury for physically invading a woman’s bodily autonomy, has now taken it upon himself to opine about how government can control women’s bodily autonomy.

Before we even begin to analyze Donald Trump’s announcement of his stance on abortion this week, we do need to stipulate it’s as worthless as soiled tissue. This guy’s only fixed principle is saving his own rear, and whatever he’s saying now about abortion may well be junked if or when it strikes his fancy to mouth something else.

All stipulations aside, it is truly delicious to see Trump taking heat from all sides on an issue that has dogged him politically ever since his hand-crafted high court erased Roe v. Wade. The forced-birth zealots on the extreme right are furious that his newly-announced stance that states should decide abortion rights doesn’t go far enough to control women’s personal lives. Meanwhile, mainstream American leaders, starting with President Biden, are eviscerating him for going too far.

Trump congratulated himself for being “the person responsible” for ending Roe (true), claimed “all legal scholars, both sides” wanted to end Roe (a blatant lie), claimed Democrats support “execution after birth” (a blatant lie), then proceeded to punt the whole thing.

“The states will determine [what to do]. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state,” Trump said this week. “Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks [when abortion is permitted], or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be.”

What a wimp. He thinks he can just wash his hands of the mess he made and waddle away.

His cowardice won’t wash with the American mainstream, which solidly supports choice. According to a February poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 67 percent of independents – and even 43 percent of Republicans – favor federally-guaranteed abortion rights. Trump is basically saying that if a state wants to oppress women, he’s fine with that. Post-Roe, 14 states already ban virtually all abortions, and seven more impose severe restrictions – in other words, he’s fine with the reality that women in nearly half the states are deprived of personal freedom simply by dint of their geographical status.

He also said in a social media post that as a candidate, he can’t support a national ban on abortion because it would damage his chances of getting elected. But he never ruled out signing such a national ban if a new Republican Congress were to pass it and send it to his desk in a second Trump reign. Because this grifter will say or do anything as befits the moment – like in 1999 when he announced a presidential exploratory committee (yes he did!) and told NBC News, “I just believe in choice,” and, on the other hand, in 2016 when he said that women who exercise choice and have abortions should face “some form of punishment.”

Meanwhile, his new wobble has incurred the wrath of right-wing extremists. They’re steamed that he’s refusing to explicitly endorse a national ban and that he’s apparently fine with blue states protecting the right to choose. Pass the popcorn, please.

The president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said her followers are “deeply disappointed” with Trump. Mike Pence, having escaped the noose, wrote on social media: “President Trump’s retreat on the Right to Life is a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020.” And prominent podcaster and anti-abortion activist Lila Rose wrote that Trump “is not a pro-life candidate,” calling his current position “cowardly.”

To which I say: Great! Don’t vote for him. Stay home in November. Tell your fellow zealots to do the same.

When Trump punted to the states, he decreed: “We have taken the abortion issue largely out of play.” The truth is precisely the reverse. Look at what happened today in Arizona, where the state Supreme Court decreed an almost total ban on abortions. Arizona is a swing state, and now, thanks to Trump’s erasure of Roe, more women will be galvanized to vote blue in November.

Way to go, political genius. By rigging the high court to erase a 50-year precedent that encoded the freedom of women to control their bodies, Trump sowed the wind. Now he’s reaping the whirlwind.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

The Bible salesman deemed it a Christian gesture last week to retweet some MAGA moron’s depiction of the president of the United States trussed like a turkey in the back of a manly pickup truck.

No surprise there – Trump’s stinking sewage has long stressed our olfactory organs to the max. But what’s infuriating is that the criminal defendant, who’s out on bail in four jurisdictions, never gets held accountable for his incitements to violence.

You weren’t waiting for Trump to sincerely apologize for posting the Biden effigy photo, were you?

One hundred years ago this week, Adolph Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for his central role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch insurrection. By contrast, our own home-grown thug has yet to suffer even a slap on the wrist. Our courts move with the speed of a swimmer in quicksand, and don’t get me started (for the umpteenth time) about the Republicans and MAGAts who indulge and excuse every fascistic incitement.

At bare minimum, political commentator Michael Tomasky reminds us “anyone else who incited an insurrection against the temple of our democracy and wanted his own vice president hanged would have been drummed out of politics the next week.”

Last weekend’s flap over the hog-tied Biden image was a classic example. Trump’s defenders quickly flooded social media with condemnations of comedian Kathy Griffin. It was the predictable ButWhatAbout game – as in: But what about Griffin, who posted a shock-art pic back in 2017, when she posed with an effigy of Trump’s bloody severed head?

Yes, she did, and it was disgusting. Indeed, the MAGAts who seized on the Griffin episode – flying the flag of false equivalence – is that they ignored a slew of salient details. In ascending order of importance:

1. Kathy Griffin is not Joe Biden. If the president was posting violent images of Trump, that would be real equivalence. But he doesn’t live in the gutter.

2. Griffin immediately apologized for what she’d posted: “I crossed the line…I went too far…I beg for your forgiveness. I made a mistake and I was wrong.”

3. Trump’s critics quickly denounced her. Ex-Hillary Clinton aide Peter Daou, said, “I just saw the violent Trump imagery and I find it horrible.” Liberal celebrity-activists piled on. Actress Alyssa Milano tweeted at Griffin: “I’m sorry but that is totally inappropriate and so very offensive. And I have to believe you’re smart enough to know better.”

4. Griffin suffered professional consequences. She was fired from her annual CNN New Year’s Eve gig with Anderson Cooper. She lost a major sponsorship. Her 2017 comedy tour was canceled. She later said, “I lost about 75 percent of my friends that never came back.”

5. Since threatening a president is potentially a federal crime, she got in big trouble with the authorities. She was visited by the Secret Service. She was targeted by the Justice Department in a two-month investigation. She was put on the no-fly list. She was questioned by Interpol.

Trump deserves that level of accountability, at minimum. I fail to understand how a criminal defendant who encourages and exploits violent imagery about the president – and who repeatedly attacks, by name, the daughter of a judge in one of his criminal cases – has not, by definition, violated his bail release conditions.

One last word about what happened 100 years ago. Hitler’s five-year jail sentence was a pittance. The German courts were intimidated by his violent followers, and he was released within nine months. You know the rest of the story. Joni Mitchell said it best, in lyrics:

Strong and wrong you win
Only because
That’s the way it’s always been

As we careen toward America’s judgment day, are our stressed democratic institutions strong enough to win the future?

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

The welcome announcement arrived at dinnertime, and it was good for digestion.

Top NBC executive Cesar Conde ate crow: “Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor…I approved (the hire) and I take full responsibility for it.”

Then he tried to explain: “Our initial decision was made because of our deep commitment to presenting our audience with a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experiences.”

That’s precisely where they stepped in it with both feet. McDaniel, who worked closely with the criminal defendant to overturn a democratic election and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power, offers a “viewpoint” that is frankly fascist, that is far more Russian than American, that is the antithesis of every hallowed value this country stands for – and thus deserves nary a red cent from any respectable network’s treasury.

More broadly, Ronna has rebooted questions that have plagued the mainstream media ever since the MAGA virus took root: How do you cover a party that has degenerated into a cult? Is it possible (memo: it isn’t) to present “both sides” with traditional journalistic “balance” when the leader and fellow travelers of one party lie as they breathe and openly conspire to sabotage our democratic institutions?

I’ll tell you a little story. In the spring of 2018, during my time as a columnist under contract at WHYY News (Philadelphia’s public media outlet), it became clear to me that the station’s overlords were discomfited by my relentless focus on Trump’s serial misdeeds. (I called him “a clear and present danger” to the nation.) They asked if I could recommend a conservative columnist who might be willing to “balance” me and defend Trump.

I told them there was a big problem: No conservative pundit with an ounce of integrity and a respect for facts was willing any longer to defend Trump. Also, by definition, any pundit still willing to defend Trump was untethered to factual reality and likely had a screw loose.

The problem then is the problem now. Alas, Ronna McDaniels’ defenders don’t understand that.

For instance, GOP pollster Frank Luntz tweeted that McDaniel has a “perspective we all would benefit from. Instead of trying to silence her, we should be listening intently for all we can learn. I listen to people I disagree with all the time.”

So working to overthrow a democratic election is just another “perspective”? We’re supposed to normalize that?

Greta Van Susteren, the Newsmax host, tweets that mainstream broadcasters should not “disrespect” McDaniel because to do so “is not journalism,” it’s “Russia TV.” Those last few words are Orwellian topsy-turvy.

Over on Fox, Jeanine Pirro, said: “The liberal media can’t stand the idea of having a different point of view on their air.” Abetting a violent coup is just a “different” view, like maybe tax cuts versus tax hikes.

Some of McDaniels’ defenders have pointed out that ex-insiders have long migrated to the media, so what’s the big deal. Granted, that is one of Washington’s revolving-door traditions. The list of ex-Republican insiders who’ve made the big leap includes William Safire, Pat Buchanan, David Gergen, Bill Kristol, Michael Steele, Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, David Jolly, Brendan Buck, and many more. But – how hard is this to understand? – none of them have ever worked to destroy democracy from within.

That’s the obvious line McDaniel crossed – yet it’s still not clear that the NBC bigwigs get it. Conde’s announcement implied that the MAGA hack would be a paid pundit in good standing if not for the fact that the entire newsroom rebelled on the air.

“We must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum,” Conde wrote. Not a word about whether all coup conspirators and abetters of fascism will be persona non grata.

Apparently the quest for a truth-telling MAGAt with a credible “viewpoint” will continue. Good luck with that.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

How delicious it is to sniff the smoking wreckage of the House Republican’s fake impeachment probe.

For starters, we learned last month that the MAGA sleuths’ star witness against Joe Biden, a grifter named Alexander Smirnov, created “a false fictitious record” (according to a federal grand jury), concocting fake allegations against the president at the behest of the Kremlin. Turns out (according to federal court documents) Smirnov has “extensive and extremely recent” ties with “Russian intelligence agencies.”

He’s dwelling in a prison cell, awaiting trial for lying to the FBI.

This week, the guy who was originally tasked by Donald Trump to dig up Joe Biden dirt showed up at a House hearing and dynamited the entire proceedings.

Lev Parnas, a Soviet-born Ukrainian-American businessman who says “I was a Republican for Donald Trump,” was sent overseas at Trump’s behest to find evidence of Biden criminality in advance of the 2020 election. Turns out, he found absolutely nothing – except fake dirt ginned up by Russia.

Fox News declined to cover his testimony. No surprise there. Here’s what its viewers didn’t hear Parnas tell members of Congress:

“The American people have been lied to by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and various cohorts of individuals in government and media positions. They created falsehoods to serve their own interests… In my travels, I found precisely zero proof of the Bidens’ criminality. Instead, what I learned in that time frame was the true nature of the conspiracy that the Kremlin was forcing through Russian, Ukrainian, American, and other channels to interfere in our elections. Ultimately this was meant to benefit Trump’s re-election, which would in turn benefit Vladimir Putin…”

Parnas testified the only information pushed on the Bidens came from just one source: Russia and its agents, “predicated on a bunch of false information that is being spread by the Kremlin.” Parnas said he never presented any evidence of Biden’s corruptions “because there truly was none.”

“On the contrary, by setting up a search for false criminality, every individual majorly involved in this plan was disguising their own criminal activity. That persists to this very day,” Parnas added. “The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on a bunch of false information that is being spread by the Kremlin.“

Parnas also named names – most notably Ron Johnson, the Russian asset Wisconsin senator – for “pushing a false narrative” in sync with key figures at Fox News “who use this narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 election. Sadly, they are still doing this today as we approach the 2024 elections.”

Parnas tried last year to warn James Comer, the impeachment sleuth who chairs the House Oversight Committee, that he was drilling a dry hole – Parnas said in a letter, “With all due respect, Chairman Comer, the narrative you are seeking for this investigation has been proven false many times over.” But Comer, in true MAGA fashion, refused to face reality. So he held his hearing and Parnas blew it up. Which further confirmed what has long been obvious, that Comer makes Inspector Clouseau look like Elliot Ness.

The hearing was so comical that one Democratic congressman, Jared Moskowitz, decided to torture the panel’s MAGA Republicans by making a motion to impeach Biden and inviting the MAGAts to second it. None of them spoke. Moskowitz taunted, “No? Nothing! OK, we got nothing! They don’t have evidence! This is a show! It’s all fake!”

But all mockery aside, Lev Parnas’ message was very serious: “I believe that what we are facing now is the culmination of a much larger plan for Russia to crush Ukraine by infiltrating the United States,” by doing everything possible – hence Alexander Smirnov’s mission – to damage Biden’s reelection prospects and boost the useful idiot who would deliver Ukraine to Putin on a platter.

The big problem, of course, is that most American voters couldn’t care less about these geopolitical stakes. Putin’s intelligence team, which worked hard to meddle in the 2016 and 2020 presidential races, is still playing the long game, and now it has the GOP, a formerly pro-America party, at its beck and call, running fake probes, operating the U.S. House as a wing of Putin’s Duma.

How tragic it is that so many Americans worry so much about migrants at the border when the real enemy is already within.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

There are lots of thankless odious jobs in America – sanitation worker, septic tank repairman – but surely none are worse than cleaning up Donald Trump’s serial excrement.

That goes double for his top female acolytes, who are tasked with defending a thrice-married adulterous crotch-grabbing rapist currently on the hook for $92 million in defamation damages and slated for criminal trial two weeks from now in the porn star-business fraud-hush money case.

It’s a tough job, defending a guy who also brags about ending Roe v. Wade (sparking a new generation of pro-choice voters), a guy who’s anathema to most suburban women (voters who may well be pivotal in November). Nevertheless, some high-profile Republican women have already demonstrated their willingness to tout Trump and thus humiliate themselves.

By now you’ve met Katie Britt, the junior Alabama senator who got caught last Friday concocting a story about how Joe Biden’s border policies had caused a Mexican girl to be raped for four years in an American brothel (the brothel was in Mexico city, and George W. Bush was president at the time).

Britt, by the way, is still attacking us fact-checkers. On Fox News Sunday, she said: “It is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story.” But what’s really disgusting is that she lied about a sexual abuse case – falsely tying it to Biden – in order to boost Biden’s challenger, a court-convicted sexual abuser.

But the headliner was House member Nancy Mace, a South Carolinian who was once wary of Trump but has since had her brain pounded to dust beneath the MAGA heel. Her Sunday morning performance on George Stephanopoulos’ ABC News show warranted a Sunday night honorary Oscar for Best Implosion.

Mace has repeatedly shared her story of being raped at age 16. So Stephanopoulos, multiple times, asked her a simple straightforward question: As a rape victim, how can you endorse a rapist?

He pointed out: “Two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape…It’s been affirmed by a judge.”

A MAGAt doesn’t like being confronted with facts. The reflexive response is to huff and puff and feign persecution. These were Mace’s responses:

“I’m not going to sit here in your show and be asked a question meant to shame me…You are shaming me, you’re trying to shame me…You are trying to shame a rape victim. I find it disgusting…I find it deeply offensive…I find it offensive, as a rape victim, that you’re trying to shame me for my political choices.”

He wasn’t shaming her for being a rape victim. He was asking her a legitimate question; she was trying to exploit her standing as a rape victim to avoid giving an answer.

Her eventual answer was that Trump (“the man I believe is best for our country”) didn’t really do anything so bad: “He was not found guilty in a criminal court of law. It was a civil, it was sexual abuse. It wasn’t actually rape by the way…He defended himself over that and denies that it ever happened. But he was not found guilty in a criminal court of law. It was a civil judgment over sexual abuse.”

Oh.

So…civil courts don’t count? So it’s OK for a rape victim to support someone she admits is a sexual abuser? So the fact that Trump “defended himself and denies that it ever happened” is more credible than two jury verdicts and a judge’s affirmation? So her faux rationale (“it wasn’t rape, by the way”) is more credible than the judge’s ruling that, under New York law, what he did to E. Jean Carroll constituted rape?

But those who wear the Trump armband believe that the best defense is to stay on offensive. Mace later triple-downed on Stephanopoulos by calling him a “piece of s—” via the acronym POS.

Actually, I hope these MAGA women – Katie Britt, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace – keep punching themselves in the face. We need them on TV to repel more women voters. Indeed, we’ll need all the help we can get to defeat the Putin-Trump ticket.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Al Pacino, in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, sat in a bar and said, “Our life is looking forward or looking back. That’s it. Where is the moment?“

Good philosophical advice. We can’t alter the past and we can’t see the future, so we should maximize the present moment. Live in it. Draw satisfaction from it. Savor it.

That’s what I did during Joe Biden’s State of the Union gig.

I have no clue – and neither do you – whether his spirited address will boost his polls, propel him toward a second term, and save us from the rapist insurrectionist deadbeat. But here’s what I do know, having just seen and heard Joe in the here and now:

If I am fortunate enough to make it to age 81, please may I have his marbles.

Yeah, he flubbed a few sentences (as he has done ever since his stuttering childhood). But this guy has more fire than a Game of Thrones dragon. The whining Dems who’ve kept wringing their hands about him being too old should zip their flapping yaps and get to work on getting him reelected. The mainstream media should cancel whatever too old stories they’re working on and focus instead on this fundamental fact:

He can talk governance and policy in complete sentences – corporate taxes, health care, rents, insulin, preschool education, computer chips, IVF and abortion, you name it. Veteran Republican strategist Mike Murphy got it right when he tweeted, “I see a brain working at 100 percent.”

The MAGAts and their fellow travelers were reduced to carping that Biden was too aggressive, too stoked up, too angry, yelling too much. Haven’t they been saying since forever that Biden is so demented and enfeebled that he barely knows he’s alive?

Optics matter. Biden’s first task – aside from hosing down fretting Dems – was to reassure independent swing voters that he has the requisite energy and articulation to do the job. Did he plant seeds of success for November? Who knows. Tens of millions of Americans simply don’t pay attention. But in that urgent moment, with arguably the largest audience he’ll get all year, he sounded a lot more substantive than the incoherent lummox who thinks that wind farms kill whales.

Biden sought to woo those swing voters – and Nikki Haley Republican voters – with substance. He drew a stark (and accurate) contrast: He believes in governance and democratic values, while Trump and his MAGAts believe in sabotaging governance and democracy.

At one point, he confronted the too old nonsense head on and gave it a savvy twist: “When you get to my age, certain things become clearer than ever before…My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy…Now, other people my age see it differently. The American story of resentment, revenge and retribution – that’s not me…The issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old are our ideas. Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are the oldest of ideas. But you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back.”

Biden’s MAGA critics grumbled that Biden’s fiery State of the Union was unpresidential, that it was too “political,” too “partisan.” That’s hilarious, coming from people who applauded Trump for bringing Rush Limbaugh to a State of the Union and giving him the Medal of Freedom in the middle of the address. It’s an election year, everything is politicized, and since Trump is campaigning so hard to stay out of jail, Biden is fully entitled to talk policy in a campaign context.

Biden effectively fused policy and politics while talking about reproductive rights. He even called out the attending Supreme Court justices arrayed in front of him: “Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect, justices, ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.”

Throughout his onslaught – and particularly when he called out the House GOP for killing the tough border security bill at Trump’s insistence – Speaker Mike Johnson, the lightweight MAGA puppet, sat there looking like a guy undergoing a colonoscopy without the benefit of anesthesia. It must’ve been tough for him, realizing there was an adult in the room. I was reminded of another Al Pacino line from Glengarry Glen Ross: “You child! Whoever told you that you could work with men!”

Biden clearly intends to channel “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” In 1948, everyone assumed that President Truman would be toast on election day. The polls said it. The media said it. But Harry got his dander up and pounded away at the “do-nothing Congress.”

I sense the same vibe now. As Luke Russert, son of Tim, tweeted, “Never doubt an Irish Catholic with a chip on their shoulder.”

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

It’s perversely fitting that the anti-science quack whose imbecilic behavior during the pandemic resulted in an unnecessarily high death toll is now declaring that, if returned to power, he will withdraw all federal funds from public schools that require vaccines.

There’s a lot to unpack in that opening paragraph. The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, concluded in a ’21 report that Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of Covid” in the United States. As a result, as many as 40 percent of the 470,00 deaths that occurred on his watch could have been avoided, had he acted rationally.

But has Trump learned anything since? Of course not. At a Virginia rally last weekend, he indeed talked about punishing schools that mandate vaccines, a brain fart he first floated in Iowa a year ago.

As this country slowly goose-steps toward a MAGA Restoration, with roughly half the electorate too dumb or oblivious to take notice, Trump’s record on public health would seem to be relevant grist for fresh discussion. I know, the pandemic was so four years ago, ancient history by our standards – Gore Vidal was right when he quipped that U.S.A. stands for “the United States of Amnesia” – but since Trump was once an incumbent, perhaps we should treat him like one by re-inspecting his detestable actions.

And there’s no better time than right now, because last week, we marked the four-year anniversary of America’s first confirmed Covid death. Four years ago this week, the CDC reported 60 confirmed cases. Four years ago this month, the entire nation virtually shut down.

Trump, we now know, was seriously briefed about the impending crisis long before it hit. But here’s what he said publicly on Feb. 26, 2020: “When you have 15 (infected) people, and the 15 within a couple days is going to be down close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done…This will end. You look at flu season. (Covid) is a little bit different, but in some ways it’s easier…It’s a little like the regular flu.”

But that’s not what he told Bob Woodward in an interview on Feb. 7: “It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu…This is deadly stuff.”

Why didn’t he share these early warnings with his fellow citizens so that they could be better prepared? He answered that during an interview with Woodward on March 19: “Really, to be honest with you…I wanted to play it down. I still like playing it down.”

That’s why he fired Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, who’d made the mistake of committing public candor on Feb. 25 when she said that Americans should get ready for “significant disruptions” to their lives.

Then we got Dr. Trump’s miracle cures. He pitched hydroxychloroquine (“try it if you like…it’ll be wonderful, it’ll be so beautiful”) – which was deemed worthless by the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the World Health Organization. And when Richard Bright, a prominent federal vaccine expert, stated that the drug “clearly lack(ed) scientific merit,” Trump fired him.

Undeterred as always, Trump flashed his medical credentials on the topic of disinfectants. Either half the electorate wants to restore this kind of thinking to the presidency, or, more likely, half the electorate doesn’t remember it, or know it even happened, or doesn’t care that it happened. Trump was talking to a science official who was off camera:

“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light – and I think you said that hasn’t been checked because of the testing. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too…I see the disinfectant that knocks (Covid) out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

Suffice it to say that, during the Biden administration, the makers of Lysol haven’t felt compelled to issue a statement warning against internal uses of its cleaning project.

Five days after Trump’s 2017 Inaugural, I wrote that he would likely “get a lot of people killed.” That was a cinch prediction, and indeed he did. If we’re heedless enough to entrust our lives, yet again, to an anti-science sociopath, next time could well be worse.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

To best assess the execrable essence of Mitch McConnell, you just need to connect the dots.

After the MAGA insurrection on Jan. 6, after the dead and the injured and the feces smeared on walls, McConnell tore into Donald Trump. He said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president” who was guilty of “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

But when the time came to convict Trump during the impeachment trial, McConnell – and other Senate Republicans who followed his lead – voted to acquit. McConnell’s excuse: “We have a criminal justice system in this country… And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable.”

We learned this week the U.S. Supreme Court may make it impossible to hold Trump accountable in the criminal justice system prior to the November election – thanks to the MAGA justices who got their jobs courtesy of McConnell’s cynical machinations.

See how it works? That’s his legacy.

Those of us who love democracy are too dispirited to applaud McConnell’s decision to step down as Senate Republican leader. The damage he has done is too sobering to warrant any celebration. He has said that his reshaping of the Supreme Court, tilting it rightward for a generation or more, is the “most consequential thing I’ve ever done,” and he got that right.

Amazingly, he’s stepping down in part because Trump doesn’t think McConnell is loyal enough. McConnell saved Trump in the Jan. 6 impeachment trial, he has rigged the high court to minimize criminal accountability before the election – but Trump still calls him “Old Crow” and hurls racist insults at his Asian-American wife. Apparently McConnell’s criticism of Trump after Jan. 6 was unforgivable. Rest assured that McConnell’s successor as Senate GOP leader will be fitted with an airtight MAGA armband.

Trump may not to remember McConnell’s craven servitude, but we certainly do.

When high court conservative Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February 2016, it was President Obama’s right to nominate a replacement. He tapped respected centrist Merrick Garland for the seat. But McConnell, as majority leader, refused to schedule a hearing and stonewalled the process all year long.

He held the Scalia seat open until 2017 for Donald Trump and his nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Then, in 2020, during another presidential election year – indeed, just eight days before the balloting – McConnell squeezed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett onto the court.

So how fitting it was that within hours of McConnell’s step-down announcement, we learned that the MAGA-infested court – McConnell’s creation – has decided to throw Trump a lifeline. There are no constitutional grounds for giving a president total immunity from crimes, as the federal appeals court’s recent bulletproof decision made clear, but now the Supremes say they want to weigh in on that issue anyway. They’ve scheduled oral arguments seven long weeks from now, thereby making it highly unlikely that a criminal conviction in the federal coup-insurrection trial can happen before the election – or that the trial itself might even start before the election.

Voters in a democracy need to know whether the Republican nominee is guilty of trying to end democracy. Instead, thanks to McConnell’s machinations, we’ve been forced to take another goose step toward fascism.

And that’s before we even mention other rancid fruits from McConnell’s orchard – like the high court’s abolishment of affirmation action at most universities, its hostility to anti-gun laws, and its abolishment of women’s constitutional right to bodily autonomy (the fallout from the Dobbs ruling is obvious, most recently, in Alabama, where the state’s top jurists cited the Bible while ruling against in vitro fertilization). Thanks a lot, Mitch.

Jonathan V. Last, a wise center-right political analyst, sums it up nicely: “McConnell’s entire adult life was spent in pursuit of two goals – The placement of conservative judges in the federal judiciary and the advancement of the Republican party’s electoral prospects…Trump understood this. Which is why Trump was able to use McConnell so effectively. McConnell hates Trump. McConnell was never MAGA. McConnell is not in favor of authoritarianism. But none of that mattered because Trump was able to align McConnell’s primary goals with his own. And so in the end, McConnell became Trump’s tool just as surely as if he’d been a toadying true-believer.”

We could sure use a little humor right now, so here we go: When McConnell was a newly elected lawmaker back in January 1985, he stood at the podium in a Washington ballroom and tried to entertain with this joke: “I read about a Paris newspaper that conducted a major survey and asked French men what they did after making love. The results were indeed startling. Ten percent said they made love again. Fifteen percent smoked a cigarette. And 75 percent said they went home to their wives.”

The guy was as funny then as he is now.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

To the shock of absolutely nobody, and to the delight of MAGA wingnuts who worship Vladimir Putin, the Republicult’s presidential candidate broke his 72-hour silence about the murder of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny by puking this babble on social media:

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

I’m sure it reads better in the original Russian.

The first six words, in particular, read as if they were personally dictated by the sneaker salesman’s murderous puppeteer. Putin’s government said that Navalny succumbed from “sudden death syndrome,” and here we have Trump parroting “sudden death.”

Not a single word of condemnation, of course. Trump is Putin’s lapdog; that’s been obvious since at least 2016, and his fealty now threatens NATO and the international order. Trump dares not defend our American values, much less question a political murder.

There once was a time when Republicans stood steadfast against Russian abuse of human rights, but that abiding party principle has gone the way of the videocassette.

Worst of all, however, Trump’s whiny Navalny message is all about himself. Did we expect anything else?

It takes a lot of toxic moxie to equate one’s legal woes with a heroic dissident’s fate, to somehow suggest that he too is a victim, to use Navalny’s death in a gulag as an excuse to rail against “Unfair Courtroom Decisions” in our courts of law, to essentially claim that he is America’s Navalny, to intimate that President Biden is no better or worse than Putin.

As Garry Kasparov, a prominent Russian dissident now living in America, remarked, “Whenever you think Trump can’t get any lower, there’s a knock on the floorboards.”

Nevertheless, as you’d expect, Trump’s agitprop is being amplified by MAGAts far and wide (“Navalny=Trump,” says wingnut activist Dinesh D’Souza). But not everyone on the right is insane. Even the Wall Street Journal thinks that kind of mantra is dangerously nuts: “Mr. Biden isn’t Vladimir Putin. Mr. Biden doesn’t invade neighbors on a false pretext, killing indiscriminately. He doesn’t make people who have fallen into disfavor fall from windows of tall buildings…If you can’t see the difference, then you have lost – or discarded – your capacity for moral reasoning.”

And conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg laments: “Condemning false moral equivalence was once central to American conservatism…The notion that Joe Biden is the moral equivalent of Vladimir Putin is a slander, not merely of Biden, but of America itself.”

Yeah, let’s talk about America. A few decades ago, George W. Bush made a lot of mistakes (most notably, invading Iraq), but I well recall what he said about American values and human rights in his second inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2005. (As a reporter, I was 10 rows below his podium.)

These speech excerpts still – or should – resonate today:

“There is only one force of history that can expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom… America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. (Human rights) are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few: Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?”

If Putin’s bootlicker is returned to power in America, we’ll have our answer.

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Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]