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To the shock of nobody, Speaker Mike Johnson has already proven himself to be a contemptible little man, pitching a crackpot deal to fund aid for Israel by swiping the money from the bolstered IRS program that cracks down on rich tax cheaters.

Surely Johnson must know that by letting the rich off the hook, it shifts the tax burden to the middle class, right? Maybe he consulted his Bible and found a comforting passage – something like, “Be not honest about what thee knows, lest it enlighten even those in thrall to thou.”

But what fascinates me most about Speaker Mike is his Biblical devotion to the dinosaurs. It’s kind of funny, until we examine it closely.

Given the MAGA GOP’s steady descent into madness, I suppose it’s no surprise that the cult would award the speaker’s gavel to a guy who thinks the earth is only 6,000 years old and thinks that prehistoric creatures hitched rides on Noah’s Ark. But hey, the Book of Genesis says that on the sixth day of creation all land animals, humans and dinosaurs alike, were created at the same time; as Mike decreed unto us in a 2021 interview, the ark episode “is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

I’ve got say, that’s quite a brain twister.

That’s what they teach at the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky. Mike is personally and professionally close to Answers in Genesis, the group that founded the park; prior to his House career, Mike did legal work for the park. He and the group sing the same hymn. The group says that what’s written in Genesis, about the dinosaurs and everything else, “is a simple but factual presentation of actual events.”

For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the fact the Earth is scientifically estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, and that dinosaurs predated humans by roughly 65 million years (according to geological findings). As Janet Kellogg Ray, an adjunct biology professor in Texas has written, “The timeline just doesn’t work.” But even if we contrive to ignore the timeline, and instead take Speaker Mike at his word, we’re still stuck with a serious conundrum:

How the heck did Noah fit those weighty dinosaurs on board without breaking the boat?

Take, for instance, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which weighed roughly seven tons. Or consider the far more capacious Titanosaurus, which reputedly tipped the scales at anywhere from 57 to 85 tons. Noah’s boat, according to Genesis, was only 450 feet long and 75 feet wide, so how did he manage the miraculous feat ascribed to him by the Bible – especially on a boat made of wood?

Those creatures surely stressed the vessel – unless, maybe, Noah’s contractor had miraculous foresight and built the boat with steel plating, aluminum, fiberglass and epoxy resin. That would’ve kept it afloat for 40 days, although…well…there would’ve been another problem: In that time the notoriously carnivorous T. Rex would’ve eaten all the little two-by-two animals.

The Bible doesn’t address that particular problem, which is quite an omission for a purported “factual presentation of actual events,” but no matter. Speaker Mike insisted in a 2022 podcast that the Kentucky ark and creationist museum is a can’t-miss: “For all of our friends who have not made a visit, it’s hard to describe. It’s really an awesome experience.”

I don’t begrudge Bible adherents for believing what they want to believe. After all, freedom of worship is constitutionally enshrined. What’s dangerous, however, is a House Speaker who’s tethered to fairy tales. The same guy who believes that dinosaurs bestrode an ark 6,000 years ago despite all factual geological evidence also believes that Trump won the last presidential race despite all factual legal evidence – and, if necessary, he’ll likely say the same if Trump (or any other Republican) loses in 2024.

And that’s not funny at all.

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Copyright 2023 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 surprise of absolutely nobody with a functioning intellect, House Republicans have finally solved their leadership crisis by replacing an election-subverting Trump butt-kisser (Kevin McCarthy) with an election-subverting Trump butt-kissing Christian nationalist backbencher with no leadership experience who says that his abhorrent policy views in the secular realm are dictated by God in the religious realm.

Just what we need running the House: An evangelical fanatic who touts the blessing of a felonious criminal defendant who was fined $10,000 for contempt of court. A guy who formerly ranked 213th in House seniority is now second in line to the presidency. Every time we think we’ve hit bottom in this benighted nation, another cellar trap door creaks open.

Mike Johnson (who?), the new House Speaker (what?) sayeth this: “My faith informs everything I do,” everything from his desire for a national abortion ban to his lust for national criminalization of “inherently unnatural” gay sex. This farce is surely prompting Constitution author James Madison to spin 360 degrees – given his fervent support, in an 1819 letter, for “the total separation of the Church from the State,” and his 1788 statement defending the nation’s founding document: “There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.”

But what else should we have expected from the MAGA cultists and their fellow travelers? Even the so-called moderates who hail from blue districts fell into line for a theocrat who in a podcast last month put a topsy-turvy spin on our nation’s core principles and dissed Madison to the max: “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around. If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history.”

I reviewed it. Johnson is wrong and dangerous. God has apparently texted unto him that “homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” and therefore gay marriages as sanctioned by the Supreme Court and federal law shall thusly be overturned.

God has apparently texted unto him that the Supreme Court’s precedents separating church and state (rulings that go back 76 years) run afoul of the Bible. God also apparently believes that the fight for freedom in Ukraine isn’t worth financing with American bucks, because Johnson has twice voted no.

Oh, and you’ve heard about the latest mass shooting, this time in Maine? Johnson said “prayer is appropriate in a time like this,” because of course. That’s better than voting for gun safety laws, which Johnson won’t do.

God has also apparently decreed unto him that he shall continue to preach the fascist lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Indeed he was a key saboteur, goading 125 of his House colleagues to sign an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, supporting a baseless lawsuit that sought to throw out the election results in Pennsylvania and other key battleground states. He said that his refusal to certify Joe Biden’s victory was based on “God’s discernment.” And besides, God had apparently informed him that Venezuela elected Biden, because he recited that lunatic lie in a radio interview: “When you have (fraud) on a grand scale, when you have, you know, a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela…it begs to be investigated.”

Bottom line: This guy is basically Jim Jordan in a suit coat – a seditionist with a smile and a splash of biblical fervor.

The big question, of course, is whether God’s humble servant will wreck the House and make us even more of a laughingstock on the world stage at a time when our allies need us most – and render us even more ineffectual at home, with another government shutdown on the horizon. Granted, Johnson is checked and balanced by a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, and his House majority is tiny thanks to the non-existent red wave in the ’22 midterms, but one lunatic chamber can wreak great havoc thanks to the separation of powers.

Rich Lowry, a veteran conservative commentator, says that Johnson’s tenure (assuming it lasts) might be rocky: “How to hold together the various factions that are inevitably part of a majority coalition? This isn’t easy, and gets much harder if members care more about their primetime cable hit than making any responsible contribution, even in opposition to the leadership… The chaos of the last few weeks may make it a little more likely that they are eventually relieved of the burden of being part of a majority next November.”

Perhaps – but only if voters pay sufficient attention. Are they?

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Copyright 2023 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 judge in Donald Trump’s most important criminal trial has put a muzzle on the mad dog. It’s about time.

Granted, free speech is a sacred right in this country, guaranteed by the First Amendment. But the right to publicly say whatever we want – to even lie with impunity – is not deemed cool by the courts in all circumstances.

In 1991, for instance, our highest court ruled that it’s impermissible to make “extrajudicial statements” that “pose a threat” to “the integrity and fairness of a State’s judicial system.” The justices wrote: “Few interests under the Constitution are more fundamental than the right to a fair trial by impartial jurors,” and therefore, “narrowly tailored” restrictions on free speech become necessary when statements are “substantially likely to have a materially prejudicial effect” on trial proceedings.

That’s basically the way U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled earlier this week, to protect the integrity of the impending coup trial in Washington, where the defendant will face four criminal charges. Trump is already in victim mode, ranting that a federal gag order has never been slapped on a presidential candidate ever before in American history. Of course, such a gag order has never been imposed before because no previous presidential candidate has ever been a criminal defendant, much less one who has personally attacked prosecutors and judges and the judicial system in general.

Trump has long been cruising for this bruising – such as pining for the execution of Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley, a potential witness – and it’s high time he got treated just like any other criminal defendant who tries to trash talk an impending trial.

“In 30 years as a federal prosecutor, I cannot recall ever seeing a defendant on pretrial release in a felony case threaten the life of a witness – or, in Trump’s case, suggest that a witness should be executed – and remain on pretrial release,” said Glenn Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney “The judicial system’s casual treatment of Trump’s unending threats, harassment and intimidation of witnesses is as perplexing as it is alarming.”

Granted, we should concede that Trump – by dint of his decision to run for president as a way to elude jail – is not like any other criminal defendant. Gag orders are indeed issued in high-profile cases, but there are zero court decisions that specifically address the speech of criminal defendants who run for office, much less the presidency. So what Chutkan did may not be the final word, if higher federal courts weigh in.

She was careful, however, to distinguish between what Trump can say and what he cannot. He remains free to lie his ass off, as usual, about President Biden and the Justice Department (as he did pre-gag order, claiming with no basis in fact that “the Biden administration” had ordered Chutkan to gag him); he remains free to trash talk his rivals in the presidential race (if he wants to keep calling Nikki Haley a “birdbrain,” and Chris Christie a fatso, the fine); and he remains free to lie his ass off about stuff he knows nothing about (in Iowa yesterday he said that you can’t buy flypaper anymore “because of cruelty to animals”). That’s all free speech, broadly covered by the First Amendment.

But he’s hereby barred from calling Jack Smith “deranged,” calling prosecutors “a bunch of thugs,” inviting his twisted followers to “go after” court personnel, attacking what Chutkan calls “any reasonably foreseeable witness,” and impugning the professional integrity of the judges (most notably Chutkan). As she said in court yesterday, shortly before imposing the gag order, “His presidential candidacy does not give him the cart blanche to vilify…public servants who are simply doing their job…This is about language that presents a danger to the administration of justice.”

Two inevitable questions: How long will it take for Trump to violate the gag order (hence, the terms of his pretrial release)? And if that were to happen, what’s Chutkan prepared to do?

We’ve yet to see how far Trump will go to play the martyr. In Iowa, he said: “I am willing to go to jail if that’s what it takes for our country to win and become a democracy again.”

That works for me.

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Copyright 2023 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]

Last week the MAGA brats in the U.S. House ousted their Speaker and basically crashed the chamber because that’s what nihilists do, they seek and destroy. But now come the consequences.

A major Middle East crisis has rocked the world, and, for the gang that can’t govern, play time is suddenly over.

Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, one of the adults in that benighted chamber, said it well when asked on CNN whether he and his colleagues can adequately respond, especially by aiding Israel to the fullest financial extent.

“I look at the world and all the threats that are out there, and what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we’re dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a Speaker of the House?” McCaul said. “I mean, how does Chairman Xi in China look at this when he says democracy doesn’t work? How does the ayatollah look at this, knowing that we cannot function properly? And I think it sends a terrible message… We’re just in too dangerous of a time right now to be playing games with national security.”

No kidding. But this is what happens when a cult gets a whiff of power. It weakens the country it purports to love, and never more glaringly than when an international crisis flares and the western world looks to us for leadership – ideally, unified bipartisan leadership. Instead, we’re hampered not only by the clowns in the dysfunctional House, but by a pair of clowns on the Senate side – most notably dumb jock Tommy Tuberville, whose blockade of military promotions has left us without a Chief of Naval Operations, a job that seems a tad important right now. There’s also Rand Paul, the Covid conspiracy theorist, who has been blocking a string of ambassadorial appointments – which means that, in this urgent moment, we don’t have a U.S. ambassador to Israel. Or to Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon.

Nevertheless, cultists have been quite voluble about the breakout of war, taking refuge in lies. The biggest whopper – which you’ve likely heard because it has landed in the mainstream media via relentless cult repetition – is that President Biden funded Hamas’ terrorist attacks. Because he (supposedly) bribed Iran to recently release some American-dual citizen inmates by giving it $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars; Iran then (supposedly) gave that money to Hamas, which then (supposedly) used it to finance its terrorist attacks.

All nonsense. The $6 billion wasn’t U.S. tax dollars – it was Iranian oil revenue that the U.S. had frozen. The money didn’t go back to the Iranian government, and, indeed it hasn’t even been released yet –it’s being held by third parties in Qatar, and the U.S. will have a role in overseeing how it’ll be spent. And it’s all earmarked for humanitarian needs like food and medicine.

But the lie is still being recycled because it’s so much easier than actually doing stuff.

There once was a time when both parties worked together in the wake of an international crisis, but today that ethos is as archaic as the videocassette.

Some Republican congressmen seem to understand the urgency of the moment. Rep. Brandon Williams of New York wrote on social media “the nation in the world needs America’s Congress to be functioning,” while fellow New York Rep. Michael Lawler warned “uncertainty and chaos in the U.S. breeds vulnerability around the world.”

It’s clear the most destructive cultists could use a good dose of James Madison.

In the 10th Federalist Paper, the architect of the Constitution lamented that zealots who exploit “human passions” have all too often “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.” He envisioned that a Congress would quell such passions. It would be “a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

That would be nice. But, as the late singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith once penned, “If wishes were changes/ We’d all live in roses.”

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Copyright 2023 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]

“In yet another spasm of dysfunction, the batty House Republicans have now conspired to trash the very notion of sane governance…What we just witnessed was the most vivid example yet of the destructive power of Republican extremism… a party exhibiting all the cognitive sanity of a drunk driving into a tree.”

I wrote that. Eleven years ago.

Late in 2012, the looniest far-right House Republicans were plaguing their own Speaker, John Boehner, holding up a budget deal and threatening the government with financial ruin. One Republican strategist lamented on Twitter that Boehner’s thankless job was akin to “herding cats on crack.” I wrote that the extremists (back then, we called them tea partiers) were incapable “of acting in the public interest, accepting half a loaf for the greater good of governance.”

You get my drift. Everything old is new again, except worse. With the likes of Matt Gaetz and his hair now running the show, having just purged their own Speaker (a first in U.S. history), those tea party stalwarts of yesteryear look like statesmen.

You know things are uniquely dysfunctional when a dirtbag like Kevin McCarthy works overtime to run the MAGA playbook – kissing Trump’s rear after Jan. 6, voting to overturn the election, launching a fake impeachment probe of Joe Biden, indulging rank and file morons like Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert – and it still wasn’t good enough for the House MAGAts.

Cue the Talking Heads song:

Hold tight, wait till the party’s over
Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

This Republican abyss has been a long time coming – nearly 30 years in the making, back to when Newt Gingrich as a rookie Speaker introduced ideological confrontation as a party brand and forced a government shutdown in 1995. That’s when the nuttiest stuff started happening.

Newt led the House’s impeachment probe of President Clinton, and then, when he was outed as an adulterer and quit Congress, his anointed Speaker successor, Bob Livingston, was outed as the squire of multiple mistresses and chose to quit his seat, whereupon the Speaker job went to Dennis Hastert, who, after he left Congress, turned out to be a serial child molester and spent 15 months in the slammer.

Then came Speakers Boehner and Paul Ryan, both of whom ultimately quit the chamber because they could no longer abide the nutcases in their ranks. In Ryan’s case, the top nut was Trump.

(By the way, McCarthy sucked up to Trump after Jan. 6, but did Trump lift a finger to save him during the purge offensive? As if we need to ask.)

What happens next, post-McCarthy, is anyone’s guess. Who in their right mind (assuming there is such a person in that mindless bunch) would want to wield the Speaker’s gavel? It’s tempting to just kick back with popcorn and watch the spectacle. In the words of commentator Jason Linkins at The New Republic, “What Republicans are enduring can’t be solved by rational people appealing to better natures that don’t exist. The only way out is for the GOP to eat shit, every day, until their bellies are full.”

But full bellies aren’t likely to bring sufficient enlightenment to solve our most immediate woes – like the fact the government’s lights will go out in mid-November, and that financing for Ukraine’s war against Putin fascism dearly needs the federal money that Putin’s MAGA House allies are thwarting.

Gee, I don’t remember this kind of juvenile nihilism going on when Nancy Pelosi ran the House with a similarly thin majority. But if that’s what Republicans want to advertise about themselves – burning down the House, highlighting their inability to get things done – then perhaps that political malpractice can grease a Democratic takeover in 2024.

Here’s a quote from an Ohio Republican congressman, lamenting his party’s dysfunction: “It’s unbelievable, this is horrible, I’m angry. I’m sad for my friend the Speaker, and I’m sorry for the country. We deserve better.”

The guy said that in 2012.

Or, as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue.”

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Copyright 2023 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].

These Republican presidential squabble-debates are so worthless, so utterly devoid of value, that they make three-dollar bills look like Bob Menendez’s gold bars.

How is it possible for these B-team blowhards to yammer on for two interminable hours without once mentioning that the cult’s AWOL authoritarian, Donald Trump, recently pined for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Wednesday night, during the second Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election, wouldn’t it have been a decent gesture to at least thank General Mark Milley for his 43 years of service to his country and the Constitution? Shouldn’t the hapless trio of questioners (two were Fox-related) have asked the candidates whether it’s right to threaten a military leader with death? And whether it’s wise to pledge support to a potential nominee who’s formally accused of 91 felonies, who has been formally judged to be a sex assailant, and who, this very week, has been formally judged to be a serial financial fraudster?

Especially the latter.

Republicans have long revered private enterprise and hard-earned wealth. Yet they’re poised to pledge fealty in 2024 to a fake whose purported empire has been built on a pile of sand. We know this now, officially, because a judge in New York has crunched the incontrovertible numbers and concluded that Trump is the Great and Powerful Oz with the curtain yanked open.

Turns out, Trump for years has blatantly inflated the value of his assets – everything from skyscrapers to golf courses to his Mar-a-Lago estate – padding his bottom line by billions, defrauding banks and insurance companies in the process. Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling in a civil lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general, says Trump lives in “a fantasy world, not the real world,” because he has repeatedly lied in his annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favorable loan terms and lower insurance premiums. Indeed, those financial statements “make abundantly clear that Mr. Trump was fully responsible for the information contained within” them – and the laws governing such statements do not “insulate liars from liability.”

For example, the judge concluded that Trump has inflated the value of his Trump Tower triplex apartment by three times its size, resulting in an overvaluation of between $114 million to $207 million. In Engoron’s words, “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.” And the judge discovered that Trump’s financial statements about Mar-a-Lago were wildly amiss – “an overvaluation of at least 2300 percent, compared to the assessor’s appraisal.”

Somebody on the debate stage should’ve had the gumption to say something like this: “Back in 2016, Donald Trump’s entire ‘brand’ was built on the false notion that he was a wildly successful multi-billionaire who’d apply his business acumen to the job of governance. Now we have learned that it was all a lie. Building a fraudulent brand is a failure of character, and we can no longer tolerate that kind of behavior in our party.”

But, as expected, everyone on stage insulated the liar from liability.

Here’s what the liar said on a debate stage seven years ago, during one of the autumn presidential debates: “I built a massive company, a great company, some of the greatest assets anywhere in the world worth many, many billions of dollars…A phenomenal company. And if we could run our country the way I’ve run my company, we would have a country that you would be so proud of.”

But if memory serves, there was a candidate in 2016 who questioned whether Trump was the financial phenom he claimed to be. She said that Trump’s track record was actually quite hinky (multiple bankruptcies), that he was a serial grifter (he’d “stiffed” many of his small contractors, refusing to pay them), and she warned that “sometimes there’s not a direct transfer of skills from business to government,” that “sometimes what happened in business would be really bad for government.”

Best of all, she said this: “Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is.”

On that debate stage, Hillary Clinton was right again.

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Copyright 2023 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 easiest way to write about the House Republicans’ purported impeachment probe of President Biden, a theatrical stunt launched with zero actual evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, is to simply focus on MAGA mascot Kevin McCarthy – the hapless Speaker best described by the late sane conservative pundit Michael Gerson as a “simpering paragon of mediocrity, shallowness, cravenness.”

It’s tempting indeed to just target McCarthy, who said two weeks ago that an impeachment probe of a president should only be launched when a majority of House members deem it necessary; in his words, “if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House, and not through a declaration of one person.” Then last week, having (rightly) suspected that he’d fail to muster a majority, he proceeded to open the Biden inquiry based on the declaration of one person, himself.

So pathetic, but so predictable. I wrote last November that McCarthy would be Speaker in name only, “with one ear attuned to his master in Mar-a-Lago and the other bent to the whims of the whackos.” Michael Gerson predicted that McCarthy’s MAGA clowns would practice “governing by gangsterism.”

It’s actually worse than that. This impeachment farce is a textbook manifestation of the nihilistic strategy best coined by MAGAt Steve Bannon: “Flood the zone with s—.”

That’s how Vladimir Putin rolls in Russia. His apparatchiks pump thick clouds of disinformation so that citizens can no longer discern what’s true. Fake stories obfuscate what’s real. People who are exhausted by all the dueling narratives instinctively question the credibility of their foundational institutions.

The American version goes like this: Trump has been indicted in four jurisdictions on 91 felony charges, with more revelations seemingly surfacing every day (the latest is that he wrote to-do notes for one of his aides on the back of classified documents)…but wait!, now there’s a Joe Biden impeachment probe that’s looking at corrupt stuff he does, too. Because everything is a sham and a con and everybody is corrupt and crooked, therefore Trump is no more corrupt and crooked than anybody else. And if Biden is getting impeached for high crimes, then big deal that Trump has been indicted for crimes.

Or something like that.

The flaw in this flood-the-zone strategy is the MAGA House Republicans have zip evidence that Biden has done anything that warrants an impeachment probe. As Republican congressman Ken Buck admits, the McCarthyites have concocted an “imaginary” narrative that the president has personally profited from son Hunter’s business hustles. But “despite years of investigation,” says Buck, Republicans have nada. Buck points out that “impeachment is a serious matter and should have a foundation of rock-solid facts.” Instead, House Republicans have begin impeachment proceedings in the hopes of finding something.

And that’s the opposite of how such an inquiry is supposed to work. First you get strong incriminating evidence, then you launch proceedings. Conservative columnist and attorney David French noted the other day that in 1998, House Republicans began an impeachment inquiry “only after DNA tests on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress exposed that Bill Clinton had lied under oath about their affair.” In 2019, House Democrats began an inquiry “only after (they) received reports that Donald Trump had attempted to coerce President Zelensky of Ukraine” into finding fake dirt on Biden. In 2021, the House launched a second Trump impeachment probe “only after” his election-fraud lies had climaxed in the domestic terrorism of Jan. 6.

But the strategy this time is to simply “flood the zone with shit” by running to the TV cameras and declaring that Biden is a crook, using the impeachment mechanism to find out whether in fact he actually is, and regardless whether the MAGAts find hard evidence or not, they’re already (further) degrading the credibility of what useful idiot Kevin McCarthy calls “the People’s House.” No wonder John Boehner and Paul Ryan bailed on the Speaker’s job; there’s no way to corral the crazies.

The danger, of course, is that half the people in this country will glean the flooded zone and say, “Biden, Trump, the courts, the Congress – they’re all the same.” The danger, with democracy on the line in the 2024 election, is that the right-wing infauxtainment complex will amplify the zone’s shit and put this nation in even greater peril.

As Jim Morrison of The Doors warned half a century ago, “Whoever controls the media controls the mind.”

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Copyright 2023 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 second Republican presidential debate is less than two weeks away, co-hosted by the Fox Business network, and I know you must be excited. But there’s no need to wait, because I have exclusively obtained an advance transcript!

HOSTS: “Welcome to the second Republican presidential debate! We are honored to help you, the American people, make informed choices. To start, we’d like to ask the candidates for a show of hands. The Republican National Committee has a new loyalty pledge. Who here is willing, if the opportunity presents itself, to go to prison for Donald Trump?”

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: “I’m the only person on this stage who not only would go to prison for him I’d insist on rooming with him and if he splits his prison pants I’d sew ‘em for him if he can’t bend over far enough I’d tie his shoes for him if he needs to lowball his weight I’d lie for him and nobody else here will do what I’d do because they’re bought -and-paid-for lackeys of the administrative state and because – “

HOSTS: “Governor Christie, we noticed you failed to raise your hand.”

CHRIS CHRISTIE: “The real issue here is why isn’t Joe Biden going to prison with Hunter Biden. Because the evidence is overwhelmingly factual that Joe Biden is in fact the proven father of Hunter Biden.”

HOSTS: “Governor DeSantis, do you agree with what Governor Christie just said?”

RON DeSANTIS: “Notice that Governor Christie never said he’d take the pledge and go to prison for the former president. We need a straight shooter in the White House and not only would I jail myself for Trump, I’d root out every inmate who’s woke, shoot ‘em stone cold dead, and slit their throats before they read page one of a banned book – “

RAMASWAMY: “I’ll swipe a dining utensil and make a shiv with my own bare younger-generation hands and jam it between the shoulder blades of any lib watching MSNBC in the TV room – don’t interrupt me! – and during exercise hour I’ll be the prison yard wingman for the best president of the 21st century – “

HOSTS: “Vice President Pence, you seem to be tut-tutting what Mr. Ramaswamy is promising.”

MIKE PENCE: “As to the urgent question you’ve put before us, I solemnly upheld the Constitution on Jan. 6 but I also gave my life to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, so if God were to text me and say that going to prison for the man whom I so proudly served for four years is the right and just thing to do, then I would gladly bunk with him in the full confidence that our corrections facilities no longer hang people – “

NIKKI HALEY: “Would Mike really follow through on that promise? Margaret Thatcher once said that if you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. So here’s what I would do. I would seek common ground. I would lead. If the American people are willing to elect someone who’s in jail, which they’re not willing to do, then I would decline to join him in jail – but I will be the first woman on this stage willing to join him in jail if the American people are willing to elect someone in jail. That’s what leadership is all about.”

HOSTS: ”Senator Scott, you’ve been quiet, will you sign the new Trump fealty pledge?”

TIM SCOTT: “Going to jail for that great man would greatly upset my girlfriend, my swell girlfriend Marcia, and by the way I do have a girlfriend, her name is Mulva, as I hope the party donors know. But the bigger question we should all be asking ourselves is this: Why do Democrats want women to have abortions up to one year after birth? Or maybe the bigger question before us is, who else on this stage would fire Merrick Garland on Day One – “

DESANTIS: “And Dr. Fauci, too! I‘d sit him down in the prison cafeteria, fire him, stick him in solitary on the Woke Block, then hand him over to my vax-free Florida Nazis.”

CHRISTIE: “You can’t fire Dr. Fauci. He retired.”

DESANTIS: “Says who! Name me one book in Florida that says that!”

HALEY: “Can’t we all agree that we want to be respectful and seek consensus, that we want to humanize not demonize? There’s no place for hate in America, and don’t all Americans agree that Joe Biden is so old he’d die in prison?”

RAMASWAMY: “Shut up, you Super PAC puppets! Not only would I be Trump’s prison wingman, I’d even be his …”

MIKE PENCE: “Please, sir, no blasphemy! Mother is in the audience!”

HOSTS: “OK, that’s all we have time for. Good night America!”

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Copyright 2023 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]

I’ll go out on a limb and take a wild guess that you didn’t watch Nikki Haley make a fool of herself on TV last weekend. I was reminded of a sentence penned centuries ago by none other than the Marquis de Sade: “Those who have no principles are never more dangerous than when they reach the age when they lose all sense of shame.”

Only a truly vacuous candidate can bring to mind the Marquis de Sade.

Haley won pundit praise for her recent GOP debate performance – at times she sounded saner and smarter than some of her rivals (an admittedly low bar). But then she hit the wall. She described Inmate #P01135809 as “the most disliked politician in America,” someone who would not be electable in 2024 – but she signaled, by raising her hand, that she’d still support Trump as the party’s nominee, even if he were criminally convicted prior to the election.

How was it possible for someone of allegedly sound mind to declare it would be nuts to fall in line behind a convicted felon…and then proceed to say that she’d fall in line behind the convicted felon? How can someone see Trump so clearly for what he is…and then proceed to shove her head up her own rear end?

She did it again this week.

On CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” host Robert Costa asked: “Do you stand by your decision to hold up your hand on (the debate) stage and back Trump? Should he be the nominee and be a convicted felon?”

Haley: “What you saw were candidates on that stage said that they would do exactly what they signed and pledged to do, which is support the Republican nominee. That’s what we are saying…I will tell you that any Republican is better than what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing.”

Costa: “Even if they’re convicted of a crime?”

Haley: “You are implying that the American people are not smart. The American people are not going to vote for a convicted criminal. The American people are going to vote for someone who can win a general election. I have faith in the American people. They know what they need to do. And so, I think that, yes, I will support the Republican nominee always…”

Let’s try to unpack that.

On the one hand, she says it would be wrong to support a convicted felon and that the American people are “smart” enough not to vote for one. On the other hand, she would “always” support whoever the Republicans nominate, even if it’s a convicted felon, and, if that were the case, she would willfully breach her own “faith” in the “smart” American people and try to persuade them to be stupid.

Or something like that.

Haley also said, a few minutes later, that Republicans want to “go back to law and order,” which is a tad odd because it doesn’t quite jibe with her willingness to support someone who, at the present time, stands criminally accused in four court jurisdictions of committing 91 felonies; someone who has even been helping to raise money for the Jan. 6 terrorists – all of which is the precise antithesis of “law and order.”

But none of this is surprising, given the fact that Haley is little more than a weathervane who whirls with the prevailing winds. Back in 2016, she said, “Donald Trump is everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” Then she went to work for him and later, “I was absolutely thrilled to see him win.”

She has also said stuff like this (yes, she really has said stuff like this): “He would never knowingly lie…I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged (in the 2020 election results). This is not him making it up…This would be different if he was being deceptive…I mean at some point, give the man a break. I mean, move on if you truly are about moving on.”

She was “disgusted” (her word) with Trump’s behavior during the Jan. 6 insurrection, until she was not. On the one hand, she said in 2021: “When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement. (Trump) went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

But a few months later, Haley’s spine shrank again. She said simply that “President Trump’s always been opinionated.” And today she’s willing to support the guy who’s been criminally charged with fomenting the coup plot that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Would Nikki Haley, presumably having failed as a presidential candidate, lobby for a job in the administration of a convicted felon? Why bother to ask. If anyone can trump the Marquis de Sade, it’s Groucho Marx:

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them – well, I have others.”

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Copyright 2023 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]

In the annals of scandal, Aug. 29 was quite and eventful day. I’ll try to unpack the proceedings.

The federal judge in the feds’ election subversion case decreed that the coup commander shall go on trial in Washington on March 4 – and if he doesn’t like it, well, tough: “Mr. Trump, like any defendant, will have to make the trial date work regardless of his schedule.” (He doesn’t like it. He fled to social media and whined about “fascist thugs.”)

Meanwhile, ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows was in another court trying to weasel his way out of Georgia’s coup case, claiming that he was just trying to help Trump fight for “free and fair elections.” (Orwell just spun 360 degrees.) On a third front, a judge in Georgia decreed that Trump will be arraigned there next Tuesday.

Naturally, Inmate #P01135809’s groupies are in high dudgeon about everything. I won’t lard this column with their many fulminations. To nauseate and entertain you, two examples should suffice.

A Georgia congressman, Andre Clyde, denounced the “sham prosecutions” and said the House should defund special counsel Jack Smith: “Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars have no place funding the radical Left’s nefarious election interference efforts.” And one of his House colleagues, Claudia Tenney, said: “They’re trying to create this appearance of Trump being a criminal.” (She is sooooo close to getting it.)

You’d think that four indictments and 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions should be more than enough to cement Trump’s place in history as our preeminent lowlife. But the rabid right has its own unique take on what constitutes a scandal. Indeed, how fitting it was that Tuesday’s various court proceedings occurred on the ninth anniversary of Fashiongate – Aug. 28, 2014 – when President Barack Obama wore a summer suit that was tan.

Now that was a scandal! Let’s cue the talking heads.

A Fox News blondette said, “I looked twice to make sure he wasn’t a circus ringmaster.”

Another Fox blondette said “the tan suit made him look unpresidential.”

Lou Dobbs huffed, “I think it’s shocking to a lot of people.”

Another Fox pundit said, “Whoever talked him into wearing a tan suit? They’re so desperate because of low poll numbers.”

A Fox roundtable said, “I think it’s a sign to enemies that he’s a wimp.”

Another Fox guy said, “Only liberals could ever elect a guy with a tan suit.”

Republican congressman Peter King said on NewsMax, “For him to walk out – I’m not trying to be trivial here – in a light suit, light tan suit…When you have the world watching, it did not show the seriousness of purpose that you need from a commander-in-chief…The suit was a metaphor for his lack of seriousness.”

Right-wingers on Twitter wrote stuff like, “Skin-colored suits don’t scream POWERFUL.”

And this: “Obama sends the wrong message to our allies.”

And this: “You can’t declare war in a suit like that.”

Perhaps the real problem wasn’t the color of the suit, but the color of the man who wore it. Perhaps the real problem is thinking that a suit’s color is more imperiling to the republic than a far-flung coup plot or the theft of classified nuclear secrets.

As we trudge ever closer to Trump’s day of reckoning, the kind of people who excoriated a tan suit will continue to concoct absurd excuses for real scandal. It will be important to remind ourselves that they dwell outside the American mainstream, in a stupidity zone where fashion is deemed to be worse than fascism.

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Copyright 2023 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]