Cagle World

There have been so many Chris Christies that I need to number them.

Chris Christie 1.0, during the winter of 2015-16, mocked the notion that a reality-TV host had the credentials to lead the nation: “It’s all make believe, if you think that (Trump’s tinsel stardom) forms the experience to run a government as complicated as the United States government.”

Chris Christie 2.0, speaking at the 2016 Republican convention: “We are about to be led by not only a strong leader but by a caring, genuine and decent person. We have a man who judges people based on their performance, regardless of your gender, your race, your ethnic or religious background.”

Chris Christie 3.0 reverted to soft criticism in 2019, lauding “my friend Donald” for his “deal-making prowess,” and hailing his “friend” for possessing “many of the qualities that have defined America’s leaders.” But he also called Trump’s White House tenure a “tragedy” because the man of many leadership qualities was ill-served by so many of his aides.

Chris Christie 4.0, the current version, has now decided that Trump does not possess any leadership qualities. Quite the contrary: “A lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog is not a leader…The person I am talking about, who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right, is Donald Trump…a spoiled baby.”

Christie 4.0 is running again for the Republican presidential nomination, and, like any standard politician, he has hoisted his finger to the wind to see which way it’s blowing. He has clearly calculated that his only option is to go into kickass mode and market himself as a truth-teller. The problem, of course, is that Duh Base won’t listen to him because it’s too invested in lies and delusions. Nevertheless, Christie can still serve a good purpose if, as already evidenced, he’s willing to say the stuff that has long needed to be said.

Like, what he said the other night about how Trump is a toady for genocidal Vladimir Putin: “Let me tell you how he would (end the war in Ukraine). He’d give Ukraine to Russia…He’d call (Ukraine president)n Zelenskyy and say, ‘Hey, guess what? Time to raise the Russian flag up on the pole.’”

Like what he said about Trump’s abysmal fiscal record: “He left (office) with the biggest deficit of any president in American history. He said he was going to eliminate the national debt in eight years. He added $3 trillion to the national debt in four years.”

Like what he said about Trump’s looming federal indictment: “The classified documents that he had – that we now know he had – were things that should have never left the White House. And if he, in fact, knew that he had these documents, was looking at them, utilizing them in some way after he left the office – and it looks like maybe even two years after he left office – it’s a big problem.”

Like what he said when asked if he’d ever pardon a convicted Trump: “If I believe someone has gotten a full and fair trial in front of a jury of his peers, and especially someone in public life, who committed those crimes when they held a public trust, I can’t imagine pardoning him.”

Like what he’s saying about the Trump family’s multibillion-dollar sweetheart deals with the Saudis: “You think it’s because (Trump) is some kind of investing genius?”

At a time when “the GOP-MAGA nomination contest reeks of weakness, moral rot, political capitulation. and fear” (in the words of ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt), it’s good to have an ass-kicker in the mix, regardless of his flaws. If democracy is to be saved, we must welcome all comers.

This reminds me of a true story: Early in the New Deal, FDR created the Securities and Exchange Commission to oversee the stock market. Many people were appalled when he named, as its first leader, Joseph P. Kennedy – a reputedly sleazy businessman and rumored bootlegger. Roosevelt had a simple retort: “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”

Precisely so. It takes a brawler to fight a brawler.

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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]

Put your hands together for sane mature bipartisan centrist adulthood. It’s a whole lot better than apocalyptic bluster.

When something good happens in Washington, we should pause to savor it. Case in point is the debt ceiling deal, forged by political foes Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, to safeguard the American economy and the global market. Neither side got everything it wanted, but that’s what compromise governing is all about.

The most vocal critics, mostly on the right but with some on the left, are now free to flap their gums about how McCarthy supposedly gave away too much to Biden (Texas Rep. Chip Roy called it a “turd sandwich”), or about how Biden supposedly gave away too much to McCarthy. Whatever. I’ll go with House Democratic (minority) leader Hakeem Jeffries, who framed the fundamental truth: “In divided government, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley put it, “Both sides were initially sounding very ardent about an inflexible position. Yet both sides ultimately blinked – and that’s what American politic is all about.” Faced with the very real prospect of sinking the economy and screwing the finances of untold millions of Americans, most House members decided that the best and only course of action was to behave like adults.

I know, that shouldn’t be too much to ask. But mere weeks ago it looked like the crazies – most notably, the so-called “Freedom” Caucus, egged on by the criminal defendant/convicted sex abuser in Mar-a-Lago – were behind the wheel and driving us toward the cliff. But in the end, House Speaker McCarthy got the best deal he could (modest spending cuts) from a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate waiting in the wings.

“Is it everything I wanted? No,” McCarthy said. “But… I think we did pretty dang good for the American public.”

As for Biden, it’s another chapter of Dark Brandon Strikes Again. He campaigned in 2020 on his insistence that bipartisanship wasn’t dead, that his long D.C. experience would pay off at the bargaining table. For that he was widely mocked. But the debt deal he negotiated is merely the latest in his string of bipartisan triumphs. Two-thirds of the House Republicans and nearly three-fourths of the House Democrats voted for the deal – which includes an agreement not to revisit this debt ceiling nonsense for at least another two years.

Veteran Republican strategist Stuart Stevens probably said it best earlier this week: “What impresses me most about Biden & team, he’s the first president who has to negotiate with a party that asserts he isn’t a legally elected president. How do you negotiate with people who claim you are an illegal occupier of office? But they still get s–t done.”

In this case, the deal essentially leaves Biden’s policy achievements (the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Act, student loan cancellations) fully intact.

Best of all, one particular extremist has been left virtually tongue-tied. A few weeks ago, when right-wing posturing was at its peak, Trump railed that Republicans should drive us into default if they didn’t get “EVERYTHING THEY WANT (Including the kitchen sink).” But earlier this week, in his first comments on the deal, amidst clear evidence that most Republicans had ignored his wisdom, he told an Iowa radio station: “Well, it is what it is.”

Yes, the adults in the room trumped the troll on the fringe. That alone makes the deal worth savoring.

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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]

If my math is correct, the 2024 Republican presidential contest is starting to look like the Marx brothers’ stateroom scene.

Right now I count nine or ten active or explorative candidates: criminal defendant/convicted sexual abuser Donald Trump, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Gov. Ron DeSantis of DeSantistan, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, hangman’s noose escapee Mike Pence, beach meme Chris Christie, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, and loony tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy. And maybe Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who knows.

The good news: Some of those folks refuse to gulp the MAGA Kool-Aid.

Hutchinson, Sununu, and Christie are vocal about extracting the Republican party from the demagogue’s death grip. Sununu, who’s popular in his home state (home of the famous early primary), calls Trump “a three-time loser” who’d notch number four in 2024. Tim Scott also wants the GOP to move on, but he’s tweaking Trump by inference only. From his stump message earlier this week: Do Republicans want “victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness?”

There’s a sizable Republican market for turning the page. According to a national poll conducted in April, 44 percent of grassroot GOPers want an alternative to Trump. Hence the growing slate of candidates who are willing to take him on – mindful, by the way, that he’s likely to be criminally charged yet again before year’s end.

Imagine how much the guy will whine if he’s indicted in D.C. or Georgia or both. That’s what Tim Scott was referring to when he urged Republicans to swear off “victimhood.” Indeed, Trump tried to play the victim for the umpteenth time earlier this week, when he said on a radio show (get ready for this one): “I think I have been violated as badly as anybody that’s ever walked.”

So bravo for all the Republican candidates who want to dump Trump in history’s trash bin. Granted, they’d largely pursue MAGA-style policies – when Trump was president, Scott voted his way 96.7 percent of the time – but most would eschew his authoritarian cult of personality. When Scott, the first Black office-holder to ever seek the GOP nomination, was asked yesterday whether as president he would ever plot to overturn a lost election, he bluntly replied: “No.” That’s progress, right?

But here’s the bad news, which you knew was coming. As more and more candidates join up to challenge Trump, the better the odds are that the nominee will be Trump.

How come? Because the delegate rules make it so.

Without getting into the weeds, Republicans tend to award all or most of a state’s delegates to the candidate who finishes first in that state’s primary contest. Last time around (and nothing has changed since), 60.5 percent of the delegates were chosen via that “winner-take-all” formula, or some variation thereof.

That’s a boon for Trump. He still commands the hardcore allegiance of, say, 40 percent of Republican voters. Even if he were to grope a woman’s privates on live TV, they’d drool their approval in the voting booth. So if a winner-take-all state holds a primary, and a half dozen Trump rivals divvy up the gettable 60 percent, Trump would score a plurality win and thus grab all or most of that state’s delegates.

No wonder Trump welcomed Tim Scott into the race, posting a friendly social media message. From his perspective, the more the merrier.

The only way to thwart the harsh delegate math is to take Trump down. The question is how. If his many challengers soft-pedal their criticisms, or eschew them altogether, they buttress the perception within the party that Trump is invincible.

Scott punted when he was asked to critique Trump’s coup plottings prior to Jan. 6; his response: “I’m gonna stay on my vision for the future.”

Scott wants to sprinkle upbeat Reaganesque fairy dust without getting his hands dirty. He says that Republicans need to renounce grievances and victimhood; on the other hand, he says, “I’m so thankful that we had President Trump in office.”

Michael Steele, the former GOP national chairman and Trump critic, reportedly said that wimping out won’t work: “You cannot lean into ‘the best days (are) ahead of you’ until you deal with the cancer inside of you at the moment.”

But the reverse is just as problematical. If the rival candidates attack the Trump cancer with all systems go and full moral clarity, they’ll alienate the MAGA voters whom they covet. And even if Scott or one of the other Republicans somehow surges into the lead, don’t bet that Trump would ever concede – without threatening, at minimum, to tear the party apart.

At least the Marx brothers knew how to handle a crowd.

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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]

Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon infelicitously said a few years ago that the goal of the MAGA movement was “to flood the zone with s–t.” In other words, to disinform citizens – disorient them – to the point where they no longer can distinguish fact from fiction.

That’s happening again right now, with the long-awaited release of the Durham Report. Actually, I doubt that you, as a sane discerning citizen, have been long-awaiting it. But the propagandists in the MAGA echo chamber certainly have.

You may dimly remember what this probe was supposed to be about. John Durham, a right-wing prosecutor, was tasked by the Trump regime with proving that the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was a hoax conspiracy concocted by Hillary Clinton and the “deep state,” or something like that. Durham became a special counsel and was given free rein by Merrick Garland to chase down and confirm Trump’s fantasy that he’d been framed during the 2016 campaign.

Well, the Durham Report was finally released earlier this week, and after four years of cooking, Durham has served up a dish with all the heft of a collapsed soufflé.

Trump has long insisted that he was victimized by a far-flung conspiracy, “the crime of the century.” Durham found no evidence of any such crime – or any crimes, for that matter. In his 300-page report, he charged a grand total of nobody – no top FBI officials, no intelligence officials, no Hillary aides, nada.

His most momentous accusation (we’re grading on a curve here) is strictly a procedural thing. He thinks the FBI in 2016 should’ve launched a “preliminary” probe of Russia’s activities on Trump’s behalf, based on what the agency knew at the time, instead of launching its “full” probe. And even that so-called revelation comes with a qualifier; in his words, there was “no question the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” Trump-Russia ties, based on the initial tips it had received.

None of these findings are surprising. Durham’s probe was always destined to fail, because the facts of what happened in 2016 have long been established: Russia helped the Trump campaign, and top Trumpists were not only fine with it, they lied about it. These facts were detailed three years ago in a 1000-page report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, which found “a direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,” replete with “opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on the Trump campaign…a grave counterintelligence threat.”

But, as we sadly know, MAGA-world is impervious to facts. The Durham Report may be a dud when measured against the rigors of reality, but it’s still grist for MAGA weaponization, with fresh opportunities (quoting Bannon) to “flood the zone” with you know what. Such as, ‘The FBI was too zealous!’ and ‘Defund the FBI!’ And even though Durham didn’t come close to unearthing the so-called “crime of the century,” just chant it anyway. That’s what Jim “Gym” Jordan and other Trumpists are doing.

And when there’s a “crime of the century,” surely some people need to be jailed, right? House Republican Dan Crenshaw says “this Durham Report is a lock ’em up moment.” But what about the fact that Durham charged nobody, and cited no statutes that would justify charging anybody? Crenshaw tweeted an answer to that one: “If they (statutes) don’t exist, it’s time we created them.”

But the prize goes to Senator Tommy Tuberville, the ex-pigskin coach and denizen of the disinformation zone: “If people don’t go to jail for this, the American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough’s enough. Let’s don’t have elections anymore.’”

There you have it, the quintessence of fascism, articulated by someone who’s too stupid to grasp the import of his words.

So the Durham Report is the new ButWhatAbout, it’s handy ammo for the false equivalence crowd. And the only way we can defeat those people is to relentlessly flood the zone with facts. In an address at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, CNN international anchor Christiane Amanpour, a vocal critic of last week’s CNN-certified Trump rally, offered this wisdom:

“Be truthful, but not neutral. Bothsidesism is not always objectivity. It does not get you to the truth. Drawing false moral or factual equivalence is neither objective or truthful…I refuse any more to say or to concede that we live in a post-truth world, because that is lazy and it is ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to seek to provide and defend the truth.”

You don’t need to be an aspiring journalist to heed that advice.

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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 borrow a phrase from Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” I was shocked, shocked! to find that non-stop lying was going on in the MAGA game room at CNN.

Just as I (and many other rational observers) had warned in advance, CNN’s decision to gift a free hour to a pathological cult leader – to a criminal defendant, and, now, a convicted sexual abuser – did indeed fulfill our worst expectations.

As anyone who isn’t naive surely knew would happen, Trump suckered CNN right into his sewer. Actually, it was worse than that. CNN, anxious to get maximum ratings mileage from its MAGA informercial, attached a sewer pipe to his mouth and pumped his demagogic diarrhea directly into our homes.

How else could it have gone, given the network’s decision to pack the “town hall” audience with “star”-struck Trumpers who clapped and giggled at every lie and slur? He’s their favorite TV character. They know his shtick to a T and hooted their appreciation whenever he recited the rot that he posts on social media.

With CNN’s blessing, he pounded out his Greatest Hits. No wonder they responded with such gusto! Like when he defamed E. Jean Carroll (again) by calling her “wacko.” (Yes, they laughed at a victim of sexual assault.) Like when he said, over and over, that the 2020 election was stolen. Like when he said he wants to pardon “a large portion” of the jailed Jan. 6 traitors. Like when he said that his two impeachments were a con job ginned up by “crazy Nancy Pelosi.” Like when he critiqued the Access Hollywood tape by insisting (despite his words on tape) that he hadn’t talked about grabbing women per se, that he grabbed only when “women let you.” Like when he condemned one of host Kaitlin Collins’ rebuttals by calling her “nasty.”

Collins tried her best to inject some factual reality by talking just as fast as her grifting guest, but as anyone with a shred of awareness has long known, there’s no way to stand in front of his blitzkrieg without being flattened. And I’m not going to waste my time fact-checking all his lies, because I have a life and so have you.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a respected scholar of fascism, saw last night what so many of us knew would happen. She tweeted: “This is a propaganda spectacle designed to reinforce the leader cult – thus the relief and enjoyment of the audience at hearing favorite slogans and untruths…The more approval authoritarians get, the more they feel emboldened to be even more lawless. This is why this ‘town hall’ was so dangerous.”

Trump was certainly emboldened by the audience questions, which were more vapid and open-ended than any of us could’ve predicted. A succession of Trump 2020 voters and delegates posed brain-twisters like…What do you think about the “current debt situation?” and What would you do “to make things more affordable?” (His answer: drill for more oil.) And this was my favorite semi-question: “I’m worried that government will act to suppress gun rights.” (Trump’s answer, ignoring the civilian death toll of recent weeks, was that he’s the greatest Second Amendment champ in human history.)

Granted, the sick spectacle reminded those of us who love democracy what we’re up against on the road to 2024. Trump and duh Republican base hide in plain sight, making it abundantly clear what they’re willing to say and do to seize power. Maybe that will help galvanize enough Americans to stop them once again. David Jolly, a former Republican congressman, seems to think so; he tweeted last night that “Trump is not picking up a single new general election voter. And every voter who came out in 18, ’20 & ’22 to stop him now remembers why.” Maybe so.

But that does not excuse CNN for debasing itself. To do responsible journalism, it’s really not rocket science. If you feel compelled to put this guy on the air, you do it in a studio with two sharp questioners. At minimum, that format ups the odds of holding him at least somewhat accountable for his pathological lies. What you don’t do is precisely what the network did. The lesson is simple:

Never fellate a fascist.

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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]

Did Fox News’ overlords fire racist ratings champ Tucker Carlson because he texted odious opinions? That’s what the New York Times seemed to suggest in a recent story:

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race. The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.

Maybe so. The text at issue is certainly detestable. Linger, if you can choke down the nausea, on the passage where he describes his reaction to three “Trump guys…three against one, at least” pounding on an Antifa protestor: “It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.”

Yes, fascist bloodlust is very yummy indeed.

Tucker wasn’t saying anything in private that he hadn’t already intimated, or worse, umpteen times in public on his propaganda showcase. In the second half of the text, he claimed to feel guilty about his bloodlust – “I shouldn’t gloat over (the protestor’s) suffering, I should be bothered by it” – and that pose mirrored his public shtick as well. On the air he’d pump up the hate, then stand back from it and tell his audience that in all innocence he was really a good guy. The text mirrored his business model.

Maybe the Fox overlords were shocked by the text because they’d somehow never watched his broadcast? Not likely. Maybe they were simply terrified that Tucker in the raw would turn off jurors in the trial they were desperate to avoid, hence the eleventh-hour settlement? More likely.

But what steams me most about his text is this line: “It’s not how white men fight.”

There are lots of ways to parse that one. Like perhaps he was suggesting that if a solo “Trump guy” had faced off against the Antifa protestor – man to man, as the saying goes – then Tucker would’ve deemed that to be honorable. (He might’ve said to the solo Trump guy, “That’s mighty white of you.”) Perhaps he was suggesting that only the inferior races (as he defines inferior) tend to fight dirty, three-on-one.

What’s most evident, however, is how that one line reveals the depths of his racist willful ignorance. I guess he hasn’t seen the Capitol insurrection footage of mobs of white men beating up on cops, or up on the news from 68 years ago, when white men mutilated and murdered Emmet Till. He must not have seen the infamous Boston photo from the 1970s that shows a white man grabbing a Black guy so that a second white man can stab him with a big American flag.

There are also the umpteen photos of white men posing proudly in front of dead African-Americans roped to trees. And Carlson probably has no idea what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, when mobs of white men beat up Blacks in the streets, killing hundreds, and put the torch to the thriving business district known as Black Wall Street.

I guess he has overlooked the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book that traces the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, where more than 2,000 heavily armed whites killed at least 60 Black men on the street and overthrew the city’s multiracial government, forcing hundreds of black families to flee into the nearby swamps.

It’s just as well that Tucker hasn’t read that book. Having publicly purveyed the crackpot theory that white Americans are being displaced by people of color, he would surely have rooted for the white mob’s coup.

All told, the newly outed Tucker text confirms what the late Maya Angelou once wrote: “If someone shows you who they are, believe them.” The Fox overlords were fine with who he was until he threatened the bottom line.

Are we supposed to think his successor will be any better?

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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 want to tell you a story about Tucker Carlson, the serial liar and useful Putin idiot who has now pulled off the hat trick of being fired by three media outlets: CNN (in 2005), MSNBC (in 2008), and Fox News (this week, without warning).

Since nobody with real knowledge has yet surfaced to explain why he was summarily yanked off his primetime perch, I’ll content myself with this traipse down memory lane.

Back in 2009, Tucker was feted as a guest speaker in the august quarters of St. Anthony Hall – a University of Pennsylvania fraternity heavily populated by comely young preppies dressed in rep ties and blazers and beige chinos. They all looked like Tucker, albeit several decades younger; it was a veritable callback to a bygone era when WASP bros ruled the land. The frat brothers signaled their approval for Tucker not by clapping, but by snapping their fingers. Whenever he got off a good line, I felt like I was dwelling in a forest of crickets.

This line was a finger-snapper: “I’m a radical small government guy.”

Right, because it’s “small government” to defend and celebrate a genocidal dictator who uses government muscle to jail and poison his dissenters. As Tucker remarked on the air shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “Why do I have to hate Putin so much? Why does permanent Washington hate him so much?”

Another 2009 finger-snapper: We need the press to tell us the truth.

Right, because recently this was Tucker’s truth: The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were persecuted victims of corrupt law enforcement provocateurs who, in cahoots with “elites,” suppressed a noble uprising. Or something like that.

This too was a finger-snapper: “The Republican party doesn’t know what it is…completely pathetic…The Republicans have failed in truly every sense.”

He didn’t float any ideas for a Republican comeback, but rest assured that if he had done so, during that gig in 2009, the message would not have been fascist-adjacent (as evidenced in his MAGA years) or trivial to the point of pitiable hilarity (like this culture-war harrumph a few months ago: “Woke m&ms have returned. The green m&m got her boots back, but is, apparently, a lesbian maybe? And there’s also a plus-size obese purple m&ms, we’re gonna cover that of course. ‘Cause that’s what we do”).

So as we continue to speculate about why Tucker was fired (did the private messages unearthed in the Dominion lawsuit do him in? Are there unexploded bombshells in the impending Smartmatic lawsuit?), and as we speculate about where he might pop up next (memo to self: I don’t care), it does seem fair to wonder what the hell happened to his mind.

Seriously, he used to be sane. He didn’t lament about the so-called crisis of masculinity and pitch a solution he called “testicle tanning.” Back in the late 1990s he was a highly credible magazine writer. He didn’t publicly lie with every breath. The guy started his career as a fact-checker, for Pete’s sake.

Columbia Journalism Review gave us the road map a few years ago: “If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles to shouting…on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country.”

Ah, there it is!

Fox spent three decades crafting – and monetizing – a safe space for older white under-educated snowflakes to nurse their racist and cultural grievances. Tucker saw the state of play; he put his brains in storage and followed the money. In the words of ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, “Tucker Carlson wasn’t a zealot who held extreme beliefs. Tucker Carlson was a con man who held no beliefs. He was singularly, besides Donald Trump, the most cynical performer on all of television.”

Now he has been stomped by the beast he rode. Whatever actually precipitated his downfall – Fox is also being sued by a former Tucker producer who says she was bullied by anti-semitism – what is abundantly clear is the Murdochs decided he was hazardous to their beleaguered bottom line.

On Friday night Tucker concluded his show by telling viewers, “We’ll see you Monday.” How sweet it is to lodge that for history as his last Fox lie.

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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]

If we conjure the spirit of Pollyanna, if we look on the bright side of life, we can probably convince ourselves that Fox News has suffered a guilty verdict in the court of public opinion.

By agreeing to pony up $780 million in damages to the Dominion balloting company, settling on the eve of a defamation trial, Fox basically admitted as never before that it’s a cesspool of lying liars, a festering cancer on the body politic.

That ain’t nothing. Fox has been massively rebuked for lying so relentlessly on the air about Dominion while knowing all along there was zero evidence for its crackpot belief the company had rigged its 2020 machines for Joe Biden.

Thanks to Dominion’s lawsuit, we know as never before how sausage gets made in the fake-news kitchen. We know the propaganda outlet’s business model is built on industrial-strength b.s. – feeding lies for fun and profit to its old white couch potatoes – and there’s nothing Fox can do to erase what has now been exposed.

The settlement, announced minutes before the start of trial, has to be the most disappointing denouement since the finale of Seinfeld. I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s line about ending “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Rupert Murdoch paid off Dominion so that he wouldn’t have to testify under oath about the lies that were spewed on the air. Tucker Carlson, who knew he was toadying for Trump by lying about Dominion, won’t have to testify. Laura Ingraham, who was told by her producer that Dominion was innocent but aired the lies anyway, won’t have to testify. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who emailed a colleague to say that fact-checking was “bad for business,” won’t have to testify.

Avoidance of trial saves Fox six or seven weeks of shame and humiliation. Meanwhile, none of the complicit Fox hosts will retract their lies on the air, or apologize for those lies, because the settlement doesn’t compel them to do so.

I’m not maligning Dominion for settling its strong case. A private company’s top priority is to protect its brand and do right by its shareholders – not to help cure America’s ills. It was a civil lawsuit, not a clarion call to patriotic duty. Nevertheless, we are left to ponder the biggest question of all:

Will Fox News’ hefty payout prompt it to change its behavior for the better?

That will happen on the same day that unicorns gambol down your street. Every time Fox gets caught acting scummy, it pays off the people it scummed and simply moves on. It’s just the cost of doing business.

When Fox’s parent company in Britain was outed in a phone-hacking scandal, no problem, it paid more than $100 million to the phone-hacking victims. When Fox News was outed for lying about a Washington murder victim named Seth Rich – it falsely claimed that he, not the Russians, had hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 – Fox simply paid seven figures to Rich’s grieving parents and moved on.

Ditto this time. Granted, the $780-million payout to Dominion is Fox’s biggest, but it’s still the proverbial drop in the bucket. Fox Corp.’s reported revenue, in the last three months of 2022 alone, was $4.6 billion, and rest assured the company will find a way to deduct the payout from its taxes anyway.

And let’s not forget Fox News’ viewers. They’re barely aware that Fox was being sued in the first place, because Fox kept them dumb and dumber by under-covering the case. And even if their favorite hosts were required to apologize for lying, would the folks at home suddenly have an epiphany and say, “Wow, Fox has lied to us, so now we’ll stop watching”? Not a chance.

They want to be lied to. That’s how they’ve been conditioned. They want to believe the 2020 election was stolen (or, as Trump writes, “stollen”). They want to believe that more guns will make us safer (tell that to the upstate New York girl who went to the wrong driveway). They want to believe that Blacks are scary (like the kid who rang the wrong doorbell). They want to believe that human-driven climate change is a myth (65 percent of Fox viewers give humans a pass). All told, they want to be cogs in the Fox machinery that monetizes grievance.

Granted, there are more court cases in the pipeline – starting with Smartmatic, another election tech company smeared by Fox – but will cosmic justice finally be rendered? You be the judge.

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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’m updating a plea uttered by Princess Leia in “Star Wars”:

“Help us, Generation Z! You’re our only hope!”

Fortunately, the youngest voters in the electorate (current ages 18 to 26) are already helping us, big time. By landslide margins, as best evidenced at the ballot box, they’re sickened by the MAGA GOP’s racism, sexism, gun fanaticism, election denialism, Christian nationalism, homophobia, anti-science ignorance, forced-birth extremism…have I left anything out?

Republicans are somehow shocked that most Gen Zers feel this way – and suddenly realize that wooing the young-uns could be a herculean task in years ahead.

I’m loathe to soil my column space by quoting Kellyanne Conway, but here’s what she said earlier this week on Fox News: “I think we got some work to do on the young people who think differently on abortion, perhaps guns, or climate change. The thing I’m really concerned about on this is that the left becomes a turnout machine for young people.”

Not sure what kind of “work” Kellyanne wants “to do on the young people,” but if the goal is to get them to “think differently” – to buy the MAGA belief that slaughtering innocent civilians on a regular basis is the price to be paid for freedom; that it’s wise to use government muscle to crack down on women, to the point of pulling abortion pills off the market; that climate change is a mirage; that anyone who isn’t white and straight is an inferior human; that hate is cool – then I bet that most young people will spurn the cult’s invitation.

Most hilariously, Republicans thinkers seem to believe they’ll win over Gen Zers with better “messaging.” I prefer to believe John Della Volpe, who directs polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. After crunching the numbers, Volpe said, “Republicans don’t have a messaging problem with young voters, they have a values problem with younger voters.”

Oh yeah. Most Gen Zers value the multicultural America of the 21st century – racial diversity, LGBTQ rights, female empowerment – coupled with the belief that government has a crucial role in solving problems. They also believe we shouldn’t entrust the climate to God, that we shouldn’t surrender our civility to guns, and that we need to rescue democracy from its current existential crisis. Those values clash with a cult led by a criminal defendant.

The proof is in the numbers that track voters under 30. In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden beat Trump among youngsters by 59-35 percent – and their turnout was 11 percent higher than in 2016. In the 2022 midterm elections, a whopping 77 percent chose Democratic candidates; the GOP drew 21 percent. They were a key reason why the Republicans won the House by a paper-thin margin.

They were an even bigger reason why Democrats kept the Senate and added a seat: In Pennsylvania (where the seat flipped from red to blue), 70 percent of under-30s voted blue. In Arizona (where Dems were defending a seat), it was 76 percent, while in Nevada (where Dems were defending a seat), it was 64 percent. Down in Georgia, 63 percent helped to thwart the ascent of dolt Herschel Walker.

There’s no need to speculate about whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s erasure of Roe v. Wade fueled their ire – young voters were the only age cohort to rank “abortion and reproductive rights” as the top voting issue. And that sentiment hasn’t waned.

In last week’s Wisconsin state supreme court race – with the composition of the bench at stake and abortion rights hanging in the balance – young turnout was nearly as great as in the 2022 midterms, and their landslide support for the abortion rights candidate helped propel her to an 11-point win over the MAGA candidate.

In New Hampshire last year, a Gen Z Republican named Karoline Leavitt tried and failed to win a House seat. She recently contended in a Fox News column that her party can surely woo young voters if only it would tweak its messaging.

For instance, “Republicans cannot continue to allow the Democrats to own an issue as popular and simple as protecting the environment. Republicans want clean water, air and forests, too, so why don’t we say that, instead of allowing the Democrats to portray us as evil Earth-haters who want the planet to end in 10 years?”

That is priceless. The reason Democrats own the environment issue is because her party refuses to help the environment. Last year, not a single congressional Republican voted for the new federal law that provides subsidies for low-emission technologies. Republicans have tried to use the government power to promote polluting energy sources – like burning more coal. Republican state treasurers have even sought to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s not enough to “say” that Republicans want to protect the environment when their actions – and the donations they garner from fossil fuel sources – demonstrate precisely the opposite.

So with disgusted young voters poised to strike again in 2024, I have a better suggestion for the MAGA GOP:

Keep on doing what you’re doing.

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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]

One of these days – but maybe never – Republicans might wake up and realize that their forced-birth crusade, their determination to control women’s bodies via government fiat, is backfiring badly at the ballot box.

They seem incapable of learning the basic lesson that it’s nuts to alienate the millions of Americans who disagree with the theocratic banning of abortion.

The thick-headed GOP was dealt yet another humiliating blow this week, when voters in swing-state Wisconsin gave progressives a 4-3 working majority on the state Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years.

In the most expensive judicial race in American history, Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal county judge who campaigned openly for abortion rights, decimated Daniel Kelly, the anti-abortion MAGA candidate, by 11 percentage points. Wisconsin is a fiercely competitive state where elections are typically decided by a point or two; nobody wins a statewide race by 11. Something special must’ve happened.

Something did.

Progressive voters – especially young people, especially young female people – surged to the polls to voice their support for legal abortion. Judicial elections in Wisconsin typically draw less than 30 percent of the electorate; this one drew 40 percent. It’s easy to see why, with the stakes so high.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s erasure of Roe v. Wade basically gave Wisconsin permission to outlaw virtually all abortions – thanks to a state ban that has been on the books since 1849. But now, with Protasiewicz on the bench, the new abortion-rights majority is all but certain to nuke that archaic statute.

The landslide progressive vote in Wisconsin has other benefits, too. The new high court majority won’t tolerate any MAGA efforts to screw with the 2024 presidential election in that crucial state. The last time around, the court came within one vote of throwing out Joe Biden’s fraud-free Wisconsin win.

Charlie Sykes, a former conservative Wisconsin radio host, said recently that a progressive high court “changes the rules and dynamics of Wisconsin politics pretty fundamentally.” And MAGA plotter Ali Alexander gave up the game the other night when he tweeted, “We just lost the Wisconsin Supreme Court. I do not see a path to 270 (electoral votes) in 2024.”

But back to the abortion issue. Republicans don’t seem to be getting the message that fealty to their evangelical forced-birth base is costing them big time with the American mainstream. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, the Wisconsin election is deja vu all over again.

Last November in Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer rode the abortion issue – with a pro-choice referendum on the ballot – to a decisive reelection win, and her party captured both chambers of the state legislature for the first time in 40 years. Abortion played a crucial role in the Pennsylvania Senate election, where John Fetterman reaped benefits from Mehmet Oz’s brain-dead remark that “local political leaders” should have a say in women’s decisions. Indeed, the abortion issue stoked midterm Democratic turnout nationwide – it ranked high in voters’ concerns, second only to inflation – thus limiting the GOP’s new House majority to single digits, and enabling Democrats to hold the Senate.

Meanwhile, last summer in red Kansas, voters turned out en masse, in a statewide referendum, to protect women’s right to choose – by a margin of 17 points. In November, voters in red Kentucky rejected extremist language that would’ve been added to the state constitution. Granted, neither of those states will go blue in the 2024 presidential election, but it’s clear that if there’s grassroots support for abortion rights in red America, imagine how Democrats might be able to leverage that issue in the handful of swing states.

And we now have some evidence that the GOP is waking up.

“This is not an issue that’s going away for our party in a post-Dobbs world, and we can’t put our head in the sand and think it’s going to heading into 2024,” Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Fox News about the role of abortion in the Wisconsin race.

McDaniel he said conservatives need to do a better job of messaging on abortion. Good luck with that.

I’ll finish with one last observation about Wisconsin. And Michigan. And Kansas. And the midterms:

People who still think voting doesn’t matter should go soak their heads.

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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]