Cagle World

Put your hands together for gun reform activist Ashbey Beasley, an anguished mom who showed up uninvited on Fox News the other day. She stormed within camera range and raged common sense to the viewers who’d probably tuned in for the usual brain-dead propaganda.

She and her son had survived last summer’s massacre in Highland Park, Illinois (you’re excused if you can’t remember that one; it’s impossible to keep track), and here she was, visiting a family member in Nashville, only to learn that three 9-year-olds had been freshly sacrificed on the altar of the Second Amendment. Her cri de coeur was loud and clear: “Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens, it has overtaken cars” – she’s right about that – “How is this still happening? How are our children still dying?”

I can answer that. They are dying, and will continue to die, because America’s spineless “leaders” – cowed by the gun lobby, cowed by the voters who are in thrall to mass weaponry – have given up. A nation that refuses to protect its children, refuses to prioritize the safety of its own budding citizens, is a detestably failed nation.

It has been nauseating this week – but no surprise – to watch elected Republicans wave the white flag of surrender. Their message is: It’s out of our hands. Basically, their “pro-life” master plan is to use government muscle to ensure that all the unborn are born, so that later they can be mowed down in school by gun freaks flexing their Freedom.

The gun-loving governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, released a worthless statement: “I understand there is pain, I understand the desperation to have answers, to place blame,” but, naturally, “this is not the time.” But if not now, when? In 2019 and 2021, Lee signed bills loosening Tennessee gun laws, allowing adults to carry in public without a permit, background check or training. Tennessee doesn’t even have a “red flag” law that would bar gun purchases to people with criminal records or mental health problems. The Nashville shooter, who, according to police, was being treated for an “emotional disorder,” legally purchased seven firearms at five stores.

How about some help on federal level? Nah. One of the worthless Tennessee congressmen, Tim Burchett, said simply: “We’re not gonna fix it.” Colleague Andy Ogles, whose district includes Nashville, had nothing to say – except to defend his family’s recent Christmas card, which featured the Ogles (kids included) brandishing semi-automatic weapons. He was eloquent about that: “Why would I regret a photograph with my family exercising my rights to bear arms?”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, when asked about the Nashville shootings, said: “Just let me warn you, I’m not going to answer any questions. We can talk about new movies, we can talk about your lives, we can talk about what you’re doing for Easter, we can talk about anything else.” Steve Scalise, the gun financiers’ favorite congressman, said that the only thing worth doing is to “keep those families in our prayers.”

On the Senate side, Republican whip John Thune said that any and all talk about actually doing something was “premature,” the magic word invoked after every massacre prior to the next one. Colleague John Cornyn, the gun financiers’ second favorite senator, chimed in: “I would say we’ve gone about as far as we can go.”

Actually, we are so awash in weaponry – thanks to our frontier ethos, thanks to the Second Amendment extremists – that it’s easy to understand why pols like Cornyn throw up their hands. At this point, more than 20 million AR-15 style assault weapons are reportedly in circulation (thanks to Congress’ 2004 repeal of the federal assault weapons ban), and the latest international gun survey estimated that, in 2018, there were 120 civilian-owned guns for every 100 American residents. That was more than double the ratio of the number-two nation on the list, Yemen.

A Washington Post analysis concludes: “If significantly reducing gun deaths necessarily means significantly reducing firearm ownership, you can see the problem. It’s hard to think of a way that ownership could be reduced significantly, even if the political will to do so suddenly materialized.”

Our gun-loving pols have gifted themselves a license to surrender. And we members of the anguished American majority should join Ashbey Beasley in lamenting our dearth of political will:

“We can’t accept events like this as routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

So said President Obama, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre. More than 10 years ago.

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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]

As we await word of a seemingly imminent Trump indictment, it has been highly entertaining to hear his defenders twist themselves into pretzels in order to excuse the fact he paid a porn star $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election to hide an extramarital tryst.

If Trump is indeed indicted, there will be plenty of time to debate whether his payoffs – via his attorney Michael Cohen, who posted the hush money and was later reimbursed – violated New York laws that prohibit the falsification of business records. What we do know for sure is his behavior during the entire Stormy Daniels scandal – canoodling with her while his wife was home nursing a newborn baby, letting Cohen take the fall and go to jail – was repugnantly amoral.

But wait! His diehards don’t agree with that. Most vociferous of all are the self-styled moralists who think they have God on speed dial.

For instance, here’s evangelist Franklin Graham: “The charges (in the Stormy case) are definitely politically motivated. I would like to ask Christians across this country to pray specifically for former President Trump, that God’s hand would be upon him, protect him, and direct him in every step he takes – and that God’s will be done.”

The thing is, I’m old enough to remember the 1998 version of Franklin Graham, who fumed in high moral dudgeon when President Clinton was outed for his canoodles with Monica Lewinsky. He warned that if an American leader “will lie to or mislead his wife, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”

The mantra back then, on the self-righteous Republican right, was “personal responsibility.” Gary Bauer, leader of the evangelical Family Research Council, said: “Character counts – in a people, in the institutions of our society, and in our national leadership.” Thanks to Clinton, he said, “our kids have been taught that fidelity is old-fashioned, that adultery is the norm. (The Lewinsky affair) is the equivalent of a cultural oil spill.”

William Bennett, one of the most vocal Republican moralists, spoke about the loss of America’s “compelling moral power” during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, warning if Americans accept his behavior, we will have committed “an unthinking act of moral and intellectual disarmament.”

Two decades later Bennett supported Trump, thus draining his moral power.

Ditto Tony Perkins, head of the Christian Coalition, who shrugged off the Stormy Daniels news when it first broke: “We kind of gave Trump – ‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.’”

By now it’s no mystery why these hypocrites behave this way. Fealty to the tribe trumps moral consistency; in the naked pursuit of power, everything is expendable. In defense of Trump, it’s even deemed fair game to smear the nation they profess to love – as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s homily this week: “In fact, settlements like (in the Stormy case) are common…Paying people not to talk about things, hush money, is ordinary in modern America.”

Right, because it’s ordinary for modern Americans like us to be identified in hush-money documents with pseudonyms like “David Dennison” and “Individual-1.”

I’m also old enough to remember that the Republican House of 1998 impeached Clinton for his amoral behavior. The Republican House of 2023 doesn’t give two hoots about Trump’s amoral behavior (Kevin McCarthy says the hush money was merely a “personal” matter). Instead, House leaders are vowing to “investigate” the Manhattan DA, despite having no jurisdiction, because local prosecutors don’t receive any federal funds.

All told, the late (and sane) conservative columnist Michael Gerson got it right several years ago when he nailed the erstwhile moralists on the Republican right: “The priests have become acolytes…The gag reflex is entirely gone.” As egregiously evidenced this week, they’re still in thrall to (or in fear of) America’s most notorious knave, treating their own reputations as collateral damage.

But now for some good news (I kid you not):

Their Faustian pact with Trump infuriates the majority of Americans who dwell outside the MAGA dreamworld – including mainstream Christians, who try to live their moral principles without craven political calculation. How likely is it that Trump, if indicted, will rally the exhausted majority to his side? That he will add any swing voters to his hardcore base? Not likely, because 65 percent of Americans now believe, according to a new national poll, that he has “definitely” or “probably” committed crimes.

So let the hypocrites carp. On the cusp of this historic indictment season, God ain’t taking their calls.

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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]

Nobody these days is happier with Ron DeSantis than Vladimir Putin, who now has two horses in the 2024 Republican race: Trump (naturally) and a coward who talks tough to Disney but quakes at the prospect of confronting a genocidal thug.

It’s no surprise, of course, that DeSantis has morphed into one of Putin’s useful idiots by dismissing Russia’s aggression as a mere “territorial dispute,” thus giving aid and comfort to the enemy. DeSantis’ stance, announced earlier this week on Putin groupie Tucker Carlson’s show (naturally), reflects the center of gravity in the MAGAfied Republican party. The GOP used to tout itself as the tough-on-Russia party, but today, thanks to Trump, it’s mostly a collection of wimps in thrall to a former KGB agent whose bloody war is the first on European soil since 1945.

Putin’s greatest weapon is American irresolution. To somehow prevail in Ukraine, he’s banking on the election of a new president who’s committed to weakness. DeSantis fills the bill to a T, parroting Russian propaganda as Trump’s Mini-Me.

In his statement on Fox, DeSantis denounced President Biden’s “funding of this conflict.” That’s a mendacious inversion of reality. Putin is the aggressor who has funded the war with rubles and mass conscription; Biden (with support from Congress) is responding to that aggression against a sovereign nation, leading the NATO alliance that has kept the peace for generations.

DeSantis also said “we cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war” because we need to finance solutions to our many problems here at home. As if we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Somebody should tell DeSantis that the Pentagon’s total outlay for Ukraine amounts to just 5.6 percent of its annual budget.

As a sane commentator at the conservative National Review points out, “Meeting the challenges posed by simultaneous crises is what we expect of a president,” especially “safeguarding the security and alliance architecture that emerged after the Second World War and became a continental bloc at the end of the Cold War…Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a ‘dispute’ over territory in the same way a bank robber and a depositor have a ‘dispute’ over money.”

DeSantis boasts about “staring down the mouse” – he has financially punished Florida-based Disney for saying nice things about gay people – and he touts himself as a tough guy about drag queens. But why is he cutting and running from a legitimate threat? Two big reasons:

He’s going where the votes are. Thanks to Trump, who last year lauded Putin’s Ukraine invasion as “genius,” a majority share of Duh Base is basically in surrender mode. According to a new poll this week, only 42 percent of Republican respondents favor more aid for Ukraine (overall American support is 59 percent). Mindful of that grassroots pro-Putin sentiment, 60 percent of House Republicans boycotted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s December speech in their chamber. DeSantis has clearly calculated that the best route through the Republican primary is to pander to the party’s Putinists. Talking sense to Duh Base – defending freedom abroad, defending America’s leadership in the world – is for losers.

He has a genuine affinity for Putin. He ain’t just calculating for votes. He and Putin are waging like-minded “culture” assaults against everyone and everything that’s not a straight white male. They’re both hostile to all forms of diversity, starting with the LGBTQ community. Ambassador Daniel Fried, a retired foreign service officer from the old George W. Bush wing of the foreign policy establishment, said the other day: “Why are Republicans suddenly soft on Russia?…A lot of them have sympathy for Putin, who is all-in on the right-wing, anti-woke, anti-cosmopolitan culture wars. The whole uber-masculine thing.”

Indeed, when Putin launched his Ukraine invasion 13 months ago, he framed it in terms of a culture war. He was sending troops into Ukraine because the western world was determined “to destroy our traditional values, to force on us pseudo-values that would have just eaten away at our people from the inside.” Or, as DeSantis says, when he denounces drag queens and compels teachers to ban books, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

Putin needs a Neville Chamberlain in the White House. But what we need is a guy who says stuff like this: “(I’ve) been urging the president, I’ve been, to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight their good fight. They’re not asking us to fight it for them…And I think if we were to arm the Ukrainians, I think that would send a strong signal to (Putin) that he shouldn’t be going any further.”

So said Congressman Ron DeSantis, eight years ago.

Today he’s not just a wimp, he’s a weathervane.

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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 Dominion Voting Systems, the balloting firm that’s doggedly suing Fox News for defamation, seeking $1.6 billion in damages as recompense for the network’s relentless lies that Dominion’s 2020 machines were somehow rigged for Joe Biden.

This lawsuit is the gift that keeps on giving, as evidenced yet again this week with the release of sworn testimony from Rupert Murdoch himself.

The rajah of right-wing propaganda has been stripped bare.

Fox News has been trying to get this lawsuit thrown out of court. Good luck with that.

It’s now abundantly clear – via the Fox internal texts and emails amassed by Dominion and now Murdoch’s deposition – that top management at the Orwellian outlet knew all along Trump’s 2020 “stolen election” mantra was total nonsense, but nonetheless allowed the Big Lie to be amplified on the air. In their quest for hot ratings, and feeling the heat from nutty competitors like Newsmax, Murdoch and his underling executives felt compelled to keep feeding crap to the saps.

“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight,” Murdoch said under oath.

Yeah I know, this revelation is not exactly shocking. Nor was it shocking two weeks ago, when we learned, via a Dominion legal filing, that Fox’s superstar hosts were well aware they were lying on the air. But to read Murdoch’s admissions in his own words, under oath, is more delicious than a tub of sea salt vanilla.

Question from Dominion lawyer: “It is fair to say you seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud?”

Murdoch: “Oh yes.”

Dominion lawyer: “And you seriously doubted it from the very beginning?”

Murdoch: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up and up.”

But Fox hosts kept telling viewers that the election was not on the up and up – and Murdoch was fine with that. And he was fine with the hosts bringing on MAGA guests, like Rudy Giuliani, who lied as they breathed.

Dominion lawyer: “You are aware now that Fox did more than simply host these guests and give them a platform; correct?”

Murdoch: “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that.”

Dominion lawyer: “In fact, you are now aware that Fox (hosts) endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election?”

Murdoch: “…Some of our commentators were endorsing it. Yes. They endorsed.”

At another point in the deposition, Murdoch candidly explained why he felt it was necessary for various Fox hosts to amplify the Big Lie: He didn’t want to alienate his MAGA viewers by telling them the truth, and he didn’t want to antagonize Trump.

In Murdoch’s words, “He had a very large following, and they were probably mostly viewers of Fox, so it would have been stupid” to tell them the truth. It was all about making money; in his words, “It is not ‘red’ or ‘blue,’ it is green.”

Dominion lawyer: “You could have said…to the hosts, ‘Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air’?”

Murdoch: “I could have. But I didn’t.”

The latest legal filing has all kinds of toxic nuggets. For instance, Murdoch testified that, during the 2020 campaign, he worked backstage with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, feeding him debate strategies and tipping him off about the content of Biden campaign ads that had yet to be aired. Suffice it to say that if anyone at MSNBC ever colluded that way with a Democratic candidate, two things would happen: the rabid right would go nuclear, and MSNBC would fall all over itself to apologize.

But Fox, in this lawsuit, still insists it did nothing wrong. Murdoch’s bottom line is that Trump was circulating the election-fraud lies and that Fox had a duty to “report” them to an audience that craved them. At one point in his deposition he even declared: “I am a journalist at heart.”

I bet you can conjure a more accurate word for that guy.

Indeed, the best retort comes from sane conservative columnist David French: “Fox News became a juggernaut not simply by being Republican or conservative but by offering its audience something it craved even more deeply: representation. And journalism centered on representation isn’t journalism 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]

You may not be aware the most important election of 2023 will take place on April 4 in the hotly competitive swing state of Wisconsin.

A primary earlier this week produced two finalists: liberal Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Daniel Kelly. Donors pumped roughly $9 million into the primary, and the spring showdown will put that multi-million tab well into double digits.

They are competing for an open seat on Wisconsin’s seven-member Supreme Court.

The election itself is what bugs me.

Granted, it’s a consequential race. The state’s high court is currently 4-3 conservative, and a Protasiewicz victory would likely swing the bench leftward. But I loathe the practice of electing high court judges. It happens in 22 states, including Pennsylvania, and it strikes me as sleaze incarnate.

The judiciary is supposed to be an independent branch of government, peopled by jurists who reach decisions based on the laws and the facts. Electing judges – compelling them to campaign and allowing them to accept donations from people who may well have a direct interest in future cases – is inherently corrupting.

According to the NYU Brennan Center and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, total national spending on state high court races in the 21st century is more than 250 percent higher than it was in the 1990s. The spending tab in the 2020 election cycle was a record high, $97 million.

In the four-candidate Wisconsin high court primary, more than $7 million was reportedly spent on campaign ads. That kind of air pollution imperils judicial impartiality. As the American Constitution Society, a nonpartisan judicial watchdog group, warned nine years ago, “State supreme court justices…are under increasing pressure to allow electoral politics to influence their decisions.”

A decade ago, the British-run Economist magazine lamented our weird American practice: “It’s fine for a politician to make deals with voters, to say, ‘Vote for me and I’ll promise to raise the minimum wage,’ or ‘Vote for me and I’ll cut your taxes.’ But it is an abuse of power for a judge to promise – or even hint – that he will decide future cases on any basis other than the facts and the law.”

Strictly speaking, Wisconsin judicial candidates don’t run with Democratic or Republican labels. But everybody knows where they stand, long before they wear the robes. Protasiewicz’s first TV ads stated unequivocally that she supports abortion rights, in a state where an 1849 law (still on the books) bans abortion statewide.

“I value a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions with her doctor, family, and faith,” Protasiewicz said after finishing first in the primary. It’s a point of view I happen to support, but doesn’t it undermine the credibility of the judicial branch when it’s touted on the partisan stump?

Ditto Dan Kelly, the conservative finalist, who’s heavily bankrolled by right-wing interest groups and a Schlitz-heir billionaire. Kelly candidly said in a recent interview that “this race will tip the ideological balance of the court, and that’s true. If I don’t succeed, the balance will tip” to the liberals.

A decade ago, the aforementioned American Constitution Society examined 2,345 business-related state supreme court opinions, and matched them to campaign finance records. They found “a significant relationship between business group contributions to state supreme court justices and the voting of those justices in cases involving business matters.”

Alas, unicorns will gambol down your street before anything changes. Proposals to scrap Pennsylvania’s judicial elections have been floated and killed in Harrisburg for decades. Inertia will continue to erode public faith in the judiciary – at all levels, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to create its own conflict-of-interest rules. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. For instance, there was this in 2010:

“We all expect judges to be accountable to the law rather than political supporters or special interests. But elected judges in many states are compelled to solicit money for their election campaigns, sometimes from lawyers and parties appearing before them. Whether or not those contributions actually tilt the scales of justice, three out of four Americans believe that campaign contributions affect courtroom decisions…The crisis of confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary is real and growing. (Without reform), the perception that justice is for sale will undermine the rule of law that courts are supposed to uphold.”

Sandra Day O’Connor got it right.

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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]

Shortly before the deadly MAGA insurrection on Capitol Hill, 2020 election loser Donald Trump infamously ordered Georgia election overseer Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” just enough votes to propel him to statewide victory over Joe Biden.

Trump – circling the drain, his power on the wane – justified his demand with a laundry list of allegations of how Biden had supposedly stolen the state via election fraud.

On the phone call, recorded for posterity, Trump shared his various fraud theories, framing them as fact. Among other things, he claimed the Dominion voting machine company had disassembled and hidden crooked machinery; that hundreds of thousands of Trump ballots were burned or shredded (in his words, “that’s what the rumor is”); that 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls; that 4,925 voters came from out of state; that 18,000 fake votes for Joe Biden arrived in “what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases”; and that “dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people.”

Well, guess what: A Georgia special grand jury, tasked with investigating whether Trump criminally interfered in the statewide election in a bid to overturn the free and fair results, has finally finished its work after hearing from 75 witnesses. Thursday, a Georgia judge released a few key excerpts of the report; it goes to the DA who may well recommend criminal charges. Lo and behold, check this out:

“We find by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”

That doesn’t bode well for Trump. They’re flatly stating that his purported reasons for pressuring Raffensperger – in potential violation of Georgia law – were baldfaced lies.

Nor does it bode well for Trump that the special grand jurors concluded that some of the Trump allies who were subpoenaed to testify might not have been on the up and up:

“…perjury may have been committed. The Grand Jury recommends that the District Attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes when the evidence is compelling.”

By the way, Georgia law prohibits “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” when a person “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in such felonious conduct. Like demanding that the other person “find” 11,780 votes. The demand itself is criminal, under state law, regardless of whether the actual fraud “is consummated.”

And it never was, because Raffensperger stood his ground. On that phone call, he simply told Trump: “Um, we don’t agree that you have won.” Now the special jurors believe this as well.

For what it’s worth, a Trump flak insisted that the special jurors screwed up: “President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong.” I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the flak’s remark has the proximate value of soiled Kleenex.

Bottom line: The weather is slowly warming for most of us, but – whether it’s courtesy of the probe in Georgia or those in Washington, D.C. and New York City – I’m more confident than ever that, for Trump, winter is coming.

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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 State of the Union is usually a useless stale slog that turns healthy brain cells to mush.

Charlie Cook, the veteran Washington pundit, got it right some years ago when he said of the State of the Union, “On my deathbed, watching it will be on the long list of hours that I will wish I could retrieve and spend doing almost anything else.”

But this week’s State of the Union was a rare treat that proved for the umpteenth time Joe Biden should never be underestimated. At this point in his achievement-studded presidency, are we really supposed to be surprised that he kicked butt? In truth, It was hilarious to watch a mentally sharp 80-year-old torment the MAGA clown caucus the way a cat toys with a dead mouse.

Is he planning to run for re-election? Duh. The speech was festooned with lines like “Folks, we’re just getting started.” Ask yourself what other Democrat is better equipped, by dint of experience and political savvy, to keep the Visigoths away from the gates of power.

And what a crowd he faced! Behind his left shoulder sat a guy who needed 15 ballots to win the Speaker’s gavel with the last-ditch assistance of the party’s freaks and frauds. In front of Biden sat more than 100 foes of democracy, the treason-adjacent “law”makers who’d refused to certify his 2020 victory – most vocally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose outbursts (“Liar!”) brought to mind an old quote attributed to Abe Lincoln: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”

How delicious it was to watch Biden drive the Republicans nuts with a list of accomplishments that only delusionists can ignore. Just a couple of highlights include the lowest jobless rate since the summer man first walked on the moon, the most sweeping investment in rebuilding roads, bridges, and rail since Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway initiative seven decades ago, and a law that finally requires the feds to negotiate lower prices for some prescription drugs covered by Medicare.

But what mattered most was the way he delivered the info, with well-timed puckish mischief.

Like when he addressed the Republicans who voted against his infrastructure law even though they’ll reap the rewards in their red districts: “We’ll fund those projects and I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.” Like when he goaded them – in real time, on live TV – to agree not to slash Social Security and Medicare.

The latter episode was fun to watch. Biden reminded them that, in their zeal to scissor the federal safety net, some of them (Senators Rick Scott and Ron Johnson, and others) have proposed reducing the national debt by indeed slashing Social Security and Medicare. Republicans in the chamber mustered another primal scream, either because they wanted to deny what some of them have proposed, or because they didn’t want TV viewers to hear it. Biden stood his ground: “Anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I’ll give you a copy. I’ll give you a copy of the proposal.”

He turned the outraged rumbling to his advantage. If the Republicans were so upset that he’d mentioned the slashing proposals, surely it meant that they were in sync with his determination to protect those essential programs: “Folks – so folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the (negotiating table) now, right? They’re not to be – all right! We’ve got unanimity!”

Now he had the whole chamber cheering for Social Security and Medicare: “So tonight, let’s all agree – and we apparently are – let’s stand up for seniors. Stand up and show them we will not cut Social Security. We will not cut Medicare…And if anyone tries to cut Social Security” – now he was reading the room – “which apparently no one’s going to do, and if anyone tries to cut Medicare, I’ll stop them. I’ll veto it. And look, I’m not going to allow them to be taken away. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. But apparently” – now he was reading the room again – “it’s not going to be a problem.”

Granted, Biden (like all of his predecessors) has weathered some setbacks. During his first two years, many of his ambitious proposals – including paid family medical leave, more affordable housing, health coverage expansion, and a beefed-up child tax credit – died in the legislative sausage-making, and they’re certainly DOA in the new Republican House. Lest we forget, the elected MAGAts have no interest in helping average Americans live better lives.

It’s true that Biden’s current poll numbers are tepid (Ronald Reagan’s were worse at the start of 1983, before easily winning re-election in 1984), and I attribute that to several reasons: Ours is an instant-gratification culture, and it will be a few years before Biden’s legislative achievements hit home; ours is a culture that worships youth, and the MAGA propagandists often score points by depicting Biden as a drooling demented fossil.

When the State of the Union was over, former Republican congressman David Jolly tweeted: “Whoa. It’s not often you see an 80-year-old man giving a public beatdown to 222 grown adults, but my word. What a night.”

He was charitable to call them adults. But what a night indeed. And let’s remember that Harry Truman, dismissed as politically dead in 1948, won re-election by using Republicans as a foil, campaigning against their “know-nothing do-nothing Congress.”

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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]

How fitting it is that just days after Groundhog Day, Americans have awoken to discover yet again that House Republicans are doing anew what they’ve long done over and over.

Republicans are spewing the usual right-wing rhetoric – only to have it collide with the reality of actual governance.

As you probably know, they’re currently threatening to make it impossible for Uncle Sam to pay his bills (by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, a move that would crash the economy). Paying those bills is an obligatory requirement under federal law, but House Republicans insist they won’t play ball… unless President Biden first agrees to slash future spending on a wide range of federal programs.

Never mind the fact Republicans voted three times (along with Democrats) to raise the debt ceiling during the Trump presidency, seven times during the George W. Bush era, and 18 times during Ronald Reagan’s reign. Now, with Joe Biden in the White House, they’re suddenly concerned about red ink.

While they’re talking a grand game about the urgent need to cut and slash Big Guv’mint, in truth they have no idea what to cut and slash. Their nutcase extremists want to target Social Security and Medicare, but House leaders have already ruled that out for the obvious reason that cutting those programs would wreck real people’s lives. And they certainly don’t want to slash the defense budget, because that would undercut their shtick about how Biden is “weak.”

To fully appreciate how lost they are in the halls of governance, check out the following exchange. On CNN earlier this week, host Jim Sciutto asked a back-bench House Republican named Dusty Johnson to specifically list the federal programs that Biden should cut. He asked Johnson three times to identify the president’s “reckless” spending. It did not go well.

Sciutto: “What specific programs are you putting on the table to cut?”

Johnson: “Well, that’s not how a negotiation works.”

Sciutto: “A negotiation, as you know, involves two sides presenting their positions. Can you name a single program that Republicans would be willing to cut money from to make a deal?”

Johnson: “But see, I think that’s ridiculously unfair.”

Sciutto: “Please, go ahead. Is there a program that you can name that you personally would be willing to see money cut from?”

Johnson: “Well, yes, there are lots of programs. But that – but the point is, I’m not going to negotiate against the Republican Party on CNN…Your goal is to try to get Republicans to negotiate against themselves and to try to identify programs.”

Sciutto: “No, my goal is to find out what your positions are…Can you name a defense program you’d be willing to cut from?”

Johnson: We will not “bring forth all of these admittedly difficult-to-discuss cuts.”

It’s clear why Republicans fear specifics. Whenever they’ve pulled that stunt in the past, they’ve gotten burned.

In 1995, Newt Gingrich’s House conservatives threatened to hold the debt ceiling hostage unless President Clinton surrendered on Medicare and Medicaid spending. A year later, Clinton won re-election with ease. In 2011, the House GOP again threatened not to raise the debt ceiling as a way to hamper President Obama; a year later, Obama won re-election with ease.

Marc Thiessen, a commentator based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warned that Republicans are nuts to threaten (yet again!) making it impossible for the government to pay its bills: “If the United States reaches the brink of insolvency, myriad problems could follow. The stock market could plummet, interest rates could skyrocket, our national credit rating could be downgraded, millions of jobs could be lost and inflation could climb even further. And Republicans would assume ownership of the economic debacle…If Republicans want to all but guarantee a second Biden term, picking a debt ceiling fight is a great way to do it.”

But those ideologues wake up every morning with the same old tune. They just never learn.

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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 good news is many Republicans want to leave Donald Trump in the dust. The bad news is so many of them are just as odious.

Case in point: Mike Pompeo.

This choleric guy, who was plucked from back-bench House obscurity by the Trump team and inexplicably elevated to CIA director and Secretary of State, is clearly maneuvering to run for president in 2024. It’s obvious in two ways: He has sought to make himself more telegenic by losing massive amounts of weight and he’s seeking to romance the right-wing donor class and Duh Base by singing all of MAGA’s greatest hits.

Earlier this week, he said on TV that “the left” had “exploited” the violent events of Jan. 6 insurrection and that the day had ended in “glory.” Apparently “the left” is exploiting the courts, which continue to send insurrectionist thugs to the slammer, and bending the minds of the 140 Capitol cops who are still reeling from the physical assaults they suffered that day.

And a year ago, for instance, on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Pompeo lauded the mass murderer as “very savvy…very shrewd…elegantly sophisticated…one who is not reckless but has always done the math…He is a very talented statesman.” Right. Putin is so talented he has united the western world against him, strengthened NATO, and wrecked the economy of his own benighted country.

Putin is arguably a clear and present danger to world peace, but Mike Pompeo disagrees. A few months ago he decreed: “The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call.” In case you didn’t know, Weingarten runs one of unions that represents public school teachers.

Actually, Pompeo has been off his rocker for a very long time. Remember Benghazi, the faux-scandal that House Republicans like Pompeo tried to pin on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? That ginned-up brouhaha ended when a string of congressional panels – the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and three others – all concluded that she’d done nothing perfidious or criminal. But none of that mattered to Pompeo, who insisted on NBC News that she was guilty of something. He was asked, where’s the evidence? He replied: “In my heart.”

But forgive me for taking so long to tee up the ultimate Pompeoism.

We got it earlier this week, with the release of excerpts from his new book (a de rigueur exercise for aspiring presidential candidates). At one point in this tract – which, according to one reviewer, has “more venom than a quiver of cobras” – Pompeo offered a quick critique of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who in 2018 was suffocated and dismembered with a bone saw by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s security team. Khashoggi, a veteran Saudi journalist, had dared to write critically of Mohammed bin Salman’s autocratic behavior and to call for a freer Arab world. As punishment, Khashoggi’s body was taken apart and made to disappear.

Those of us with civilized instincts were rightly horrified, but not Pompeo. He recounts in his book that he was the first western big shot to visit Mohammed bin Salman after Khashoggi’s murder, aiming to rehab the homicidal prince’s credentials. Should Trump have punished the prince in some way? Nah, writes Pompeo, “it wasn’t a close call.” Indeed, “I was the one who gave the middle finger to The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the other bed-wetters who didn’t have a grip on reality.”

Then Pompeo tries to school us on his version of reality: “We need to be clear about who Khashoggi was – and too many in the media were not…Khashoggi was a journalist to the extent that I and many other public figures are journalists. We sometimes get our writing published, but we also do other things. The media made Khashoggi out to be a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward…In truth Khashoggi was an activist” – someone who was “cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood.”

In truth, Khashoggi had spent three decades as an editor and reporter. He was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (not since the 1980s) and was “cozy” only to the extent he tapped some members as sources. He also routinely denounced terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11.

Seven years ago, Khashoggi wrote: “In the Arab world, everyone thinks journalists cannot be independent, but I represent myself, which is the right thing to do. What would I be worth if I succumbed to pressure to change my opinions?”

It’s no surprise that Pompeo would try to smear a bone-saw murder victim. As Pompeo would put it, demeaning Khashoggi in a bid to boost his MAGA creds was clearly not a close call.

Trump may not be viable in 2024, especially if he’s indicted. But with low characters like Pompeo in the mix, let’s be careful what we wish for.

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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]

With all my heart I cherish the saga of George Santos (aka Anthony Devolder, aka Anthony Zabrovsky) because he’s the quintessential epitome of the MAGA freak show.

The bad news is he now sits on two House committees  thanks to Kevin McCarthy, who needed his vote in order to become Speaker. The good news is hardly a day goes by without a fresh revelation about the fraud whom House Republicans have clutched to their bosoms.

The latest beaut is that Santos has been outed by people in Brazil who knew him as a drag queen who went by the name Kitara Revache, who aspired to be crowned Miss Gay Rio de Janeiro.

A Brazilian drag queen saw a photo of the Long Island congressman now known as George Santos and realized it was the same guy he knew as “Kitara” – more specifically, he knew the guy as “Anthony” using the stage name of Kitara – from a 2008 drag queen contest.

The drag queen who outed Santos now says, “He’s changed a lot, but he was always a liar.”

Let me be clear: The fact that Santos/Devolder/Zabrovsky/Kitara enjoyed being a drag queen is not the issue at hand. As the Seinfeld gang used to say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” If somebody wants to dress in drag, fine. I certainly don’t stand with the right-wing homophobic thugs who’ve been trying to shut down drag shows in various American venues – or with the MAGA demagogues who’ve latched onto the notion that drag queens are trying to “groom” innocent kids.

What’s at issue here is the fact that McCarthy and his House minions are totally fine not only with a guy who faked his entire resume, who got his campaign money from mysterious sources, who’s definitively linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch, who’s the target of a Brazilian check fraud investigation, who said his mom died in the 9/11 attack when in fact she was not in America that day and died 15 years later, who allegedly stole money from a Navy veteran’s GoFundMe page for his dying dog… but who also paraded himself in public as precisely the kind of person he and his party openly detest.

It seems a tad contradictory that “Kitara” in his current guise is a hate-stoking conservative in the ginned-up culture wars. Santos supports Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law barring teachers from discussing gender identity in class and has mimicked MAGA rhetoric about how LGBTQ people, and drag queens in particular, abuse children by bending their minds.

So what’s the Republican response to all this? Because it seems a tad contradictory for a party that purports to champion Christian morals and targets drag queens as existential enemies to also be welcoming a drag queen into its club. If “groomers” are such a threat to western civilization, shouldn’t these self-appointed moralists be demanding that Santos resign? Conversely, if they’re truly OK with having Santos in the loop, doesn’t that expose their anti-drag crusade as fraudulent?

Naturally, they’ve been silent ever since the news broke about the adventures of “Kitara.” A spokesman for morality crusader Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s “not getting involved in this media-created drama.” Kevin McCarthy, who has appointed Kitara to sit on two committees (Small Business and Science) has said zip, because what’s the guy going to say? He needs “Kitara’s” vote.

As Al Franken has observed, “There is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right.” And if memory serves, didn’t Democrats compel their colleague Franken to quit his Senate seat after an old photo showed him doing something juvenile?

How asymmetric it is that one party tries to police its ranks often to a fault, while the other party is so despicably shameless.

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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]