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When news broke the other day that President Biden’s lawyers had found a few documents with classified markings in a think-tank office he once used, we all knew that MAGA’s false equivalence cops would spring into action.

Their predictable message, aimed primarily at low-information nitwits: Trump is innocent because he and Biden did the same thing!

Um, no. They didn’t do the same thing.

This is bad for Biden, purely from a bare-knuckle political perspective. The disclosure of the Biden documents (including a second batch that Biden’s people have now found on his Delaware property) has gifted the MAGA Republicans a propaganda weapon when they needed it most – as Trump potentially teeters on the cusp of indictment. This week, via spin and innuendo, Republicans are busy asserting – with zero evidence – that the two cases are equivalent, as a way to absolve Trump of any criminal wrongdoing.

This muddying of the waters may well strike a chord with the millions of Americans who have problems processing facts, or who simply don’t pay attention. But if only a few of them are reading these words, here’s a simple primer on how the cases fundamentally differ, based on what we actually know:

The documents in the Biden case total roughly 12. The documents in the Trump case total at least 220, including at least 60 labeled “Top Secret.”

When Biden’s lawyers discovered the office documents, they immediately notified the National Archives and handed over the material a day later. Trump, for months, repeatedly defied requests from the National Archives that he hand over everything he was hoarding in Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s Justice Department has named a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to review the Biden office documents. Trump’s long pattern of obstruction – refusing to comply with a federal subpoena; handing over some classified documents while hanging onto others – compelled the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and execute a search warrant.

Indeed, there was a great exchange the other day on Fox News. Host Dana Perino tried to goad Republican strategist Karl Rove into playing the false-equivalence game – but Rove didn’t take the bait. When Perino said that the Biden case “sound a little similar” to the Trump case, Rove succinctly replied:

“But there are differences. For example, how many documents in Biden’s case? There appear to be about 10. In the case of President Trump, hundreds…We know that President Trump ordered the removal of the documents to Mar-a-Lago. How responsive were (the two camps)? When the Biden people found out about (the office documents) they immediately called the local authorities and turned them over. We spent a year and a half watching the drama unfold in Mar-a-Lago, and it had to end in a police search to recover the documents.”

Nevertheless, Rove said that MAGA Republicans have been handed an opportunity to spin a false-equivalence narrative – and thus, “in the minds of a lot of ordinary Americans,” the two cases “are going to be conflated as being roughly the same.”

Rove got that right. Trump’s hacks on Capitol Hill are busy rooting for an FBI raid on Biden. Trump himself, on his social media site, is already claiming (with his usual attentiveness to facts) that all the Joe Biden office documents were “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL” and had something to do with Hunter Biden and China and “Old Crow” Mitch McConnell and McConnell’s Asian-born spouse, “Coco Chow.”

It’s only a matter of time before the “narrative” asserts that the Biden office documents reveal a plot to seize everybody’s gas stoves.

How refreshing it’d be, even in our nutcase political climate, if people could muster the ability to put things in perspective, to grasp the concept of proportionality. There’s a difference between a guy who forfeits stuff that doesn’t belong to him, and a guy who takes stuff and refuses to give it back. There’s a difference between a guy who negligently leaves a store without paying, and a guy who robs the place. There’s a difference, as former Bush pollster Matthew Dowd points out, “between an accidental fender bender who stays to file report, and a homicidal maniac who purposely runs through a crowd of people then leaves scene of the crime.”

We can only hope that Jack Smith and his federal prosecutors will spot the difference.

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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]

Decades ago, Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt warned: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, i.e. the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false, i.e., the standards of thought, no longer exist.”

With that quote in mind, it’s oh so predictable that the Republicans – devoted as they’ve been to a totalitarian ex-president, and practiced as they are in propagating viral fictions – seem fully prepared in the new year to clutch George Santos to their bosoms and usher him to his new House seat, despite the fact that he has been outed as a serial lying fraud in the Trumpian tradition.

Every time we think we’ve reached bottom in this country, MAGAts and their spawn drill deeper – exacerbated all too often by the public’s inattention.

You’ve probably heard about Santos, who flipped a blue House seat in the midterms, winning handily on Long Island with a fake bio that might even shame Herschel Walker. He told voters he’d worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. In truth, he’d worked for neither. He told voters he’d earned degrees from Baruch College and New York University. In truth, he did neither. He told voters he was “a nonobservant Jew,” “a proud American Jew,” and a the grandson of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, a trifecta of lies.

Santos said that he runs a capital consulting company, but there’s no record of any clients and his original claim of $80 million in company assets has gone up in smoke. He also said that some of his employees were killed in a mass nightclub shooting in 2016. In truth, none of nightclub victims were his employees. He also said he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties. In truth, the correct number is zero.

It’s also a mystery how the guy managed to pump $700,000 into his own campaign. It’s not clear where the money came from, given his own sketchy history, because as recently as two years ago he was reportedly struggling with small debts. Some years ago in Brazil, he was charged by the authorities with check fraud after being caught writing checks with a stolen checkbook.

Santos tried to defend himself Tuesday night on Fox News: “I understand everybody wants to nitpick at me. I’m gonna reassure this once and for all. I’m not a facade.”

“Nitpick”?

Nevertheless, House Republican leaders haven’t uttered a peep of protest about this font of fakery. Rank opportunism reigns, extremism is rewarded (the GOP supported Santos even though he was in D.C. on Jan. 6), and truth is the first casualty. Kevin McCarthy, who was suckered like so many others – on Nov. 19 he boasted that Santos would swell the size of the “Republican Jewish caucus” to a grand total of three – wants Santos sworn in on Jan. 3 simply because he needs the guy’s vote in the Speaker contest.

You can almost smell the stink. I’m reminded of what Obi-Wan Kenobi said before entering the Star Wars cantina: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Granted, politicians are not loath to embellish their resumes. But Santos is an uncommonly blatant figment of the imagination (his own), and, truth to tell, blame for his ascent is not limited to the GOP. By all accounts, Democratic strategists in that blue Long Island district didn’t do enough to check out Santos while the campaign was under way. Neither did the local media, which (like the Democrats) decided in advance that Santos had no chance to win. Those who were entrusted to separate fact from fiction failed to act.

But the Santos story isn’t over. Where did those $700,000 campaign bucks come from? Did Santos lie on his congressional disclosure forms? It’s a crime to file false forms to the feds.

What lesson can we learn from this debacle? Alas, nothing we don’t already know. As Sally Yates. the acting attorney general fired by Trump, said five years ago: “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable.”

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Copyright 2022 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 I watched President Biden sign the historic marriage equality law, his latest of many legislative achievements, I couldn’t help but marvel at how much American culture has changed during the past quarter century.

Sometimes the long arc of history does bend toward justice.

Those of us with MAGA PTSD, benumbed as we’ve been by years of bad news, should savor this moment to celebrate something good. Because, not so long ago, the Respect for Marriage Act – which creates federal protections for same-sex couples and outflanks the Supreme Court’s theocrats – was unthinkable, unimaginable, and undoable.

As recently as 1996, Gallup’s pollsters reported that only 27 percent of Americans supported gay marriage. That same year, President Clinton read the tea leaves and signed an anti-gay bill, passed by a Republican Congress with solid bipartisan support, that defined marriage as a bond of man and woman, banned federal recognition of gay marriages, and permitted states to ban recognition of gay couples wedded elsewhere.

Clinton was intent on crafting a centrist image for his re-election race, and in 1996, the centrist stance on gay marriage was staunch opposition. Not only did Clinton sign the bill, he even bragged about it in radio campaign ads (“President Clinton has fought for our values, and America is better for it”).

Eight years later, on the eve of George W. Bush’s reelection bid, the anti-gay vibes were still so strong that Karl Rove, his political swami, had a brilliant brainstorm. Rove wanted gin up 2004 turnout among Christian evangelicals who, in his calculations, had been insufficiently enthused when W. eked out his first win in 2000. And what better way to drive evangelicals to the polls than to put anti-gay marriage referenda on the ballots in 11 states – most notably Ohio, a swing state back then.

As numerous political science scholars have since determined, those referenda (which warned that scary gay marriage would sink western civilization) helped attract an outsized number of evangelical voters – particularly in pivotal Ohio, where some analysts even believe that the heftier base turnout was pivotal in putting Bush over the top in 2004. That’s precisely what a “wedge” issue was designed to do.

But today in the 2020s, there’s no way Republicans would even consider such a stunt – because, as former Bush strategist Mark McKinnon quipped quite some time ago, “The wedge has lost its edge.” Campaigning against equality has become an artifact from an intolerant era.

A major shift in public sentiment was clear 10 years ago when Barack Obama ran for reelection. In the Gallup poll, support for gay marriage cleared 50 percent for the first time. President Obama signed legislation allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, and he paid no political price. Then, in the spring of 2012, his vice president – Joe Biden – declared on “Meet the Press” that he favored federal protection for gay marriage, essentially forcing Obama’s hand. They paid no political price for that either, winning reelection in November.

Today, of course, there’s still some shrill resistance to marriage equality – Fox News’ Laura Ingraham baselessly says that the new law weakens religious people’s freedoms, while talk show agitator Matt Walsh says that conservatives who favor marriage equality are “stupid pansies” – but the naysayers and homophobes are outliers. A quarter century after Gallup said that only 27 percent of Americans supported gay marriage, that stat has soared to 71 percent.

Can anyone name another issue on which public sentiment has changed so swiftly? This particular culture war battle is over.

It’s easy to understand why – the generation that has come of age since 1996 thinks it’s common sense to let people marry those they love. Gay people increasingly live openly and share their lives with straight friends and family – and how fitting it was that Joe Biden, a 10-year marriage equality advocate, wielded the signing pen.

As President Lyndon Johnson said on the eve of his battle for civil rights, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

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Copyright 2022 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]

Fresh from their failures in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans have created an “advisory council” to help craft their “2024 vision and beyond.”

Cue the hysterical laugh track.

Vision. That’s a hoot. By all accounts, their plan to curb inflation is to focus on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The showrunners on “Seinfeld” had a slogan for their self-absorbed characters: “No learning.” That’s perfect for the MAGA-infested GOP, which seems incapable of learning anything. In fact, it was perfect for the GOP long before the MAGA metastasis.

After losing the 2012 presidential race, Republicans warned in an autopsy report that the overwhelmingly white party needed to modernize by reaching out to people of color, because otherwise it was “driving around in circles on an ideological cul de sac.”

Guess what happened next.

In 2016 they ignored their own advice and tripled down on circling the cul de sac by nominating Donald Trump, who proceeded to market white grievance and malign people of color. Then Trump led the party to defeat in three straight elections – the 2018 midterms, the 2020 presidential, and the 2022 midterms.

So now Republican chairwoman Ronna McDaniel thinks an “advisory council” can help determine what’s gone wrong and how to make things right. And to further that effort, here are three of the advisors she has chosen to contribute wisdom:

• Kellyanne Conway, the Trump propagandist who told Fox News this week that Herschel Walker lost in Georgia because not enough Republican bigwigs came to help him.
• Blake Masters, the defeated Arizona Senate candidate, who insisted that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, that America was wrong to enter World War II, and that America’s gun violence should be blamed on “Black people, frankly.”
• Tony Perkins, the right-wing religious zealot who has devoted his career to opposing legal abortion and gay equality.

“Our party needs to modernize,” said Blake Masters, who drew lots of support from white extremists whose idea of modernization was turning back the clock on people of color.

The prize for magical thinking goes to the Republican National Committee, which said that the advisory council members would advise “on continuing the success we saw in 2022 such as growing the party with Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters.”

That’s an odd definition of “success.”

Black voters basically clinched Democratic control of the Senate; more than 90 percent cast ballots for John Fetterman in Pennsylvania (as did 68 percent of Pennsylvania’s Hispanics), and more than 90 percent voted for Rafael Warnock in this week’s Georgia runoff. According to the nationwide midterm exit polls, only 30 percent of non-whites voted for Republicans (other estimates put the share at 27).

And imagine taking advice from anti-abortion extremist Tony Perkins, in the wake of exit poll evidence that 59 percent of midterm voters supported legal abortion in all or most cases; that abortion was cited as the second most important issue – and that 76 percent of those who named abortion as the most important issue voted for Democrats.

The funniest recent line in The New York Times was a reporter’s prediction that the GOP’s lousy midterm results “will almost certainly lead to soul-searching.” Yeah, right.

Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk show host, had the best rejoinder: “Somehow we doubt that the GOP will spend much time rummaging through the soul they mislaid years ago.”

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Copyright 2022 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]

On the campaign trail back in March 2020, Joe Biden said he viewed himself as merely “a bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders, whom he called “the future of this country.”

By all indications, however, the president seems determined to extend his bridge construction deadline to 2028. He’s reportedly mapping plans for a re-election bid (“My intention is that I will run again”), emboldened by the most successful midterm results for a president’s party in decades. He would be 82 when the 2024 ballots are cast. At the close of a second term, barring bad health or worse, he would be 86.

Biden just turned 80, and maybe that’s fine, maybe it’s enough to quip that 80 is the new 70, especially for a guy with a disciplined exercise regimen and the best health care in the western world. But most Americans don’t seem impressed; in an autumn Associated Press survey, 58 percent of voters said that he lacks the mental capability to serve effectively. And we certainly know what his political opponents think. Here’s Jim Geraghty, in the conservative National Review:

“Most Americans can see and hear [Biden’s] statements and senior moments now, roll their eyes, shrug, and go about their daily lives. The question is whether at some point, these tics, blunders, and memory lapses turn into something more consequential… Could Biden address the United Nations General Assembly and ramble for 20 minutes about Corn Pop and his exploits as a pool lifeguard in Wilmington, and everyone in the world would just shrug it off as ‘Biden being Biden’?”

It’s often standard practice to diss an aging politician who has defied the actuarial table (the average life-expectancy of an American male is 77.3), and to suggest that such a person should get off stage, go play shuffleboard, and queue up for the early-bird special. Our culture deifies youth and dumps on about seniors. In 1996, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole was widely ridiculed for being 73. Late-night comics targeted John McCain in 2008, when he was 71, calling him “the kind of guy who picks up the TV remote when the phone rings.”

Those quips seem cruel in retrospect, and it’s worth pointing out that Joe Biden has always gaffed and meandered. And given the number of legislative wins he has racked up in only two years with a 50-50 Senate and thin House majority – major wins, many of them under-appreciated – what difference does it make how old he is? Referencing those wins not long ago, he said, “How’d an old guy do that?”

On the other hand, we have never elected an octogenarian to the Oval Office, and it’s fair to assume that Biden’s loose lips will flap ever more often – given what we all know, that our character traits and quirks tend to become more pronounced as we age. When Biden was veep 12 years ago, it was deemed cringeworthy when he was captured on an open mic telling Barack Obama that the Affordable Care Act was “a big f–king deal!” Three months ago, at a White House event, it was way worse when he searched the audience for Congresswoman Jackie Walorski (“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?”), apparently forgetting that she’d recently died in a car crash.

In politics, optics matter. Biden’s physical gait is clearly stiffer than it was even two years ago. Fairly or not, when the youngest voters look at Biden, they see great grandpa in God’s waiting room. What they also see – what many of us older folks see – is a new generation of Democratic leaders waiting in the wings, jonesing to make their mark. That includes current and incoming governors like Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, and Wes Moore (Maryland’s first black chief exec); current and former office-holders like Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries, and Tim Ryan; and many others you may fault me for omitting.

They may have no choice but to cool their heels until 2028, much the way Republican aspirants had to wait back in the ’80s for Ronald Reagan to finish out his second term at age 77. (Reagan was widely perceived as being men mentally out to lunch for much of that second term.) But on the issue of health, we don’t know what we can’t possibly know. Biden, who has weathered much tragedy in his life, recently said, “I am a great respecter of fate.”

And if we reach the point when someone in that rising Democratic generation decides in public to thank Biden for his service, we’ll know it’s game on.

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Copyright 2022 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]

Those of us who love America for its traditional democratic values are exhaling sighs of relief, because – lo and behold – it turns out that the midterm elections’ purported “red wave” turned out to be somewhere between a ripple and a trickle.

We won’t have full clarity for a few days or even weeks – control of the House and Senate currently hang in the balance – but what we do know, beyond all reasonable doubt, is that the MAGA cult failed to sate its goose-stepping ambitions. Even if Republicans eke out a House majority, there’s no way they can claim a mandate for their destructive instincts.

In the words of right-wing apparatchik Mark Thiessen, whining on Fox News, “This is an absolute disaster for the Republican party.”

The conventional wisdom on midterm eve – with inflation at eight percent and President Biden burdened with a popularity rating around 42 percent – was that the Republicans would sweep into power, picking up at least three Senate seats and dozens in the House. Those forecasts didn’t seem preposterous; after all, an incumbent president’s party traditionally suffers big time in his first midterm. Bill Clinton lost 54 House seats in 1994, and Barack Obama lost 63 in 2010.

But it’s already clear that Joe Biden will enjoy the best midterm of any Democratic incumbent since at least 1978 – for several key reasons: the Democratic base (especially the overwhelmingly blue 18-to-29 year olds) showed up in robust numbers and swing-voting independents (who often break heavily for Republicans in midterm elections) narrowly favored Democratic candidates this time around – apparently because Trump-endorsed candidates turned them off.

Oh, did I mention that 58 to 60 percent of voters (according to the exit polls) said they don’t like Donald Trump? And that lots of conservatives are blaming Trump for the red trickle? And that the one guy Trump viciously attacked on midterm eve, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, won in a landslide? I hope they’re locking up the ketchup bottles at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s favorite celebrity, Mehmet Oz, lost the Pennsylvania Senate race to John Fetterman. We should talk about that first, because by flipping the seat blue, Democrats have enhanced prospects of holding the Senate. Oz was a quack doc and a carpetbagger (the joke on Election night was that he awaited a surge of late votes from New Jersey), but what clearly hurt him most was his anti-abortion stance, as articulated during his debate with Fetterman when he said that abortion should be a decision between a woman, her doctor, and “local political leaders.” Women voters favored Fetterman over Oz by 15 percentage points. Checkmate.

It’s also clear, nationally, that the high court’s erasure of Roe v. Wade buoyed the Democrats. In the exit polls, a plurality of 39 percent said they were “angry” about the criminalization of abortion. Of those folks, 85 percent voted blue.

Speaking of Pennsylvania, Democrat Josh Shapiro routed Jan. 6 MAGAt Doug Mastriano in the gubernatorial race. How refreshing it was that a gentleman of the Jewish persuasion defeated an abettor of fascism. And speaking of gubernatorial races, Democratic incumbents won in Michigan and Wisconsin, which ensures that Trump supporters will have a tough time rigging those key states in the 2024 presidential election. The guardrails of democracy have indeed been strengthened.

Other Trump-endorsed candidates are flaming out or fighting for breath. Blake Masters is likely going down in the Arizona Senate race; Dan Bolduc flopped in the New Hampshire Senate race; Hershel Walker, arguably the biggest blockhead on Trump’s MAGA roster, finished second in the Georgia Senate race, which will head to a December runoff.

All told, as right-wing pundit Erick Erickson points out, Trump “saddled the GOP with a lot of clunker candidates.”

Nevertheless, Trump has it all figured out. He actually said this, while the voting was underway: “I think if they (his endorsees) win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”

Whatever. But since the midterms are finally over, now can we get this guy indicted?

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Copyright 2022 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]

When I was a kid, I’d sometimes cover my eyes or ears during scary movies. I did it again earlier this week, for as long as I could bear it.

About the Pennsylvania Senate debate between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz – with the fate of the Senate itself hanging in the balance – perhaps the less said, the better. A guy with a serious medical impairment faced off against a huckster who sounded like a chihuahua on speed. This is the best we can do?

I’m sorry if I sound “ableist,” but it was excruciating to hear Fetterman in action. If Democrats and progressives are so willing to justifiably question whether Herschel Walker is fit to serve, based on the fact that he’s not right in the head, and so willing to justifiably question whether Donald Trump is fit to walk the earth freely, much less serve a new presidential term, based on the fact that he’s not right in the head, then it follows logically that Fetterman is questionable as well.

I’m not engaging in “false equivalence.” I’m simply responding to what I heard and saw with my own semi-covered eyes and ears. A senator needs to be able to communicate, period. I’m still haunted by Fetterman’s response to the question of whether he supports fracking despite saying quite clearly in 2018 that he opposes it. He said: “I, I do support fracking and – I don’t, I don’t – I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking.”

And I’m still not sure what he meant when he said this about Dr. Oz: “He got his Pennsylvania house from his own in ladies for a dollar.” Or perhaps he was trying to say in-lays, which perhaps means that he meant to say in-laws.

And we got this (I’m quoting Fetterman verbatim): “How can a man, you know, with with 10 gigantic mansions has am willing to talk about willing wage for anybody? Imagine a signal mom trying with two children trying to raise with them.”

OK, now I’m starting to sound cruel. But ask yourself: If a loved one in your family had a stroke, and was clearly still recovering, would you want that loved one to be pursuing such a demanding and stressful job?

Oz, however, didn’t have the excuse of being impaired. He was smarmy, arrogant, and condescending because that’s who he is. Especially when he said, “John, obviously I wasn’t clear enough for you to understand this.”

Oh, here’s something we can all understand: his position on abortion. Oz said that the option to have an abortion should involve “women, doctors, and local political leaders.” Hey, that’s brilliant! Let’s involve the “local political leaders” of his own party, starting with the MAGA chairmen in places like Cumberland County – or, better yet, with all the Republican hacks in Harrisburg and who are jonesing to pass legislation that would ban abortions statewide.

And when Oz was asked about the phony medical advice he peddled during his years as a celebrity TV doc, he basically admitted that it was just a hustle: “That was a television show, just like this is a television show.”

And Oz actually said this, free of any medical impairment: “I want to bring civility, balance…bring us together…I want Washington to be civil again.” But he’s still a cheerleader for Trump. He said he’d support another Trump presidential bid, apparently deaf and dumb to the irony that the sick puppy who’s on the cusp of indictment is the antithesis of civility and balance.

I don’t have the stomach to continue. I want that hour of my life back.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

There ain’t much to laugh about in politics these days – not with hundreds of election deniers on the 2022 ballot, not with House Republicans leaders openly vowing to sabotage Social Security in 2023, not with the thief of nuclear secrets still marauding the land – so we need to covet mirth wherever we may find it.

But we’ve just received a blessed gift. A quintessential Republican grift. So let’s briefly forget our existential frets and indulge in what Keith Richards calls “legs-in-the-air laughter.”

Consider the standard right-wing family values hypocrite. Such people are too numerous to list, but we could always start with former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who famously declared in 1999 that “We must continue to be proactive warding off the pedophiles and creeps who want to take advantage of our children” – only to wind up in jail on charges that he violated banking laws and lied to the FBI about hush money he paid to conceal past sexual abuse of an underage student.

Or we could start with Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican senator who paraded himself in public as a gay-hating homophobe, as a man’s man who vowed to “defend and strengthen the traditional values of the American family” – only to be caught, in 2007, soliciting gay sex in an airport washroom.

Or we could start with family-values fraud Roy Moore, the 2018 Senate candidate who was credibly accused of preying on teen girls in Alabama – and was so relentless in his pursuit that he was banned from a local mall.

But we should make room for the latest entry, a gentleman by the name of Randy Kaufman, a purported moral pillar of his Arizona neighborhood, who was running as a Republican this fall for a position on the governing board of the Maricopa County Community College District. His platform was quite specific. He said he wanted to ensure that “our children are protected (from) the progressive left.”

Then he decided to put his protection plan in action. On Oct. 4, Kaufman parked his truck near a preschool where kids were playing outside. He pulled down his pants…acch, I’m too skeeved out to continue. I’ll let the arresting officer tell the rest of the story:

“(Kaufman) appeared to be looking at a cell phone in one hand. I immediately became alarmed as I saw (Kaufman) had his pants down mid-thigh and was exposed showing his fully erect nude penis. (Kaufman) was manipulating his genitals in a masturbatory manner.”

Wow. Of all the ways to protect little kids from “the progressive left,” Kaufman’s method was certainly… different.

Anyway, the cop didn’t seem too impressed. He had more to say in his report:

“(Kaufman) looked up, saw me, seemed alarmed and surprised then grabbed a cloth that he had on his seat and covered his genitals. (He) rolled down the window and I instructed him to pull his pants up. I had (him) exit the truck. I said to (him), ‘Seriously?’ (He) said to me, ‘I’m sorry… I’m just really stressed out. I have a lot of things going on.’”

Most of us are stressed out. Most of us have a lot of things going on. But I’ll venture to say that we tend to relieve our anxieties with wine, cannabis, a binge-worthy show, a chill piece of music, with any vast number of appropriate options. But self-pleasuring in front of a preschool…wait, I also should mention what Kaufman told the cop about the preschool.

The cop asked him: “When you look around here, what do you see?”

Kaufman replied: “The child center, but I didn’t notice it… Are you going to put that in your report?”

Oh, you bet he did.

So much for Kaufman’s avowed crusade against “the progressive left.” This week he suspended his campaign – while vowing to “never stop fighting to protect the United States Constitution and the values that make America the greatest country in the world.” (Seems like he whacked that vow. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

The hitch, however, is that it’s too late to remove his name from the ballot. I won’t presume to know how well he’ll perform on election day, but at the rate the GOP seems to be going, he’ll probably be in the U.S. Senate by the end of the decade.

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Copyright 2022 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]

My general policy is to ignore Donald Trump’s rallies, in part because his narcissistic freak shows are merely a cry for help. But mostly because his lies mount up with such rapidity that it’s impossible to knock them all down.

But one particular defilement, uttered at last weekend’s gathering of the willfully deluded, does peeve me greatly. It definitely rates a fact-check before it’s inevitably forgotten. It concerns a deceased president who’s not here to defend himself.

Trump is clearly spooked by the prospect of being indicted for stealing classified documents from the government that owns them, so naturally his instinct is to slime innocent people as a way to somehow absolve himself. Here’s what he tried the other night:

“George H.W. Bush took millions of documents to a former bowling alley and a former Chinese restaurant where they combined them. So they’re in a bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant… A Chinese restaurant and a bowling alley. With no security and a broken front door. Other than that it was quite secure. And there was no security.”

His suckers reflexively chuckled, having no clue what he was talking about, but they probably figured that if their grievance god was saying it, then surely it must be gospel. But alas, it was just another grift:

1. When presidents leave office (as the senior Bush did in January 1993), documents are always initially stored in large converted spaces. Ronald Reagan’s material was initially stored in a former pasta factory. Bill Clinton’s material was initially stored in a former car dealership.

2. The senior Bush did not “take” the documents. The National Archives and Records Administration took the documents, supervised the documents, and sifted the documents to ensure that any classified material would be kept from prying eyes. Ten NARA archivists did that job for three years. NARA did that job for Reagan, Clinton, the junior Bush, and Obama. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Those temporary sites are always NARA-managed facilities.

3. According to the voice in Trump’s tooth fillings, the senior Bush’s documents had “no security and a broken front door.” But here’s what the Associated Press reported on June 26, 1994: “Uniformed guards patrol the premises. There are closed-circuit television monitors and sophisticated electronic detectors along walls and doors. Some printed material is classified and will remain so for years; it is open only to those with top-secret clearances.”

4. Even Trump’s use of the present tense – “they’re in a bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant” – was a quarter century out of date. All of the senior Bush’s NARA-vetted documents have been housed at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum since it opened in 1997. Those libraries are always the final resting place, after NARA completes initial work in the temporary warehouses. And by the way, the senior Bush never diverted any documents to his personal residence.

But even if my instinct is to ignore Trump’s rallies, I do hope the Justice Department’s prosecutors are paying attention – because every so often he admits that he broke federal law. (Actually, numerous laws.) From his Sunday freak show: “I had a small number of boxes in storage… They should give me immediately back everything they have taken from me, because it’s mine.”

No, thief. It’s not yours. It’s ours. And can you at least let Poppy Bush rest in peace?

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Copyright 2022 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 Georgia Republicans rallying around Herschel Walker – with evangelical Christians flocking to his “prayer luncheon” this week, with ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich on TV hailing the Senate hopeful’s purported “deep commitment to Christ” – it’s clear the guy could abort a fetus in the middle of Fifth Avenue and never lose a right-wing vote.

That might seem astounding, given that Herschel “pro-life without exceptions” Walker, long unmasked as a serial liar, has now been outed for financing a girlfriend’s abortion (writing a check, no less). But we do need to remember that conservative tribalism and rank hypocrisy are not new phenomenon. To best understand the GOP’s latest circling of the wagons, turn back the clock to 2014 and consider the case of Congressman Scott DesJarlais.

DesJarlais, a Tennessean swept into the House in the 2010 tea party wave, is still in office today. But he seemed doomed back in 2014. Surely there was no way that Republican voters would want to reward a self-described “family values conservative” who preached traditional values (“pro-marriage and proud of it”) as well as anti-abortion zealotry (“all life should be cherished and protected”) – while, in private, engaging in multiple extramarital affairs and encouraging several women to have abortions.

A licensed physician, DesJarlais was reprimanded and fined by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners in May 2013 for engaging in sexual relationships with two of his patients. At the time of those affairs, “pro-marriage” DesJarlais was married to his first wife.

Actually, there were more than two affairs. According to divorce court transcripts, released after he won re-election in 2012, there were as many as eight affairs (patients, co-workers, a drug representative). He also encouraged one of his lovers to have an abortion (according to the transcript, he scolded her for procastinating: “You told me you’d have an abortion, and now we’re getting too far along without one”), and he brandished a gun to intimidate his first wife during an argument. Oh, and I almost forgot: He goaded his first wife into having two abortions.

Still with me? There was more.

Under oath during his divorce proceedings, DesJarlais explained his reason for seeking the second abortion: “Things were not going well between us.” In other words, there should be no exceptions for rape, incest, or the endangered life of the mother. But, for the exclusive benefit of himself, he crafted a Things Not Going Well in the Relationship loophole.

All this baggage should’ve been a deal-breaker at the ballot box, right? As if.

He was even challenged that summer in a Republican primary – his opponent sent out mailers: “Abortions. Affairs. Abuse of Power. We can’t trust DesJarlais to Fight for Our Values” – but it didn’t matter. DeJarlais still won the primary. Then, in November, he trounced his Democratic foe by 23 percentage points.

By now you’ve probably guessed why the guy survived: (1) Tennessee conservatives hated President Obama, and DesJarlais had dutifully voted against everything Obama wanted. (2) As one voter, clearly speaking for many, told a Tennessee newspaper, “We’re Christian. If you can’t forgive…”

Bingo! The voters gifted him a Get Out of Hades Free Card. Here’s the way it works: When a conservative sins egregiously, violating everything he preaches in public, he gets Christian forgiveness; but when (for instance) Bill Clinton sinned, it was a “character issue” and a spur for impeachment.

The DeJarlais Rule lives on. No wonder Herschel Walker is getting a pass. (Fellow philanderer Newt Gingrich has offered an additional defense: “He had a lot of concussions coming out of football.”) But Sarah Longwell, a lifelong and still sane Republican activist, has tweeted the bottom line:

“I’m not saying Herschel Walker can’t still win. I’m just saying that if he does win, it means that morality, truth, and decency have ceased to be relevant to GOP voters. And there is no limit to what the broader Republican Party will tolerate. But I guess we knew that already.”

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Copyright 2022 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]