Cagle World

At the start of Tuesday’s Jan. 6 hearing, Liz Cheney sent a critically important message to the Justice Department: “Like everyone else in this country, (Trump) is responsible for his own actions and his own choices…Trump cannot escape responsibility for being willfully blind…He is a 76-year-old man, he is not an impressionable child.”

Translation: Don’t let Trump off the hook just because he’s a lunatic living in a fantasy world. For weeks and months, he was repeatedly told that he’d lost fair and square, but refused to face the truth. Given the choice between conceding the race, as tradition required in a democracy, and summoning a violent mob to desecrate democracy, he opted for the latter. But willful blindness is not a defense against criminality.

Liz got that right. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2011 case (with Justice Alito writing for the majority), criminal defendants cannot escape responsibility “by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances…defendants who behave in this manner are just as culpable as those who have actual knowledge.”

What we learned, in infuriatingly excruciating detail, was that over a span of six hours on the night of Dec. 18, 2020, Trump met with three of his favorite grifters – Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn – in the hopes of reversing his defeat despite the dearth of election fraud. Trump, by this point, had been told for many weeks that his prospects were nil; indeed, two White House attorneys, Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann, crashed the grifter bull session and stressed, yet again, that election fraud evidence did not exist.

It was a climactic showdown between the realists and the crazies. There was lots of insults and cursing, with Rudy yelling that Cipollone and Herschmann were “pussies.” Cipollone, in his videoed testimony, recalled that the crazies floated the idea of having the U.S. military seize the voting machines. (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.)

Cipollone’s reaction, as shared with the Jan. 6 committee: “Having the federal government seize voting machines? That’s a terrible idea for the country. That’s not how we do things in the United States.”

What was Der Leader doing while all this was going on? Weighing which side to embrace – the realists or the crazies. The realists had repeatedly told him there were no legal options, but he was willfully deaf to their counsel. So he chose the crazies; as ex-aide Katrina Pierson later remarked, he “loved the crazies.” Shortly after that grifter bull session ended, in the early hours of Dec. 19, 2020, he posted his now-infamous tweet summoning his acolytes to march on Jan. 6, with the promise “will be wild!”

That tweet prompted his pet demagogues (Alex Jones, et al) to spread the word, and ordinary folks were duly incited. Stephen Ayres, an Ohio cabinetmaker who recently pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct at the Capitol, testified in person: “I followed President Trump on all the websites. He basically put out (word of) the rally, I felt I needed to be down there…We were basically just following what he said…I was hanging on every word.”

Others in Trumpworld knew exactly what he was doing. Brad Parscale, one of Trump’s many former campaign managers, lamented in a Jan. 6 text to Pierson that he was witnessing “a sitting president calling for civil war…I feel guilty for helping him win.” Pierson contended that Trump’s rhetoric wasn’t responsible for the violence and deaths on Capitol Hill, but Parscale tweeted back: “Yes it was.”

It’s gratifying that nearly six in 10 Americans now believe (finally!) that Trump should be criminally charged. And now, as Liz Cheney pointed out, there is bountiful evidence that he was willfully blind to the irrevocable facts and truth of his defeat; that he opted instead for havoc, in violation of numerous federal statutes.

As Barbara McQuade, a law professor and former U.S. attorney, said in a recent New Yorker interview, prosecutors have the easiest time if a defendant confesses that he consciously knew his actions were wrong – but “you can still obtain a conviction (when) a jury is told that they should look at the totality of the circumstances and draw reasonable inferences based on their own common sense and life experiences. If someone tells you 100 times that the world is round and you think, ‘Geez, the world looks flat to me,’ at some point, if you continue to deny the world is round, you really know better. You are engaging in willful blindness to say the world is flat, and to sell people things on the basis that the world is flat.”

In the best of all possible worlds (to quote Voltaire’s Candide), Trump will sell his grifts only to fellow inmates.

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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]

I can’t help but notice that the six Supreme Court justices who criminalized abortion were all raised Catholic.

It’s quite galling (the mildest adjective I can conjure) that they’ve overturned settled law and relegated American women to second-class status by unleashing their worst theocratic impulses. It’s the kind of arrogant fiat you might expect to see in a traditional backwater where Catholic diktats rule the roost – a country like, say, Ireland.

Wait. I need to amend that. Compared to America, Ireland in 2022 is a land of secular enlightenment.

On the issue of abortion, Ireland makes us look exactly like what we’re on cusp of becoming: a reactionary theocracy that threatens to impose forced-birth policy on half the population.

To fully appreciate how far the Irish have come, let’s set the scene. In 1995, when I was a foreign correspondent, I spent two weeks in the Irish Republic, writing about the scads of devout parishioners who were fed up with the Irish Catholic Church. One such lady was Mary Heffron, a mother of seven in the tiny County Mayo town of Moygownagh. She ran the local church choir and prayed in a pew every Sunday. The church had always relied on the Mary Heffrons of the land, and her stolid presence would’ve seemed to indicate that all was well. But no.

She told me: “I’ve had quite a crisis of belief. It’s a bit of a curse to be more educated and aware than ur parents were, because it makes it harder to go to Mass now. I’d love not to go. It’s just gotten very stale, old-fashioned and boring…Last Sunday our priest went after abortion again, and really personalized it, he said how selfish women were for wanting to kill babies. Nothing at all about the circumstances women often find themselves in, or how there were men involved as well. And I sat there, looking around, betting that some of the people there had had abortions, and what was he saying to them? What about mercy and the love of God? How can those women keep coming to Mass and listening to that?”

This was a quarter-century ago, when Ireland – by dint of a constitutional amendment engineered by the church hierarchy – banned virtually all abortions; even rape and incest victims were out of luck. But progressive western thought was beginning to weaken the church’s grip, and the seeds of grassroots discontent were already sprouting, particularly among the young.

Fortunately for Irish citizens, their lives (unlike ours) are not held hostage by unelected judges with absolute power and lifetime sinecures who lie under oath about promising to uphold settled law. In the Irish system, by contrast, the judiciary can be checked-and-balanced by the people – who have the right to vote in national referenda.

And so it came to pass, in 2018, that the people had the opportunity to decide for themselves whether abortion should be legal – in essence, whether conservative church doctrine should still be permitted to dominate policy. A referendum was held.

And legal abortion won in a landslide.

A whopping 64 percent – including 72 percent of women – voted to junk the constitution’s ban. Legal abortion won every age bracket except voters 65 and older, and even 63 percent of the voters in rural counties, where church influence was arguably strongest, said Yes as well. Thirty nine of the nation’s 40 voting districts signaled Yes.

The state minister of health, Simon Harris, approvingly declared that the people of Ireland “want to live in a country that treats women with compassion.” The prime minister, Leo Vadakar, said the vote tally was “the culmination of a quiet revolution that has taken place in Ireland over the past 10 to 20 years. We trust women, and we respect them to make the right decisions for their healthcare.”

Last Friday, Orla O’Connor, an Irish women’s rights activist, recalled that historic referendum: “People had a sense of the legacy of the past, particularly in terms of the Church and how the Church had treated women, but there was a sense that we were not that Ireland anymore.”

Gee, if only American voters had the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of America they wanted and whether women should be allowed to control their own bodies. We know darn well what the majority would say. But alas, there’s no referenda mechanism here.

I never thought I’d see the day when a modernized Ireland, in a democratic spirit, would embrace social-justice Catholicism – while America, via theocratic fiat, would fall prey to the religion’s most backward misogyny.

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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]

I can’t help but notice that the six Supreme Court justices who criminalized abortion were all raised Catholic.

It’s quite galling (the mildest adjective I can conjure) that they’ve overturned settled law and relegated American women to second-class status by unleashing their worst theocratic impulses. It’s the kind of arrogant fiat you might expect to see in a traditional backwater where Catholic diktats rule the roost – a country like, say, Ireland.

Wait. I need to amend that. Compared to America, Ireland in 2022 is a land of secular enlightenment.

On the issue of abortion, Ireland makes us look exactly like what we’re on cusp of becoming: a reactionary theocracy that threatens to impose forced-birth policy on half the population.

To fully appreciate how far the Irish have come, let’s set the scene. In 1995, when I was a foreign correspondent, I spent two weeks in the Irish Republic, writing about the scads of devout parishioners who were fed up with the Irish Catholic Church. One such lady was Mary Heffron, a mother of seven in the tiny County Mayo town of Moygownagh. She ran the local church choir and prayed in a pew every Sunday. The church had always relied on the Mary Heffrons of the land, and her stolid presence would’ve seemed to indicate that all was well. But no.

She told me: “I’ve had quite a crisis of belief. It’s a bit of a curse to be more educated and aware than ur parents were, because it makes it harder to go to Mass now. I’d love not to go. It’s just gotten very stale, old-fashioned and boring…Last Sunday our priest went after abortion again, and really personalized it, he said how selfish women were for wanting to kill babies. Nothing at all about the circumstances women often find themselves in, or how there were men involved as well. And I sat there, looking around, betting that some of the people there had had abortions, and what was he saying to them? What about mercy and the love of God? How can those women keep coming to Mass and listening to that?”

This was a quarter-century ago, when Ireland – by dint of a constitutional amendment engineered by the church hierarchy – banned virtually all abortions; even rape and incest victims were out of luck. But progressive western thought was beginning to weaken the church’s grip, and the seeds of grassroots discontent were already sprouting, particularly among the young.

Fortunately for Irish citizens, their lives (unlike ours) are not held hostage by unelected judges with absolute power and lifetime sinecures who lie under oath about promising to uphold settled law. In the Irish system, by contrast, the judiciary can be checked-and-balanced by the people – who have the right to vote in national referenda.

And so it came to pass, in 2018, that the people had the opportunity to decide for themselves whether abortion should be legal – in essence, whether conservative church doctrine should still be permitted to dominate policy. A referendum was held.

And legal abortion won in a landslide.

A whopping 64 percent – including 72 percent of women – voted to junk the constitution’s ban. Legal abortion won every age bracket except voters 65 and older, and even 63 percent of the voters in rural counties, where church influence was arguably strongest, said Yes as well. Thirty nine of the nation’s 40 voting districts signaled Yes.

The state minister of health, Simon Harris, approvingly declared that the people of Ireland “want to live in a country that treats women with compassion.” The prime minister, Leo Vadakar, said the vote tally was “the culmination of a quiet revolution that has taken place in Ireland over the past 10 to 20 years. We trust women, and we respect them to make the right decisions for their healthcare.”

Last Friday, Orla O’Connor, an Irish women’s rights activist, recalled that historic referendum: “People had a sense of the legacy of the past, particularly in terms of the Church and how the Church had treated women, but there was a sense that we were not that Ireland anymore.”

Gee, if only American voters had the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of America they wanted and whether women should be allowed to control their own bodies. We know darn well what the majority would say. But alas, there’s no referenda mechanism here.

I never thought I’d see the day when a modernized Ireland, in a democratic spirit, would embrace social-justice Catholicism – while America, via theocratic fiat, would fall prey to the religion’s most backward misogyny.

–

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]

To millions of oblivious Americans, “democracy” is just an abstraction conjured by dead men in powdered wigs, and “fascism” is just something with swastikas on the History Channel.

But as we learned this week – in what was arguably the most powerful congressional testimony since Joseph Welch asked Joe McCarthy “Have you no decency?” – the MAGAts have already goose-stepped into the lives of certain private citizens who have dared to do the grunt work of making our democracy function.

Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, two Atlanta election workers, were targeted personally by Trump because he needed some fake scapegoats for his election loss. Trump has ruined their lives.

Naturally, they’re Black women – because, as we know from Trump, “bad things” supposedly happen in places with lots of Black voters.

What happened to Moss and Freeman in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as recounted at the fourth Jan. 6 committee hearing, was no abstraction. It was fascism with a tragic human dimension. All Americans should take what happened as an early warning of what’s to come for everyday folks if the evil forces currently in play are permitted to run wild.

Here’s the gist, as articulated by Ruby Freeman, known for decades in her community as Lady Ruby:

“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me, ‘Lady Ruby,’ a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic…

“I don’t introduce myself by name anymore, I get nervous when I bump into someone who in the grocery store who says my name. I’m worried about who’s listening. I get nervous when I have to give my name for food orders…I’m always concerned of who’s around me. I’ve lost my name, I’ve lost my reputation, and I’ve lost my sense of security.”

Trump couldn’t abide his loss in Georgia, so he and his goon, Rudy Giuliani, blamed it on (nonexistent) election fraud in Fulton County – greater Atlanta – and said that Moss and Freeman helped orchestrate the (nonexistent) perfidy. Trump called the elderly Freeman “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” and said without a shred of evidence that she and her daughter double-counted votes for Joe Biden. Giuliani also concocted the fantasy that cameras had captured Moss and Freeman passing a thumb drive (“like they were vials of heroin or cocaine”) filled with doctored votes for Biden.

In reality, as Moss said under oath, the thumb drive was a ginger mint.

Giuliani had said: “I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who’s a criminal investigator or prosecutor they are engaged in surreptitious illegal activity. Their places of work, their homes should have been searched for evidence of ballots, for evidence of USB ports for evidence of voter fraud.”

Various Georgia thugs were so inspired by Trump and Giuliani, they stormed the home of Ross’ grandmother in the hopes of making a so-called citizen’s arrest. Freeman was compelled to flee her own home for two months; her daughter had to go into hiding.

Ross recalled “a lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like ‘Be glad its 2020 and not 1920’….This has never happened to me, and my mom is involved. A lot of them were racist, a lot were just hateful.” And, to this day, “I don’t want to go anywhere, I second-guess everything that I do. It’s affected my life in a major way, in every way, all because of lies for me doing my job – the same thing I’ve been doing forever.”

But Ross no longer works for the Fulton County Department of Registration & Elections. She felt compelled to quit, for the sake of her family’s safety. Other honest election workers in other locales have already done the same. What will happen to our elections if these tragedies become endemic?

It’s laudable that the Jan. 6 committee, and groups like Protect Democracy, are fighting to salvage our imperiled form of government. Moss and Freeman are not abstractions; they’re private citizens who sought to do their best for the country they love.

If the cesspool of lies engulfs us, there will be many more such stories. If fascism infests us on a human scale, it will be too late to resist.

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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]

The fascist threat at the top, so well documented by the Jan. 6 Committee, is rightfully seizing our attention. But it’s also happening from the bottom up.

Case in point: Nevada nutcase Jim Marchant.

In Nevada’s Republican primary, he became the cult’s candidate to be secretary of state – the election overseer in that narrowly blue locale. Marchant, a former state assemblyman, got the nod because he told the voting cultists that if he had been secretary of state in 2020, he would’ve refused to certify Joe Biden’s solid statewide victory. And if he’s elected in November, he promises to “overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada,” even though there’s zero evidence of a fraudulent election system in Nevada.

This is how the MAGA termites are going about their business of chewing democracy’s woodwork.

Imagine if Marchant is the Nevada secretary of state in 2024, when the presidential balloting potentially trends blue. Imagine, moreover, that similar loons are overseeing the 2024 election in other states crucial to Democratic hopes – like Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Arizona – which is entirely possible, because MAGAts are running in those races, too.

At the risk of making you more paranoid, there’s solid evidence that some of the MAGA work to seize secretary of state posts is being orchestrated by a QAnon promoter who goes by the pseudonym “Juan O Savin” – courtesy of something called The America First Secretary of State Coalition. Yes, folks, the QAnon crowd and the MAGA crowd have wedded in holy matrimony. If Abe Lincoln, the first Republican president, could behold what has happened to his party, he’d never stop retching.

It’s all happening in plain sight, as so-called “Juan O Savin” can attest. Not long ago he told a radio show: “I started with Jim Marchant here in Nevada, who has then taken a primary role in this coalition as other candidates have come in, going out around the country and helping vet that we got the right players that are inside the coalition.” He candidly says that the goal is to rig the election system – In his words, “to get to the right result…How are we going to coordinate between the various states to get the right outcome?”

The “right” outcome. And Marchant concurs. During a podcast earlier this month, he told contempt-of-Congress indictee Steve Bannon: “If we get just a few of the candidates that we have in our coalition, we save our country.” Another Marchant remark, on another occasion, referring to his MAGA allies: “Not only did they ask me to run, they asked me to put together a coalition of other like-minded secretary of state candidates. So I got to work. ‘Juan O Savin’ helped.”

They’re gnawing the woodwork below the secretary of state level, too – by enlisting various election-overseeing candidates at the county level. New Mexico held primaries on June 7, but, lo and behold, the Republican election commissioners on rural Otero County canvassing board are refusing to certify the county results… because, without a shred of evidence, they say they don’t trust the Dominion voting machines.

Here’s a shock: One of the county election officials, Couy Griffins, is the co-founder of something called Cowboys for Trump. Apparently, the fact that he was recently convicted of illegally entering restricted Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 has not cured him of the impulse to sabotage the democratic machinery. New Mexico’s secretary of state got so fed up that she complained to the state Supreme Court – which ordered the county board to do its job and certify.

But there’s also some good news: Various anti-fascist groups are actually paying attention to all this localized perfidy. For instance, the Demo­cratic Asso­ci­ation of Secret­ar­ies of State is hyper-focused on the looming threat, and it’s racking up more donations than ever before. American Bridge, another group that helps Democrats, is targeting election deniers running for secretary of state and other local posts. The American SOS Project, a new political action committee, is running ads and raising money.

And yes, the termites can be successfully sprayed – as evidenced in May by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s landslide primary victory over a Trumpist who’d sought to oust Brad for certifying Biden’s statewide win. (Trump’s command that Brad “find” 11,000 Trump votes is now the focus of a Georgia grand jury probe, and Brad may well testify in front of the Jan. 6 Committee.)

Tip O’Neill, the legendary House Speaker, was indeed correct when he said that “all politics is local.” That’s where you find the foundations of our democratic woodwork. But the overriding question in 2022 is whether most voters – fixated as they are on inflation – will care enough to protect it.

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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]

It’s blasphemy in certain circles to state the obvious, which is that America is not exceptional in every way and that Americans are not the peerless masters of the universe. Heck, I’ll even dare to say that some countries do some things better than we do.

Consider, for instance, Australia. If I didn’t have a job, family, and friends, I’d be tempted to move there. Because the people who live there are far less likely to be mowed down en masse in a food store, or in a movie theater, or at a concert, or in a restaurant, or in a school.

When the Australians suffered a horrible massacre in 1996 – a gunman killed 35 in a seaside resort – their elected leaders didn’t waste time with worthless prayers. Instead they responded like rational civilized human beings. Twelve days after the shootings, Prime Minister John Howard and his center-right government announced a sweeping bipartisan gun reform deal. In Howard’s words, “We have an opportunity in this country not to go down the American path.”

True that. What civilized country would want to emulate us?

In the 1996 law, Australia created a buyback program that took 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns out of circulation – roughly 20 percent of all firearms nationwide. They banned private gun sales, instituted thorough national background checks, required that owners register all their remaining weapons, and, perhaps most importantly, they required that gun buyers provide “a justifiable reason” at the time of purchase. Self-defense was not considered a justifiable reason.

In the decades since the law was enacted, roughly one million semi-automatic weapons have been sold back to the government and destroyed. And Australian hunters can still hunt. In 2016, one hunter told Time magazine: “When (the prime minister) proposed the gun law, I marched like everybody else did in opposition. But I now fully endorse what he did… At the end of the day, it’s a small price to pay not to have the nutjobs walking through shopping centers and massacring innocent people.”

Granted, such enlightenment can’t happen here. We’re us and they’re them. Australia doesn’t have a gun-fetish culture that’s tethered to a misinterpreted amendment about a “well-regulated militia” (an amendment that the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican appointee, called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public”). Australia doesn’t have a deadly cadre of elected leaders who routinely cash in millions from the gun manufacturers’ lobby.

What’s indisputable is that the Australian reform law has been, in the words of a 2011 Harvard study, “incredibly successful in terms of lives saved.” A 2018 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that in the 18 years prior to the seaside resort shootings, Australia weathered 13 mass shootings (defined as incidents in which five or more people died). In all the years since, the country has suffered a grand total of… one. (We’ve had two in the last two weeks.) And a 2021 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that the Australian law’s benefits have been even broader: “The strongest evidence is consistent with the claim that the (law) caused reductions in firearm suicides, mass shootings, and female homicide victimization.”

I know that we Americans hate to be lectured by other countries, but sometimes, like especially when little kids get slaughtered, we clearly deserve it. So let’s give the Australians the last word. This is from an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“It is incomprehensible to us, as Australians, that a country so proud and great can allow itself to be savaged again and again by its own citizens. We cannot understand how the long years of senseless murder…have not proved to Americans that the gun is not a precious symbol of freedom, but a deadly cancer on their society.

“We point over and over to our own success with gun control…and that we are still a free and open society. We have not bought our security at the price of liberty; we have instead consented to a social contract that states lives are precious, and not to be casually ended by lone madmen. But (our) message means nothing to those whose ideology is impervious to evidence…You can’t regulate evil. But you can disarm it. Once again we pray that the U.S. will come to its senses and do just that. And once again, we are dreadfully sure it won’t.”

That editorial was written five 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]

So here we go again.

Politicians of all stripes will offer their “thoughts” and “prayers” to the victims’ families. Special-interest groups on the right will cite the latest bloodbath as proof that we need more gun ownership. And cable television will rerun the same video clips umpteen times, fill the airways with talking ranters, and thus leave the impression that nothing else is happening anywhere in America or overseas, probably for the next week or so, until this latest massacre is flushed down the memory hole.

That’s what always happens. Way back, that’s what happened after two twisted kids shot up the Columbine high school on April 20, 1999. We witnessed the national wringing of hands, the convening of symposia and the ritual assignations of blame – and now we’ll do it again, of course, before settling back into our routines until the next massacre provides a temporary jolt.

Before we numbly move on from one of the worst mass shootings in American history – temporarily topping some of the worst mass shootings in American history, to be topped sooner or later by the next mass shootings – let’s do the drill we know so well: Quotes from on-the-scene survivors. Media kudos to heroes. Biographies of the dead. NRA silence. Congressional nothingness. Rinse ‘n’ repeat.

After all, when tragedy strikes here in the accursed land of locked ‘n’ loaded, it’s deemed “too soon” to say anything else. Then, after all the deaths are tallied and the bodies are buried and we’ve moved on, it’s always “too late.”

But what the heck, I’ll go through the motions anyway: What happened this time was a terrorist act greased by a lenient gun-loving state that makes the NRA proud. We’ve lost the mental and moral capacity to prevent these bloodbaths. The lawmakers quake in perpetual fear that the arms merchants will unleash their wrath on anyone who steps out of line. A nation armed to the teeth has essentially decided that the mass loss of innocents is an acceptable tradeoff for “Freedom.” The innocents’ freedom to live is deemed disposable.

Conservative commentator David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, laments: “Like ancient villagers, Americans accept periodic plagues as a visitation from the gods, about which nothing can or should be done. The only permitted response is ‘thoughts and prayers’ – certainly never rational action to reduce casualties in future. Even to open the discussion as to whether something might not be done violates the taboos of decency: How dare you politicize this completely unpredictable and uncontrollable event! It is as if gun violence were inscrutable to the mind of man, utterly beyond human control.”

All we get, in lieu of substance, are worthless words from the gun lobby’s hapless stooges. It’s all part of the drill. I can’t precisely pinpoint when America fully surrendered to benumbed insanity, but I’ll put my money on Sandy Hook. Once we decided that even the slaughter of little kids was acceptable collateral damage, we crossed the line and sold our souls.

The innocents are casualties of a toxic culture that’s out of control. Semi-automatic weapons (known to NRA leaders as “sporting arms”) and high-capacity magazines are growth sectors of the gun market. Remember the NRA’s unspoken message: “Guns are good business. Invest your kids.” Barring a great awakening, there is no going back.

Regarding the mass murder of 19 kids in Texas, there’s really nothing new to write. That’s why for this column, I’ve merely copy-pasted passages that I have written before. Everything old is new again. Every sentence in this post has been lifted from my previous columns about the 2021 Michigan school shootings, the 2018 Parkland school shootings, the 2017 Las Vegas concert shootings, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings, and the 2007 Virginia Tech school shootings. I’ve stitched a Frankenstein monster, as it were.

More than ever, we’re held hostage by the “pro-life” American ethos: Life begins at conception and ends with a Second Amendment execution.

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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]

The writer Alan Furst has shrewdly observed, “Fascism famously stomps around in jackboots, but it sometimes wears carpet slippers, padding about softly on the edges of one’s life, and in a way that is worse.”

And so here we are, in my home state of Pennsylvania, face to face with the worst.

No need for jackboots here. In last night’s gubernatorial primary, pro-coup Republicans merely went to the ballot box and chose a MAGA loon who loudly agitated to overthrow Joe Biden’s victory and nullify the will of the people. And if this guy winds up as governor, you can forget seeing an honest election in this swing state in 2024.

Granted, conventional wisdom decrees that Doug Mastriano has no chance of beating popular Democratic nominee (and current attorney general) Josh Shapiro. To which I say: Have you ever visited Pennsylvania? More specifically, the vast expanse between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia?

In a formerly sane America, a fascist fellow traveler like Mastriano would pull a single-digit percentage in any statewide election. But apparently, for Duh Republican Base in 2022, plotting a coup is what passes for a sterling credential.

Mastriano didn’t cheer on Trump from the sidelines – he was a central player. In late November 2000, from his perch as a state senator, he introduced a resolution to erase Biden’s popular vote victory and instead authorize the Republican-run state legislature to gin up its own slate of electors, who’d then magically award the swing state to Trump.

Mastriano insisted that Dear Leader had been “cheated” out of his victory by a “corrupt” election process – “There is mounting evidence that the PA presidential election was compromised” (there was no such evidence) – and therefore “we are going to take our power back.” When all that failed, he bused supporters to the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. And when that failed, he wasted time in 2021 agitating in vain for an “audit” of the Pennsylvania election.

He has been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 Committee (he has ignored it). He’s also cited in a Senate Judiciary Committee report for having “raised a litany of false and debunked claims of widespread election fraud.” He’s also defiant about his presence at the Capitol on insurrection day: “Shame on the media and the Democrats who are painting anyone who was down there as a villain.”

But never mind the past. Take a gander at the potentially fascist future.

I’m well aware that the word fascist sounds hyperbolic. But we’re talking here about the exercise of dictatorial power and the suppression of democratic opposition. Denying the reality of Mastriano would mean that we’ve learned absolutely nothing these last six years.

He’s already telling us who he really is. He recently surfaced at a QAnon meeting, where he mocked what he called “this myth of the separation of church and state,” and vowed that in November “we’re going to take our state back. My God will make it so.” He’s also an anti-choice zealot who has already floated a bill to ban all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. If/when the Supreme Court nixes Roe v. Wade, Mastriano would work with the Republican legislature to end women’s bodily autonomy. (He says: “I don’t give way for exceptions, either.”)

Most importantly, a Pennsylvania governor has the power to appoint the state’s top election official (the secretary of the commonwealth, who certifies election results), and it’s a cinch bet that whoever fills that role would work with Mastriano to ensure that the 2024 contest is rigged for MAGA.

So much for Pennsylvania being the birthplace of democracy.

Do I sound like an alarmist? Was I an alarmist in 2016 when I wrote repeatedly (and in vain) that Trump was a “clear and present danger to our democratic values”?

Pennsylvania Democrats are reportedly giddy that Mastriano is the Republican gubernatorial nominee because there’s supposedly no way he can beat Josh Shapiro. (I seem to recall that many Democrats in 2016 were giddy about Trump because there was no way that such a clownish fraud could beat Hillary.) But this is no time for haughtiness.

If grassroots Democrats do what they usually do – stay home en masse during non-presidential elections – then fascism, in Alan Furst’s words, will no longer be “padding around softly on the edges of one’s life.”

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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]

It’s shocking that someone within the Supreme Court enclave would take the extraordinary step to leak the draft opinion that kills Roe v. Wade and propels women back to the coat-hanger era. But what’s not shocking in the slightest is the draft opinion itself.

Did we really expect anything else? It’s not as if the Republican rightists and the censorial evangelicals and the meddling moralists and the craven misogynists had not signaled for decades exactly who they were and what they were plotting to do. It’s not as if Mitch McConnell wasn’t signaling his intentions when he stole a Supreme Court seat from a qualified Obama appointee. It’s not as if Donald Trump wasn’t making it plain as day when he promised to put three or four Roe foes on the court. It’s not as if Republicans hadn’t stated over and over, election after election, that it considered “the sanctity of innocent human life” (introduced in the GOP platform of 1980) and the composition of the high court to be intertwined first-tier voting issues.

They’ve been playing the long game, and now it’s finally poised to pay off. They haven’t cared a whit whether most Americans were on their side about criminalizing abortion (most Americans are still not on their side), because they answer only to God or whatever purportedly higher entity. They’ve been single-minded and focused and ruthless – unlike the too often lazy and oblivious pro-choice majority.

Let’s talk about that pro-choice majority. Let’s put the blame for the impending post-Roe dystopia squarely where it belongs.

I’ll spare you the long history by starting the clock in 2000. When George W. Bush ran for president, he wooed and won the Christian right with explicit promises to craft a right-wing anti-Roe court. (Justice Alito, who wrote the draft opinion, is a Bush appointee). Bush’s pledge was applauded by conservative activists like William Kristol, who told me in 1999 that overturning abortion rights was a top priority and that “the biggest impact the next president will have on domestic policy will be in the realm of high court appointments.” In response, Democrats and progressives barely mentioned the court in that campaign.

Fast forward 10 years. Infuriated by Barack Obama’s presidential victory, the Republicans – always thinking ahead – launched a massive effort to capture state legislatures in the 2010 “off-year” elections, in order to undercut Roe with state restrictions. In response, Democrats and progressives devoted a comparable pittance of money and resources to those state races. Result: a red tsunami at the grassroots.

Did Democrats and progressives learn their lesson and realize that “off-year” elections were kinda important? Not a chance. When the next round came along, in 2014, Democratic turnout was anemic yet again. Result: Republicans seized control of the Senate and McConnell, the new majority leader, was thus empowered to block Obama nominee Merrick Garland, to the point of even denying him a hearing.

Did Democrats and progressives respond with a sustained focus attack on that stolen seat, using it as a springboard to make the 2016 presidential race a referendum on the future composition of the Supreme Court? Not a chance. Not even after Hillary Clinton explicitly warned what would happen to Roe if she were to lose: “Our next president could appoint as many as three or four justices in the next four years…That’s why this election is so important.”

Alas, what was deemed to be far more important was the feeling that Hillary was not pure enough or likable enough or her voice was too “shrill” or there must have been something sinister in her emails.

Here’s the big difference between the two partisan camps: Republicans and conservatives of all stripes had all kinds of legitimate qualms about Trump, but they stayed focused on their ultimate judicial mission: to deny women bodily autonomy. That kind of thinking was anathema to liberal litmus-testers.

And sure enough, when the 2016 exit polls were released, the damage was done: One-fifth of all voters cited the Supreme Court as the “most important” factor in their voting decision – and among those folks, Trump swamped Hillary by 15 percentage points.

So here we are now, paying the price for decades of apathy – willfully blind to the plotted theft of women’s privacy rights, happening in plain sight. The furious Democratic reaction to the leaked draft opinion is so tiresomely in character precisely because Democrats by nature are so tiresomely reactive.

Joe Lockhart, a pro-choicer and former Bill Clinton spokesman, wrote on Twitter: “We have an election coming up to actually do something.” That’s fine, as far as it goes. It certainly would be nice if lazy pro-choice folks get off their duffs en masse and “do something” to rid us of Republican incumbents at all levels in the impending midterms.

I’ll believe it when I see it. And it’s so grievously in character for the Democrats to wait until the GOP’s long game is almost over and hurl a Hail-Mary pass as the clock runs out.

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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]

Just as it’s a waste of time for Republicans to refight the results of the 2020 election, it certainly does no good for anti-MAGAs to refight what happened in the previous race. Nevertheless, I wince on occasion when I contemplate how our country would’ve been far better served if the popular vote winner in 2016 had ascended to the Oval Office.

Wednesday was one such occasion, truly winceworthy.

While eulogizing Madeleine Albright at the Washington National Cathedral, I was struck by these passages:

“Freedom can’t be taken for granted. Democracy must be defended. Peace must be won. And there is no time to waste doing any of that…(Albright) continued to issue blunt warnings about the dangers posed by authoritarianism and fascism with undeniable moral clarity…She talked about the importance of what President Biden is doing to rally the world against Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine and the urgent work of defending democracy at home and around the world. She knew better than most and she warned us in her book on fascism, that yes, it can happen here, and time and courage are of the essence…This must be a season of action. And yes, once again, we must heed the wisdom of her life and the cause of her public service. Stand up to dictators and demagogues, from the battlefields of Ukraine, to the halls of our own capital. Defend democracy at home, just as vigorously as we do abroad.”

Albright indeed warned us about encroaching fascism – in 2018, she said: “There are conditions out there that provide the petri dish for something terrible to happen” – but let’s not forget that back when it mattered most, with America at a crossroads, Hillary Clinton warned us, over and over, about what would happen if the opposition’s demagogue was handed the reins of power. She had faults as a candidate, but ultimately it was not her fault that a small but fatal share of clueless, oblivious, feckless, or willfully deaf Americans stayed home in the handful of states that swung the antiquated Electoral College.

She got it right during the 2016 debates when she spoke directly to Trump: “(Putin) would rather have a puppet as president. (We know) that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do. And that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”

She got it right in 2016 when she warned about the MAGA movement’s animosity toward people of color: “Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters. It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of president he’d be.”

She got it right in 2016 when she warned that the GOP would target gay people all over again, regardless of “the progress that we fought for, that many of you were on the front lines for. It may not be as secure as we once expected.”

She got it right in a 2016 speech when she warned that “a fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party. And this is part of a broader story – the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world…So no one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here.”

She got it right in 2016 when she warned about a fragile future for women’s reproductive rights: “The fact that our next president could appoint as many as three or four justices in the next four years (demonstrates) that we can’t take (those rights) for granted. Just consider Donald Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive nominee…He has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade…And that’s why this election is so important. The outcome of November’s contests is going to be a deciding factor in whether our elected officials and our courts defend or attack a woman’s right to health care for generations to come.”

She’s still getting it right, by the way. Last year she noted: “There is a plot against the country by people who truly want to turn the clock back. They believe that the progress we’ve made on all kinds of civil rights and human rights, the cultural changes that have taken place, are so deeply threatening that they want to stage a coup.”

If that coup is completed in 2024, don’t say that Hillary didn’t warn us.

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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]

I’m guessing that the French presidential election isn’t high on your current list of interests. If not, I suggest you take a long look at the photos that feature Vladimir Putin communing with one of his favorite goons, far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

In the French election runoff on April 24, Le Pen has a decent shot at beating current President Emmanuel Macron and fulfilling Putin’s longstanding dream of having an ally in power in the heart of western Europe. May I say with extreme understatement that this would not be a good thing for our western alliance.

Macron and Le Pen finished first and second, respectively, in the initial round of balloting this past weekend. But since neither came close to winning a majority of votes – Macron garnered 27.9 percent, Le Pen 23.2 – they will face off in the deciding round, just as they did in 2017 when Macron prevailed.

That may well happen again this time. The problem is, far-right nationalist sentiment has long been building in France, and it’s currently threatening to bust the country wide open, thanks to widespread public grousing about inflation and immigrants and “elites.” Macron is consigned to the latter category.

Le Pen, a longtime Putin apologist, has been trying to broaden her political appeal – how else can she win a majority of votes on April 24? – by stressing tax-cutting “kitchen table” issues and playing down her pro-Russia biases. She has criticized Putin’s rape of Ukraine, but her platform echoes key Putin priorities.

Most notably, she wants to withdraw France (the European Union’s only nuclear power) from NATO’s integrated military command structure “so as to be no longer caught up in conflicts that are not ours.” She has also attacked sanctions against the Putin regime. (“Do we want to die? Economically, we would die!” she said recently, when asked if France should cut off oil and gas imports from Russia. “We have to think of our people.”) Her party, National Rally, has even featured a leaflet showing her shaking hands with Putin. That’s no surprise, given the fact that her party financed itself in 2014 with a 9-million euro loan from a Russian bank.

Her con game should be obvious to anyone who’s paying even minimal attention. The problem is, a fatal share of French voters may not be paying attention – or caring one way or the other. Shades of the 2016 Trump ascent in America.

One democracy scholar told The Washington Post the other day: “At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, there was an assumption that it would significantly harm extremists who have long been close to Putin. (But) Le Pen’s success in the first round of the presidential election shows that this was, sadly, naive. Many Europeans just don’t care…The cordon sanitaire (protective barrier) which marginalized the far-right in France is fast eroding. Voting for Le Pen is not nearly as taboo as it has been in the past.”

Le Pen, whose father led the nation’s far-right a generation ago, received only 34 percent of the vote during the runoff election in 2017. But this time the polls suggest that she’s flirting close to the magic 50 percent. Macron, the incumbent, is a center-left advocate of globalization and the anti-Putin western alliance, and has been famous lately for telling Putin what the war criminal does not want to hear. But the big question is whether a majority of voters will be swayed (excuse me, hoodwinked) by Le Pen’s economic palliatives, like cutting taxes on food.

The Biden administration is understandably worried about the upcoming election, telling reporters on background that a Le Pen victory could weaken the western alliance and give other NATO nations cold feet.

Outside analysts are more blunt.

Benjamin Haddad, senior director of the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, reportedly says: “(Le Pen’s) election would be a disaster for Europe and the trans-Atlantic front to support Ukraine. She’s against sanctions and arms delivery, has always aligned on Kremlin talking points on Ukraine or NATO. Her platform includes leaving NATO military command and a series of anti-EU blocking measures that would de facto amount to a Frexit (French exit) down the road, though she has taken Frexit off her program this time so as not to spook voters.”

Are the voters in France as stupid or oblivious as the fatal plurality of Americans were in 2016? Vladimir Putin is counting on it.

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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]