Cagle World

Journalists have been debating how to most effectively cover a defeated ex-president who lies as he breathes and aspires to restore his reign by any means necessary.

Donald Trump has an iron grip on his cultish party, so it’d be a dereliction of duty to ignore him – and the existential threat he represents. But by indulging him in an interview, does that not give him more oxygen?

I’m happy to report that Steve Inskeep at NPR found a way Monday to thread the needle. The solution is to over prepare, give the listeners and the readers as much context as possible, and push back in real time whenever the liar lies.

For instance:

TRUMP (still obsessing about the 2020 election): You look at the findings. You look at the number of votes…Look at Philadelphia. Is it true that there were far more votes than there were voters?

INSKEEP: It is not true that there were far more votes than voters.

Inskeep gave Trump air time to recycle his lie that he actually won Arizona but that it was stolen by voter fraud. But instead of letting the lie stand unchallenged, NPR checked in with Arizona’s Republican election officials – who recently conducted a ballot review and reaffirmed Joe Biden’s statewide win. The posted NPR story says this:

Republican officials in Maricopa County (the most populous and pivotal county) debunked the characterizations of Trump and his allies in a 93-page rebuttal issued last week. “The people who have spent the last year proclaiming our free and fair elections are rigged are lying or delusional,” said Bill Gates, the GOP chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

At another point in the interview – which NPR had sought for the last six years – Inskeep reminded Trump that he lost all of his post-election court cases. This exchange was revealing:

INSKEEP: Let me read you some short quotes. The first is by one of the judges – one of the 10 judges you appointed – who ruled on this. And there were many judges, but 10 who you appointed. Brett Ludwig, U.S. District Court in Wisconsin, who was nominated by you in 2020. He’s on the bench and he says, quote, “This court allowed the plaintiff the chance to make his case, and he has lost on the merits.” Another quote, Kory Langhofer, your own campaign attorney in Arizona, Nov. 12, 2020, quote, “We are not alleging fraud in this lawsuit. We are not alleging anyone stealing the election.”

TRUMP: When you look at Langhofer, I disagree with him as an attorney. I did not think he was a good attorney to hire. I don’t know what his game is…

He maligned one of his own lawyers, and didn’t even bother to address the fact that 10 of his own judicial appointees had ruled against him in case after case (including his Hail Mary in Pennsylvania). All told, NPR accurately observed: “Repeatedly in the interview, Trump presses his party to adhere to his point of view and false claims…That’s a typical strategy among purveyors of disinformation and misinformation.”

And this was a fun exchange, Trump being unable to fathom how Biden won without drawing huge crowds in the midst of a pandemic:

TRUMP: How come Biden couldn’t attract 20 people for a crowd? How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch, but all of a sudden, he got 80 million votes? Nobody believes that, Steve. Nobody believes that.

INSKEEP: If you’ll forgive me, maybe because the election was about you.

The interview was scheduled to last 15 minutes. But at the nine-minute mark, when Inskeep started to bring up the Capitol insurrection, Trump hung up. Inskeep exclaimed, “Whoa whoa whoa, I have one more question!” Alas, his guest had cut and run to the MAGA cocoon.

Granted, the MAGA crowd doesn’t listen to NPR or read its website. But journalists who have a laudable bias for facts have no rational choice but to do their jobs.

As veteran Washington reporter Barton Gellman said recently, “What we’re for as journalists is truth. And what we’re for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders. And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself.”

The only way forward – as Inskeep demonstrated – is to hold those forces 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]

We yawn as we drift toward doom. The news is relentless, for those who deign to pay attention.

For instance, scientists discovered last month that a massive (and, until now, stable) ice shelf at the bottom of the globe is rapidly crumbling, with serious consequences for us all: “The rapid transformation of the Arctic and Antarctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift and ecosystems will be altered. Unless humanity acts swiftly to curb emissions, scientists say, the same forces that have destabilized the poles will wreak havoc on the rest of the globe.”

The havoc is here already. Unprecedented tornadoes destroy entire Kentucky towns, unprecedented wildfires destroy Denver suburbs, the sea routinely runs wild in the streets of Miami, New York City subways drown in floodwater…it’s just life in the 21st century.

According to one report about last week’s Colorado conflagrations, “heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increasing prevalence of bigger and stronger fires, as rainfall patterns have been disrupted, snow melts earlier and meadows and forests are scorched into kindling.”

And yet, film critics and armchair curmudgeons are whining that the Netflix satirical film Don’t Look Up! – a bitter attack on climate change deniers – is too “heavy-handed,” too “broad,” too “angry,” a veritable “sledgehammer” at the expense of subtlety. I watched the film during the holiday doldrums – like many of you in semi-lockdown mode, I was binging TV – and I frankly can’t fathom those complaints.

Because the same indictment could be leveled against Dr. Strangelove (on orders from a general named Jack D. Ripper, a gung-ho Texan rides an A-bomb), and against Network (a lunatic anchorman is assassinated on the air because his ratings went bad). Heck, you could say the same thing about Jonathan Swift, the 18th-century satirist who suggested, in his treatise entitled “A Modest Proposal,” that poverty in Ireland would be cured if only the impoverished Irish families would agree to fatten their children and sell them as food to the English landowners. He even suggested some yummy recipes.

Spoiler alert: Nobody thought that Swift was literally serious. Satire, by definition, uses “humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices,” – and, in case you haven’t noticed, rampant stupidity currently reigns in our benighted disunion. Witness the latest deluge of lies on social media, with keyboard loons insisting, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, that the Greenland ice sheet has not been losing billions of metric tons of ice each year.

In “Don’t Look Up!”, a killer comet is hurtling toward earth – there’s incontrovertible scientific proof – but the morons on social media still call it a hoax. A male astronomer gets a lot of air time only because the viewers think he’s hunky, while his female assistant gets canceled by the Twitter haters because she’s deemed too “shrill.” Meanwhile, a MAGA-type president and her dimwit chief of staff (her son, naturally) worry that the comet will sink her poll ratings. An Elon Musk-type billionaire thinks there’s money to be made from the comet, brainless followers chant that the comet will “create jobs,” and in no time a sizeable chunk of the doomed populace is refusing to look up, wearing buttons that feature an arrow pointing down.

And finally, when it’s too late to do anything, Leonardo DeCaprio’s astronomer says plaintively, “We had it all, didn’t we?”

This is the fractured and fool-infested America we know all too well. If anything, the film is a documentary masquerading as a satire – a veritable metaphor for life as we know it, with tens of millions of people (mostly Republicans and other Trump chumps) still spewing, circulating, and swallowing COVID-19 lies, adamantly refusing to look up.

Anyone who thinks “Don’t Look Up! “lacks subtlety needs only to look around and behold what mass stupidity has wrought.

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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]

Has this been a great year or what? Don’t answer.

Thanks to the work of the House’s Jan. 6 committee, and thanks to our still-free and independent press, we’ve been showered with fresh information about the insurrectionist attack on our democracy – the planning, execution, and aftermath.

Have you kept up with the dirty details? Here are 10 brain-teasers to test your knowledge. Afterwards, you can always shower off the stink. The answers are down at the bottom – but no peeking or Googling!

1. Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows urgently emailed a Justice Department official with breathtaking news about an evil conspiracy that he believed warranted investigation. What was it?

a) Biden supporters in the National Security Agency had used Chinese satellites to cancel Trump votes in five swing states.

b) Biden supporters in the CIA had used Italian satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Biden.

c) Biden supporters in the Defense Intelligence Agency had used Russian satellites to trick Venezuelan computers into altering the results in Georgia and Arizona.

d) Biden supporters in NASA had threatened to jam all transmissions from Japanese satellites unless that nation agreed to remotely throw Michigan and Pennsylvania to Biden.

2. The Jan. 6 committee has released a 51-page report that nails Meadows as a core player in the failed coup. But acting deputy attorney general Richard Donaghue concluded long ago that Meadows’ various election fraud theories were:

a) ”pathetic idiocy.”

b) ”laughable fraudulency.”

c) ”pure insanity.”

d) ”dangerous lunacy.”

3. Jim “Gym” Jordan texted Meadows, prior to the ceremonial counting of electoral votes, advising that Vice President Pence:

a) ”should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

b) ”should kiss the ground our President walks on, because if not for our President, he’d be a loser.”

c) ”should get with the program, or else something will land on his head worse than that fly at his debate.”

d) ”should announce that not a single word in our Constitution says that the vice president shall certify the beneficiary of massive election fraud.”

4. Like the Wicked Witch dispatching her flying monkeys, Trump at his rally commanded his followers to march to the Capitol and

a) ”be tough very strongly.”

b) ”fight like hell.”

c) ”tell Crazy Nancy I said hello.”

d) ”get me a bigly beautiful souvenir.”

5. Prior to the insurrection, one scholarly Proud Boy wrote on a group chat that he and his manly MAGA men intended to storm the Capitol in order to

a) ”target the black cops.”

b) ”spread our feces with extreme prejudice.”

c) ”burn it all down and pose for selfies.”

d) ”smash some pigs to dust.”

6. Texas real estate broker Jen Ryan, who flew to the insurrection on a private plane and predicted she’d never be jailed because “I have blonde hair and white skin,” wound up jailed for 60 days. In court she’d insisted that the prison sentence was unfair, because

a) ”this is not anything that remotely resembles who I am.”

b) ”I’d been invited to exercise my free speech rights by my President.”

c) ”I never thought I’d be persecuted so badly for being white.”

d) ”I have two condo closings next month that I really can’t miss.”

7. Jacob Chansley, the moronic invader who wore horns on his head, ultimately landed in the slammer – where he requested, in his words,

a) ”a Trump 2020 pillow.”

b) “a special organic diet.”

c) ”a Jesus coloring book.”

d) ”a TV so I can watch Tucker.”

8. Who is retired Army Col. Phil Waldron?

a) He claimed that dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez fixed the election for Biden.

b) He waited in Dallas with the QAnon people for JFK Jr. to show up undead.

c) He wrote the coup PowerPoint that was shown to congressional traitors.

d) He hugged Trump at the Jan. 6 rally and cried very strongly.

9. A few months after the insurrection, Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that the goons’ demand to hang Mike Pence was:

a) ”so beautiful, very strongly.”

b) ”what you’d expect from very good people.”

c) ”so heartfelt, very strongly.”

d) ”common sense.”

10. The other day, referencing the work of the Jan. 6 committee, someone remarked: “It was a horrendous event, and I think what they’re seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.” Who said that?

a) Jamie Raskin

b) Liz Cheney

c) Kamala Harris

d) Mitch McConnell

Bonus. True or False: The Jan. 6 committee is trying to turn over every rock. But no matter what it ultimately unearths, roughly half the people in this country will sleepwalk to the end of democracy.

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ANSWERS

1) a 2) c 3) a 4) b 5) d 6) a 7) b 8) c 9) d 10) d

Bonus: Take a wild guess.

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Copyright 2021 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]

Rand Paul has long been a laughable lightweight – at Senate hearings, Dr. Fauci beats him up on a regular basis – but now he has outperformed even himself.

Republicans like him always equate “big government” with “socialism” and routinely condemn it as a matter of principle – until catastrophe hits their own backyard, and then suddenly, without even a scintilla of embarrassment, they dump their doltish boilerplate and plead for big government socialist money to rescue them.

Look, the tornado victims in Kentucky deserve all the help that Joe Biden can possibly provide, and he’s already doing it. But we can still take a moment to laugh ourselves silly at the letter Paul sent to the president over the weekend, where be begged for federal assistance and asked Biden to “move expeditiously to approve the appropriate resources for our state.”

Isn’t it amazing how all the idiot talk about the evils of “socialism” gets blown away as soon as killer weather ( the “new normal,” thanks to climate change) comes calling?

If memory serves, Paul is the purportedly principled “libertarian” who voted in 2013 not to send billions in federal relief aid to the New Jersey victims of Hurricane Sandy, who voted in 2017 not to send billions in federal relief to the Texas victims of Hurricane Harvey, who voted in 2017 not to send federal relief money to the Puerto Rico victims of Hurricane Maria, and who voted in 2019 not to appropriate billions in new relief money to several federal agencies.

As he once explained, “This (relief spending) has to stop. We spend too much. We owe too much. We cannot keep spending money we do not have.”

But now that his state has been hit hard, he wants to spend as much as possible with all expeditious speed. In the past he always insisted that if the feds wanted to hike disaster spending, they should offset those costs by cutting the budget somewhere else. But lo and behold, you can read the entire letter that Paul sent to the president, and not once is there any insistence that Kentucky should be helped only if the federal budget is cut elsewhere.

No amount of air freshener can erase the stench of his hypocrisy.

Actually, that’s standard Republican behavior. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump budget director, was a congressman who voted in 2013 not to send money to New Jersey, insisting that Sandy relief should happen only if budget cuts were made elsewhere. But in 2015, when his state of South Carolina was flooded by a killer storm, he pleaded for federal money without first insisting on other budget cuts: “There will be a time for a discussion about aid and how to pay for it, but that time is not now.”

The state’s senior senator, Lindsey Graham, did the same thing. He’d voted No on the Sandy package, but suddenly, after his flood, he declared: “Rather than put a price tag on it, let’s just get through this, and whatever it costs, it costs.”

There’s much more. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator, voted No on the Sandy package, but pleaded for expeditious federal money a few years later after Arkansas was hit by floods. Four House Republicans from Colorado voted No on the Sandy package, but a pleaded for socialist help a few months later when Colorado was hit by floods. In 2011, the two Republican senators from Oklahoma voted No on the Sandy package and in 2011 they tried to cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget – only to pull a miracle switcheroo in 2013 when Oklahoma was hit by tornadoes.

One of those senators, Tom Coburn, told his constituents: “As the ranking member of the committee that oversees FEMA, I can assure Oklahomans that any and all available aid will be delivered without delay.”

So Rand Paul is merely one rotten egg in the basket of deplorables. Nevertheless, he was still a committed scrooge as recently as last month. When Biden’s infrastructure package reached the Senate floor – with its $47 billion outlay to combat climate change; with its $6.8 billion for FEMA – Paul again voted No. How fortunate for his benighted citizens of Kentucky that he was powerless to stop its historic passage.

And how fortunate Kentuckians are that Paul’s hypocrisy has been trumped by Biden’s sense of responsibility. The president has already approved massive federal relief aid with all deliberate speed – without fuming that the state’s red electorate had voted against him, without ranting that the state’s two red senators were horrible people or whatever, without offering to throw paper towels, without telling Kentuckians that maybe the tornadoes would’ve never happened if they’d bothered to rake their forests.

That’s called governing.

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Copyright 2021 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 it looks like Roe v. Wade is perched at the precipice. Gee, I wonder how that happened. Let me count the ways.

Conservative Republicans started prioritizing a high court takeover, with the explicit aim of ending legal abortion, more than 40 years ago. In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s GOP introduced new language in its party platform, promising to “work for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”

In response, Democrats and progressives stuck their heads in the sand.

In 1992, the Supreme Court kept Roe alive, but ruled that some restrictions would be OK as long as they didn’t impose an “undue burden” on women. Anti-abortion groups, backed by their friends in the GOP, seized on that loophole and launched grassroots movement to restrict abortion on a state by state basis – focusing on the state legislatures.

In response, abortion rights groups did virtually nothing, focusing instead on federal policy in D.C.

By the time George W. Bush ran against Al Gore in 2000 – and wooed the Christian right with explicit promises to craft a right-wing court – key conservative activists like William Kristol were echoing the same priority. In 1999, Kristol told me: “The biggest impact the next president will have on domestic policy will be in the realm of high court appointments. There are so many big things facing the court in the next few years…church-state issues, abortion.”

In response, Democrats and progressives yawned.

Inspired by the mounting onslaught of state restrictions on abortion, and angered by Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, the Republicans – always thinking ahead – launched a massive effort to capture state legislatures in the 2010 “off-year” elections, not just to undercut Roe, but to control the drawing of congressional and state legislative districts with the 2010 census stats.

In response, Democrats and progressives devoted a relative pittance of money and resources to the state races.

In 2014, thanks to the usual anemic Democratic “off-year” turnout – hey Obama was president, what else did they need to do? – Republicans seized control of the U.S. Senate and Mitch McConnell, the new majority leader, was thus empowered to block Obama high court nominee Merrick Garland, to the point of even denying him a hearing.

Did Democrats and progressives launch a sustained major outcry about that “stolen seat”? Nope.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it crystal clear that if elected he wanted to erase Roe: “That (end of Roe) will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting ‘pro-life’ justices on the court.” Trump even released a list of such names, prepared for him by the right-wing Federalist Society, which for decades had been nurturing a deep bench of right-wing nominees.

In response, Hillary Clinton did not prioritize the future of the court, and Democrats and progressives still didn’t warn their voters, with any sustained messaging, that Garland’s stolen seat could wind up being filled by a right-winger. (It was indeed, by Neil Gorsuch.)

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 – among those folks, Trump swamped Clinton by 15 percentage points

So there you have it. Trump remade the court – and McConnell, as majority leader, muscled Amy Coney Barrett onto the bench at Trump’s eleventh hour to become a potential sixth Roe-killing or Roe-crippling vote – not just because the GOP shrewdly played the long game, but because the party of abortion rights and its allies slept for decades.

Now they seem to think that they can succeed in the 2022 congressional midterms by highlighting what the GOP has done – a typically reactive last-ditch Hail-Mary response. The bottom line is, they have failed from the bottom up, failed from the top down, and they have confirmed writer Aldous Huxley’s age-old observation that “human beings are condemned to consequences.”

And women, denied autonomy over their own bodies, are poised to pay the biggest price.

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Copyright 2021 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

If only I had a magic wand, I would henceforth consign all conspiracy freaks and vaccine refuseniks (78 million in number) to some distant desert isle where they could breathe free upon each other until God sorts them out. I know that sounds harsh, but I am beyond fed up. I suspect you are, too.

Right now, in the wake of the discovery of the variant Omicron, we are suffering fresh breakthrough infections of idiocy that prove, yet again, that the MAGA loons have learned absolutely nothing – despite a death toll of nearly 900,000, driven ever higher by the unvaccinated.

For instance, it’s a disgrace to the human species that Fox News hack Lara Logan can appear on camera and equate Dr. Anthony Fauci with Nazi doc Josef Mengele (she did that yesterday), thereby schooling the network’s credulous couch potatoes that someone who’s dedicated to saving lives is the same as someone who abetted the murder of six million lives. What a message for Hannukah week.

Elsewhere, Texas congressman Ronny Jackson (who was Trump’s White House doctor, and who, amazingly enough, still has doctor creds) tweeted on Sunday that news of the Omicron variant is just a Democratic plot to win the midterms in 2022: “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election.”

I tend to doubt that the South African scientists who shared their evidence with the world, in the hopes of saving lives with an early warning, were thinking about what balloting options Americans might have one year from now. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the whole world is in on the Democratic plot.

That’s how the tinfoilers “think” – clearly it’s a tribal disease that defies treatment – as evidenced on Sunday by Kari Lake, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, who said of the Democrats, “They are going to try and sell us new ‘variants’ for the rest of our lives if we don’t tell them to shove it.” On Saturday, another Fox host, Pete Hegseth, insisted that Democrats will keep cooking up variants on the eve of every election: “You can count on a variant about every October, every two years.” But their logic (and I use the word advisedly) makes no sense. Fox host Rachel Compos-Duffy said (lied) that the Democrats are exploiting variants in order to justify “more lockdowns,” but wouldn’t more lockdowns hurt the Democrats at election time?

There’s no point in parsing these people. They’ve whined that Trump didn’t get any credit for speeding some of the vaccines to market…then they decided to pride themselves on not getting the vaccine. They’ve periodically insisted that Covid is overhyped, that it’s no worse than the flu…but now they’re complaining that President Biden isn’t getting Covid under control. (Yesterday, on the official GOP Twitter account: “Joe Biden promised he would shut down the coronavirus. He failed.”)

Of course he’s having trouble getting Covid under control – because the Covidiots refuse to cooperate. Urging them to do the right thing, to protect themselves and their fellow Americans, clearly hasn’t worked. And requiring them to do the right thing, via federal mandates, triggers rants about their vanishing Freedom. The right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board complained the other day that “Mr. Biden had no plan to deal with the large numbers of vaccine holdouts.” What, pray tell, would Rupert Murdoch’s minions suggest that he do?

Statistics don’t seem to matter. Only 59 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated – lagging far behind countries like Cuba, Costa Rica, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Aruba, and Ecuador – and those who refuse the jabs are disproportionately Republican. (Shocking, I know.) The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported in October that the unvaccinated are three times more likely to be GOPers than Democrats, and that the ratio has widened since the spring, when vaccines became widely available. Indeed, the redder the counties (in terms of their fealty to Trump), the higher the Covid case rate.

It’s hard to foresee how we can fight new variants, and curb the virus long term, when so many millions of Americans are a clear and present danger to public health – and still function as dumpsters for conspiracy garbage. Biden said yesterday, “I expect this not to be the new normal. I expect the new normal to be, everyone ends up getting vaccinated and the booster shot.” Good luck with that.

I was thinking that perhaps Fiji, a nation of 300 islands, would be willing to take our Covidiots…But nah. Fiji’s fully-vaccinated rate is notably higher than ours. A MAGA infestation would only lower its quality of life.

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Copyright 2021 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

If Bill Murray were to star in a sequel to Groundhog Day, he’d wake up to the Sonny and Cher alarm clock, take the cold shower, step in the puddle, parry the insurance agent, trudge to the gazebo…and see Chris Christie doing his same old song and dance.

Seriously, him again?

Didn’t this guy end his gubernatorial tenure with a 15 percent approval rating, then crash and burn as a 2016 presidential candidate? Wasn’t it Christie who morphed from Trump foe to toadying manservant, then contrive to write a spin memoir and launch a rehabilitation tour just two short years ago? Didn’t Christie hit the road with a media blitz in 2019, sort of praising Trump (“he has many of the qualities that define America’s leaders”) while sort of knocking Trump (it was a “tragedy” that he was so ill-served by his aides), in the hopes of grabbing a piece of the action?

Apparently it’s time to rinse and repeat. Christie has a new book out now about how Republicans should reboot themselves by flushing all the lying sewage of recent years and rediscover the virtues of truth. Which is fine as far as it goes.

Naturally, he thinks of himself as the 2024 nominee who can lead the party back to sanity, and you can’t blame him for salivating at the prospect. But because Christie is always trying to keep all his options open, he still can’t explain why in 2016 he endorsed the con artist most responsible for the lying sewage… or why he’s unwilling to rule out endorsing exactly the same con in 2024.

Christie still seems to think Trump is capable of being a better person. If only Trump would stop obsessing about his re-election defeat, things would be just ducky. In Christie’s words the other day, “If he wants to be a positive force in the future, he’s got to let this other stuff go.” Right. And if dog poop tasted like ice cream, it would be on dessert menus.

Christie’s game is obvious. He’s trying to stuff himself through the eye of a needle, damning Trump with faint praise and praising Trump with faint damns in order to (theoretically) woo the Republicans who are discomfited by Trump’s fascist excesses – without quite alienating the MAGAts who still march in lockstep.

I guess we should give him points for trying. But good grief, it sure gets embarrassing.

Take, for instance, what happened on MSNBC this week when he ran into the buzzsaw best known as Nicolle Wallace. As my dear departed mother would have said, “It was a scream!”

Christie’s new book laments about all the lies and disinformation that circulates in the media. But somehow, he just plumb forgot to mention the ceaseless contributions of Fox News. Wallace, the former Republican aide, decided to ask him why so-called media bias is more dangerous than conspiracy theories spouted by the likes of Tucker Carlson.

Wallace: “I don’t think it’s an intellectually honest case to make against conspiracy theorists without taking on Fox News.”

Christie: “Well, then listen, you can write that in your book.”

Wallace: “I’m not the one trying to ‘rescue’ the Republican party.”

She continued:

Wallace: “So you may or may not support Donald Trump in 2024, you may or may not run for president, and a book about liars and conspiracy theorists doesn’t have anything to say about Fox News.”

Christie: “No, the book – you’re conflating it.”

Wallace: “If you want to solve the proliferation of conspiracy theorists without dealing with Fox News – it’s like solving terrorists, without dealing with the terrorists.”

Suffice it to say Christie’s dumbo act with respect to Tucker Carlson – who has the highest rated show on Fox News – is more than a tad disingenuous. And suffice it to say that he omitted Fox News from his book because as a perpetual Republican candidate he can ill afford to alienate fans of the infauxtainment network. His whole shtick is quite tiresome.

Only fans of The Sopranos will get this closing reference, but so be it: I wish Bobby Bacala would just go away and play with his trains.

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Copyright 2021 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]

Mark Twain, in an unpublished manuscript, once wrote: “It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.”

“Man’s character” indeed. Check out what’s happening right now in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hear the eerie echoes of what happened in Germany in 1924.

In Charlottesville, some vile right-wing hatemongers are currently on trial in federal court, charged with conspiring to commit racist violence at the deadly 2017 rally. Three cheers for the justice system, yes?. That’s the good news.

But, according to press reports, here’s the bad news:

“(I)n this courtroom, they’ve found a new platform to amplify their racist views, put on performances they boast about on podcasts, radio shows and in live during-the-trial chats, and to attack their opponents…the defendants repeat the greatest hits of right-wing extremist beliefs in the courtroom and double down on the racist personas they have crafted for their followers, many of whom are paying attention…Neo-Nazi fans troll the court – saying the n-word multiple times, declaring ‘Make America Great Again’…”

Well, that sounded familiar.

In 1924 Bavaria, some ragtag rabble-rousers led by a minor crackpot were put on trial for fomenting political violence in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. The defendants were delighted – they recognized that the open proceedings would allow them to tout their views to the widest possible audience. The ragtag leader, some nut named Hitler, spoke in court for four hours, described himself as “an absolute anti-Semite,” and told the attentive newspaper scribblers that “either this racial poison, this mass tuberculosis, prospers in our nation and Germany dies of a sick lung, or we cut (it) out and Germany can thrive.”

That too sounds familiar. A press report from the Charlottesville trial:

“When Michael Hill, another defendant, was questioned by attorneys on Friday about his beliefs and planning ahead of the rally, he proudly repeated a pledge in which he called himself  ‘a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite’….On any given day, this trial sounds like an open spigot of hate. Defendants have dropped the n-word, admired Adolf Hitler, joked about the Holocaust and trafficked in racist pseudoscience. A court reporter types their slurs into official transcripts, news media report on what’s said in the courtroom…Hill (later) called in to a far-right radio show and said, “I’m very honored…to have gotten to face off with this New York Jew attorney.”

Flash back again to 1924. In the words of historian Ernst Deuerlein, “For Hitler, the trial was the continuation of political propaganda by judicial means.” Now flash forward to 2021. Another defendant, proud neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell, called into a far-right radio show recounted his open statement at trial. He called it “a spoken word performance…I saw this (trial) as a tremendous opportunity, both because of the cause at hand and because I knew the world was listening.”

You see the problem here.

In 1924, the chief judge grew so exasperated with the defendants that he blurted, “This is not a theater!” (Oh yes it was.) And in 2021, the press is quoting Melissa Ryan, an anti-extremist activist, who laments that our courtrooms “just weren’t designed for this kind of stress and behavior.”

But what else can we do? Let the extremists skate free, for fear that putting them on trial will put them on stage? The only choice we have is to hold them accountable in courts of law and trust that most Americans will not respond favorably to their amplified hatred. After all, we’re not crazy the way Germany was.

Right?

Oh dear, what do we have here:

“The Spotsylvania County School Board (in Virginia) has directed staff to begin removing books that contain ‘sexually explicit’ material from library shelves and report on the number of books that have been removed…Two board members, Rabih Abuismail and Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned. ‘I think we should throw those books in a fire,’ Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to ‘see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.’”

Mark Twain supposedly also intoned that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” There’s no actual proof Twain ever said that, but sometimes it seems to ring true.

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Copyright 2021 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]

Democrats can certainly try to convince themselves that the Virginia gubernatorial defeat is no big deal. All kinds of rationales are available.

For instance, the incumbent president’s party has lost 11 of the last 12 gubernatorial races. Virginia, when choosing its chief executive, tends to vote against Washington’s “in” party. And Terry McAuliffe, the losing Democratic candidate, has never been super popular – he’s from the old-school Democratic establishment, with leftover Clinton ties, and when he won his previous gubernatorial race in 2013, he only managed to beat a right-wing nutcase by two percent. And it just so happens that deep blue states do elect red governors from time to time – most recently, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Nevertheless, if we point forward to the 2022 midterms and beyond, the likeliest forecast for Democrats is that winter is coming. And we know what that likely portends for the future health of democracy itself.

A president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections – there were recent exceptions in 1998 and 2002 – and some of the rumblings Tuesday night in Virginia fit that pattern.

President Biden’s poll numbers have slid in Virginia (a state he won by 10 points) and nationally as well. We can debate whether he deserves such a fate, but fairly or not, it’s been happening. And the issue mix that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to victory in Virginia – worries about the economy, general parental frustration with schools (some of it idiotic, but cleverly exploited by the GOP) – has potential national resonance. At the Democrats’ expense.

Youngkin also hit on a winning formula that conceivably could work for House and Senate Republican candidates next year: Be Trumpish on the stump without the baggage of Trump. Make all the requisite MAGA noises, especially in the suburbs – “I’m gonna abolish critical race theory!” (Even though it’s not taught anyway) – but do it with a friendly face. Ensure that Trump stays away, but say the stuff he says in ways that can woo back the Republican-leaning college-educated suburbanites that voted against Trump in 2020.

Meanwhile, if the current Republican minority on Capitol Hill (with the help of Joe Manchin, Krysten Sinema, and the usual Democratic infighting) can continue to stymie Biden’s ambitious attempts to make life better for average Americans, then presto!, the Democratic base voters, who always stand ready to be apathetic and disillusioned, will be increasingly inclined to sit on their asses on midterm election day – just as they did when Barack Obama’s party was routed in 2010 and 2014.

The result, of course, would be GOP takeovers of the House and Senate, and the death of any progressive agenda in advance of the 2024 presidential contest.

Oh, and did I mention that Biden’s poll slide in deep blue New Jersey has imperiled its Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, whose re-election bid remained a nail-biter well into Wednesday?

Granted, there are scenarios that could save the Democrats in time for the midterms. The pandemic could be in the rear view mirror next fall, especially now that vaccines for kids have been approved – a move that could drastically reduce parental tensions about the schools. And Democrats on the Hill this week even managed to revive a Build Back Better provision that would lower prescription drug prices, and, who knows, maybe they’ll even finally manage to pass something big that swing voters will notice. Because they need to prove they can govern; it ain’t enough to just be anti-Trump.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin tweeted a plaintive plea Tuesday night: “Hey Democrats, the circular firing squad is the problem, not the solution. Stop. We need to pass the strongest bills we can pass with our current majorities.” Indeed. As two Democratic sources told the Politico website last night, everything “will get so much worse if we don’t pass the agenda and aren’t able to run on it…Democrats need to stop fighting each other and start delivering for voters. If we don’t, 2022 is going to be brutal.”

Gee, ya think?

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Copyright 2021 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]

Don’t you feel a wee bit bad for Merrick Garland?

Granted, you’re probably infuriated that the fascist putsch plotters continue to roam free. Which means you’re probably asking yourself, on a hourly basis, WHEN OH WHEN OH WHEN IS SOMEONE GONNA FRICKIN’ DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?

That lament may well be aimed at the U.S. attorney general, who has vowed to restore the rule of law by bringing justice back to the Justice Department. By now it’s crystal clear that the lowest people in the highest places, on the eve of Jan. 6, conspired to take democracy down. Indeed, the House last week voted (nine Republicans even concurred) to recommend that subpoena stonewaller Steve Bannon be prosecuted by the DOJ for criminal contempt. As Adam Schiff remarked, “Are some people truly above the law, beholden to nothing and no one, free to ignore the law and without consequence?”

I guess we’ll find out at some point. All Garland has said thus far is that his department “will apply the facts and the law and make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution,” which could mean anything.

But, if I may muster a smidgen of sympathy, Garland is in a tough position. He’s a high-minded man of probity who’s been tasked to confront the lowest form of human life. As Slate legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick shrewdly observed the other day, “the big lie is already going halfway across the world while the institutionalists are still double-knotting their loafers.”

On the one hand, If Garland does nothing to hold the coup plotters accountable, it will irrevocably shred the DOJ’s credibility, erase the rule of law, sanction the use of violence, and give MAGAts the green light for the final conflagration in 2024. Schiff, in a recent podcast, worries about that: “I think there’s a real desire on the part of the attorney general not to look backward…I disagree with (that) most vehemently.”

For instance, federal law – 18 U.S.C. 371 – says it’s a crime to defraud the federal government. And it’s clear, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in 1925, that obstructing a free election and the ritual counting of electors, falls well within that language. The court ruled that it’s a federal crime “to interfere with or obstruct one of (the) lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.”

There’s also abundant language in 18 U.S.C. 2384 to indict Trump and his plotters for seditious conspiracy. Heck, there are grounds to federally prosecute Trump for pressuring Georgia’s top election official to commit fraud by reversing Joe Biden’s statewide win. Lest we forget, Trump was caught in a phone recording saying: “I have to find 12,000 votes…So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.”

Still, there are potential downsides for Garland. If he does decide to do his job, in accordance with “the facts and the law,” he’ll risk a violent backlash anyway. Plus, the coup crowd and their right-wing media cheerleaders will move to impugn the DOJ’s credibility and assail it as a hotbed of partisan jackbooted socialists or whatever. (But that’s already happening. Recently on his podcast, Steve Bannon ranted that Garland plotted to illegally remove Trump from office after the 2020 election: “I can show you a coup and we will show you a coup…We’re going to connect hard dots.” Um, Garland didn’t get the attorney general job until March 2021.)

So, for Garland, is doing nothing really a viable option? What happens to the concept of justice if he surrenders to the mob? Laurence Tribe, the esteemed law professor, warns: “Looking backward as well as forward is essential if we’re to avoid falling over the cliff that lies ahead.”

Heck, looking backward is what prosecutions are all about – holding people accountable for the wrongs they’ve already committed, signaling to future potential criminals that they too would be held accountable. Garland can start by prosecuting Bannon for defying the subpoena issued by House investigators who want to know what he meant when he declared in a pre-Jan. 6 podcast that “all hell is going to break loose.”

As the novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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Copyright 2021 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]