Cagle World

This is for real: Rupert Murdoch will soon launch a new platform, Fox Weather.

Wrap your head around that one. Brian Wieser, a prominent media analyst, said it best the other day: “How do you address the fact that weather changes are caused to some degree by humans when you have a media property with a history of challenging that fact?”

Hmmm.

“…And for the latest Big Beautiful 10-day American Greatness Forecast, let’s go to Sabrina at the big board. Sabrina?”

(Blonde, short tight skirt) “Thank you, Tucker! Stay tuned, we’ll have that soon. In the meantime, I’m happy to report that red states are in for a treat this weekend as a high pressure system brings balmy temps and blue skies, fine weather for cleaning your guns outdoors or joining up with other tourists at your favorite Capitol building. But Tucker, there’s very different news elsewhere. Would you like me to share?”

“That would be mighty white of you.”

“It does appear that the Pacific Northwest, and we all know how those states voted, will boil in 125 degrees, with rampant wildfires in the areas where they don’t rake the forests. Why God is seeing fit to punish that region, we can only speculate on His motives at this time, but suffice it to say that tomorrow in particular may be the worst day for those folks since Ashli Babbitt was shot.”

“Sabrina, some elites will surely say that those high temps are further ‘evidence’ of what they theorize as ‘climate change,’ but what does your reporting tell you?”

“Tucker, I’m getting high readings on the Chinese Hoaxmeter, so let’s leave it for the viewers to decide.”

“And questions need to be asked whether it’s just a coincidence that all this is happening at the same time that blue states are forcing our kids to learn critical race theory.”

“Which also may account for the sustained high winds that are expected in other blue states, where some say that the wind turbines will kill tens of millions of birds.”

“Right you are, Sabrina. Seems like what this country needs this weekend is a massive tax cut.”

(Mutual laughter). “Right back to ya, Tucker. But just to be fair and balanced, it does look like some southern areas of Real America will be hit this weekend with record flooding and endless rain, so it might be advisable for those patriots to get out the ole umbrella and go live for awhile in a rescue shelter where unvaccinated people aren’t persecuted.”

“Any remote chance that the flooding could spread into ungovernable Democrat strongholds?”

“Not at this time, Tucker, but if I take my Sharpie pen…there…fixed it!”

“Thank you Sabrina. Is there any confirmable good news out there?”

“Well, it does look like Miami is under water, and we all know how Miami-Dade County voted.”

“I’m sure the alarmists will have a different theory. By the way, have you finished tabulating the 10-day American Greatness Forecast?”

“We have indeed, Tucker. But we don’t like the downbeat results – too much ‘extreme’ weather in too many places – so we’re going to send the data out to Arizona for an audit.”

“Right you are, Sabrina, you never know what Hugo Chavez may be up to. Stay tuned, we’ll be back in a minute after this message from Beautiful Clean Coal.”

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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]

With apologies to the poet E. E. Cummings: It’s Indictment Day, and the world is mud-luscious…

Do you feel as jaunty as I do? Maybe not. Maybe you think that the first indictments against the Trump Organization, unsealed Thursday, are chump change. Maybe you think that the 15 felony counts – featuring alleged tax fraud, conspiracy, grand larceny and fake business records – are no big deal. Nailing the Trump CFO and the company itself for stuff like that may seem a tad trivial given the fascist stench that continues to waft from the Former Guy.

But it always helps to remember that Al Capone was finally brought down not for murder, but for unpaid taxes. And today’s indictments are just the beginning. The New York grand jury is sitting for six months, and the Manhattan DA, working with the state attorney general, have only begun to unroll their evidence of criminality. The financial consequences alone could be devastating for Trump’s bunco empire.

Granted, he deserves far worse for being a Russian stooge and for his incitement of violence (the latter crime against America is ongoing). And granted, his cultists will dismiss the indictments – the first ever targeted at a former president of the United States – with their usual magical thinking: “Nah, this is just some radical left woke partisans persecuting his top executives, but not him personally, which proves he did nothing wrong, which is why he deserves to be president again, so he can drain that swamp,” etcetera ad infinitum.

But just look at all the potential collateral damage. A volley of indictments in the summer and autumn could seriously cripple the company he’s been bragging about for so long. Banks and other business partners may well be reluctant to loan money to, or engage at all with, an outlaw outfit accused of committing financial crimes. Many banks may even be banned by laws and regulations from working with Trump.

A full-scale legal assault will also cost a bundle to defend, precisely when he needs money the most – all while he’s presumably running for president again, except this time he’d be stripped of his fake reputation as a business genius.

Daniel Goldman, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted mob families and white-collar crooks, tweeted the other day: “I can’t underscore enough how devastating an indictment would be to the Trump Org. Every lender would call their loans and no way Trump Org can pay them all, likely leading to bankruptcy” – because, according to a 2020 report by Forbes magazine, the company is already at least $1 billion in debt.

Lest we forget, this whole probe started when Trump was outed for paying illegal hush money to two women during the 2016 presidential campaign. His personal attorney, Michael Cohen, went to jail for that. If Trump hadn’t been such a dirtbag in that episode, Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance might never have launched (and widened) his financial probe, nor would he have sought Trump’s tax records – winning twice in the U.S. Supreme Court. Clearly, Trump’s greatest enemy is the orange image in the mirror.

Witnesses from inside his crime scene now stand ready to testify about how the organization long engaged in rampant fakery – inflating or deflating its real estate assets for ill-gotten financial gains – and I’d even look forward to Trump explaining how the things his company does “are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community and in no way a crime.” That’s what he said earlier this week in his latest propaganda broadside; let’s hear his lawyers argue that in court. Indeed, four prominent legal experts – including a former Reagan-Bush deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general – have concluded in a new report that “Trump is at serious risk of eventual criminal indictment.”

Those legal experts acknowledge, as I did earlier, that some people “will perceive politicization in any criminal or enforcement action that may be taken” against Trump and his company. However, “as the lead law enforcement officials in the locale where Trump has for decades centered his business dealings, (the Manhattan DA and the state attorney general) bear the greatest public responsibility for the integrity of the law enforcement process as it concerns nearly all the dealings apparently at issue. Ultimately, they must choose between acting, or leaving the actions of Trump and those associated with him beyond public accountability….While one should take extreme caution before pursuing charges against high-profile politicians and their associates, in principle the law applies equally to prince and paupers alike.”

I’m skeptical that Trump will ever be jailed. But it’d be some measure of justice if the prince were to become a pauper.

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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]

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the Catholic Church, but I can sniff out hypocrisy. And whenever you put the Catholic Church in the same pew with hypocrisy… hoo boy, does it ever stink.

But before we delve into the latest church farce – the budding effort by conservative Catholic bishops to deny giving holy communion to the devoutly Catholic president of the United States – please indulge my brief walk down memory lane.

Forty years ago, when I was a young metro columnist at the Hartford Courant, the church fathers in Connecticut’s capital city decided to make a killing in the real estate market. They owned valuable downtown property that housed four retail businesses, and in their lust to sell it for big bucks, they threw all the tenants onto the street at the peak of the Christmas shopping season. Perfect grist for a column. I wrote that their actions betrayed many passages in the New Testament, such as: “He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart, how does the love of God abide in him?”

My home phone was listed in the white pages, and callers peppered me for hours. But they were angry at the church, not at me. Most of them, to my great surprise, were Catholics who’d left the church because they’d concluded, for a variety of reasons, that it failed to practice what it preached. This was 1981, remember – eons before the church’s global pedophile coverup, eons before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sucked up to amoral Donald Trump (rushing to congratulate his 2016 win even before the results were certified).

So it’s no surprise, according to Gallup, that the church in America lost nearly 20 percent of its parishioners between 2010 and 2020. Hypocrisy is clearly a turnoff, yet the church keeps finding new ways to alienate. The latest, of course, is last week’s decision by the bishops conference (voting 168-55) to draft a formal statement decreeing that Joe Biden – a devout Catholic and faithful Mass attendee – should be denied Holy Communion because he, as president, believes that the choice to end a pregnancy should be made by the woman and not the state.

This is so nuts that the Vatican has warned against it. A top official in Rome voiced concern that the bishops’ move would become “a source of discord rather than unity ” – a wise observation, given the fact that 67 percent of U.S. Catholics say that Biden should be allowed to receive communion despite his policy views on abortion. And Pope Francis says the church should be a “home for all,” without litmus tests on social issues.

So the bishops’ hypocrisy reeks to high heaven. The church opposes the death penalty on principle, but has never sought to deny communion to Catholic politicians who support it. In fact, last autumn in Washington, the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast gave a special award to a Catholic named William Barr – the award’s inscription read: “In Honor and Gratitude for Fidelity to the Church” – despite the fact that federal prisons under Barr’s control were executing prisoners for the first time since 2003.

Catholic church catechism #2267 says that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person, and (the church) works with determination for its abolition worldwide,” but somehow the Catholic leaders at the prayer breakfast hailed Barr’s “fidelity.” Probably because the prayer breakfast founder, Leonard Leo, is a right-wing dark money fundraiser who’s on record saying stuff like this: “We are all in the debt of Donald Trump.”

How anyone can square fealty to church doctrine with fealty to Trump is beyond my understanding. But how a church that covered up a pedophile epidemic can then presume to pass moral judgement on Joe Biden…well, that just takes the cake.

It’s well known by now that the church’s longstanding impulse was to merely transfer abusive priests to new jobs, and to my best recollection, the bishops conference has never drafted a decree denying Holy Communion to men of the cloth who assaulted kids. (A new editorial in Christianity Today: “Bishops for years kept themselves busy moving pedophile priests from parish to parish, diocese to diocese – all the while, presumably, allowing these priests who raped little boys and girls to receive communion.”) As I said other day on social media, the church all too often seems to believe that life begins at conception but continues at molestation.

But here’s the bottom line: If the church wants to play partisan politics – by making abortion rights a litmus test – then it should pay taxes like everybody else. We sure could use the revenue, to help the downtrodden that the church purports to care about.

As St. Paul warned in the Bible, “If I have all faith, so as to move mountains, yet do not have charity, I am nothing.”

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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]

On a podcast the other day, national political reporter Thomas Edsall analyzed the mounting threat of Republican authoritarianism and posed a great question:

“Trump and the Republican party have created a real dilemma for the media… A party of sedition is trying to (enact) rules that even when it loses, it wins… We have a different animal in the ballgame now. One side is dominated by a party that is willing to accept lies, that is delusional… a party that is on the verge of becoming something unseen in America, beyond the point of no return…When you have a party that is moving in this extreme fashion, how do we in the media describe it?”

Easy answer: Describe reality.

The old days of both sides false-balance journalism, the old days of writing “on the one hand, on the other hand,” the old days when both parties honored democracy by accepting the election results – those days are over. When one party openly declares that it no longer believes in democracy, when indeed it is working non-stop to destroy it, journalists can no longer take refuge in “neutrality.”

Richard Tofel, founder of the investigative journalism website ProPublica, wrote recently that neutrality is an “attractive value” only “if you view public life as an endless series of fights between two sides distinguishable most importantly by the primary colors of their uniforms.” But all too often – and especially now – neutrality is merely “an appropriate pose for the uninformed.”

Any journalist who’s remotely informed about what’s going on in 2021 should be compelled to point it out in plain language. If arsonists are torching a house, and it’s burning in front of your eyes, you report it and identify the arsonists. It’s not enough to say “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell hopes to win the chamber in 2022.” It’s factually accurate to simply say, “Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, after voting to exonerate a president who inspired an anti-democratic coup attempt, hopes to win the chamber in 2022 and strengthen Republican vote-suppression efforts in 2024.”

In a national civic emergency, the mainstream media needs to be pro-democracy and pro-truth. That is not “bias.” That is patriotism.

The problem, however, is that too many journalists (especially the older, more seasoned ones) are stuck in the old paradigm. Jay Rosen, a media critic at New York University, said it well last week: The press is still too invested in “the game – ‘who are the winners and losers, who’s ahead, what’s the strategy?’ You can keep doing that right up until the point when democracy disintegrates.”

I agree. So does Tom Edsall: “In times of big change, reporters have a harder time finding ways to describe it and to deal with it. Reporters are usually fixed in a language that they’ve (long) been using to describe political competition.” Nevertheless, “you have to look at the truth…The press has been reluctant to look at the truth adequately… That is what the press is supposed to do. I’m personally against mincing words,” whereas, at too many mainstream outlets, “the pressure is to mince words.”

Granted, the word authoritarian upsets a lot of people. But what more empirical evidence do we need that the GOP wants to turn America into Turkey, Hungary, or worse? In plain sight, its state-level lawmakers are working to sabotage future free elections – ensuring that Republican state legislatures have the power to invalidate Democratic wins, installing local election officials who can refuse to certify Democratic wins, enacting a string of new voter suppression laws that are designed to protect their white minorities.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s national leaders remain in thrall to the loser who thinks the 2020 election was stolen, and they continue to pretend that the insurrectionist coup attempt was a mirage. As Edsall says, “stuffing things down the memory hole is precisely what authoritarianism does.” If we journalists don’t point that out, we’re not doing our jobs.

James Madison, who championed the Bill of Rights, warned more than two centuries ago that a free country starved of accurate knowledge “is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.”

Both indeed. The clock is ticking.

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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]

I must warn you in advance that this is not satire. This news is real.

This week, the Republican governor of Texas signed a law creating “The 1836 Project,” a feat of “patriotic education” that will celebrate the purportedly glorious founding of the Texas Republic.

At his signing photo-op, Gov. Greg Abbott said: “To keep Texas the best state in the nation, we can never forget WHY our state is so exceptional.” The 1836 Project will ensure that future generations will “understand Texas values. Together, we’ll keep our rich history alive.” The project will promote “the principles that make Texas Texas,” especially the state’s “legacy of economic prosperity.”

Hey, bring it on! I trust that the Texas white people’s party, in its quest to provide a true education about 1836, will feature Section 9 of the original Texas Constitution:

“All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude. (The Texas) Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall Congress have the power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder have the power to emancipate his or her slave without the consent of Congress…”

After featuring that provision in The 1836 Congress, I trust that the current citizens of Texas will also be told why Section 9 was enacted in the first place: Because Mexico, which ruled the territory at the time, had recently enacted a law abolishing slavery. The Anglo settlers in Texas wouldn’t stand for that (John Durst, a prominent white landowner, wrote: “We are ruined forever”).

Defending slavery was a major impetus for the decision to break away from Mexico and establish an independent republic. It worked beautifully – between 1840 and 1850, the Texas slave population increased 500 percent, propping up the state’s most precious commodity, on which roughly 95 percent of the economy was based: Cotton.

Surely those facts will be highlighted in The 1836 Project. After all, Gov. Abbott’s law promises to patriotically educate people about the state’s “legacy of economic prosperity.”

Perhaps The 1836 Project will also teach citizens that Texas seceded from the Union in 1861 because it was determined to defend what the state’s leaders called their “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery,” a system that enabled slaveholders to amass more than 70 percent of the state’s economic wealth. The secession statement decreed that Texas would be preserved as “a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race.”

Perhaps that too will be featured in The 1836 Project, because Abbott promised to educate people about what made Texas Texas.

Actually, I’ll go way out on a limb and predict that a true accounting of the roots of “Texas values” will not happen. What a missed opportunity.

As historian Seth Cotlar rightly tweeted, “it is the responsibility of a state’s leaders to speak honestly about its past. Whitewashing history serves only to perpetuate historical injustices. Teaching rising generations the truth about history won’t magically make everything better. But it will at least enable us to move forward together with a relatively shared and accurate understanding of where we’ve been.”

Alas, the problem in Texas – echoed everywhere by racist MAGAts who take refuge in myths – is that “patriotic education” is just an Orwellian con, further proof that those living in fear of the future are determined to whitewash the 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]

John Warner, a Republican who served in the U.S. Senate for 30 years and died Wednesday at 94 in his home state of Virginia, said this about his Democratic colleagues: “We had political disagreements and fought on the Senate floor. But at day’s end we shared a drink, talked as friends, and we found common cause, solving problems and serving the American public.”

Jeez. Now there’s a sentiment that belongs in a time capsule, along with rotary phones and videocassettes.

He was fortunate to retire in 2009. Imagine how he would’ve felt sharing the chamber with insurrectionist goons like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. As a veteran of two wars who cared deeply about the credibility of Congress, imagine how he would’ve felt being forced to breathe the same air as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The species of Republican willing to work across the aisle has been dying and retiring for many years now – Arlen Specter, Richard Lugar, John Chafee, it’s a very long list – but Warner deserves some special attention, not just because he’s one of the last to depart, not just because he was a glamour guy who was married to Liz Taylor (husband #6), but because he stood up to the right-wing zealots when it mattered most.

It might be enough to simply point out that Warner, in retirement, recognized Donald Trump’s twisted treachery from a mile away – and signaled early support for Hillary Clinton. But that was a comparatively easy call because in 2016 he was no longer had to face the voters. In truth, he indulged his country-over-party instincts decades earlier.

A former Navy Secretary under Richard M. Nixon, he won his Senate seat in 1978 and dutifully hewed to the GOP line most of the time. But in that era when it was still possible for a Republican to put country first, he did so without quaking in his boots.

When it became clear that gun violence was a national epidemic, he infuriated the rabid right by voting for gun-safety measures and trying (without success) to extend the federal ban on assault weapons. He voted for some restrictions on abortion, but accepted that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.

Warner had supported George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, but in 2007 he called for Bush to start bringing the troops home, and he compelled Pentagon officials to testify about the torture of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. He opposed gay marriage, but when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs denounced gays in the military, Warner said: “I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the chairman’s view that homosexuality is immoral.”

But arguably Warner’s most laudable moment came in 1994, when it appeared that Oliver North would become his Virginia colleague in the Senate. North, you may recall, was the key Iran-Contra scandal operative who’d been criminally convicted for lying to Congress; naturally, Virginia right-wingers deified North as a hero and rewarded him with a Senate GOP nomination.

Warner refused to pledge tribal fealty and declared that North was unfit for public office. He helped save his Democratic colleague, Chuck Robb, by endorsing an independent bid by moderate Republican Marshall Coleman. That November, the GOP vote was split and Robb survived. Home-state conservatives hated Warner’s blasphemy, and tried to oust him in a 1996 Senate primary, but he didn’t bend and he didn’t lose.

What he said was this: “I sure risked my political future, that’s for sure. But I’d rather the voters of this state remember that I stood on my principle…That’s the price of leadership.”

If only the MAGA rabble in today’s Senate could fathom the meaning of his words and honor his legacy. Or at least thank him for his service. I just did.

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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]

Why do most Capitol Hill Republicans oppose the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly coup against democracy staged on Jan. 6? Duh, take one guess. They know darn well that a thorough investigation will implicate them. They can’t handle the truth.

That’s why 80 percent of the House Republicans voted “no” Wednesday night, even as the commission cleared the chamber. That’s why Senate Republican leaders want the commission idea to die on their watch – and their stated reasons are not subtle.

John Thune, one of Mitch McConnell’s top lieutenants, said candidly that a sweeping 1/6 probe could hurt their prospects in the 2022 midterm elections because they “want to be moving forward and not looking backward.” That jibes with MAGA lickspittle Kevin McCarthy’s fear that a bipartisan commission could be “potentially counterproductive.”

I get what they’re saying. It’s like if Ted Bundy had declared in 1979 that he opposed his Florida double-murder trial because he feared it would be counterproductive to his freedom, that “looking backward” could land him in the electric chair.

So here’s the bottom line: If Republicans ultimately kill off the bipartisan concept negotiated in good faith by one of their own House members, fine. Let ’em walk. Their ranks are infested with domestic terrorist fellow travelers – as we saw again yesterday, just as we saw in their January refusal to certify President Biden’s win – and our longstanding American policy is not to negotiate with terrorists.

Do the commission without them. If the insurrectionist abetters are not part of the probe process, it frees up the Democrats to be more firmly in charge, with full subpoena power to unearth which House GOPers were in backstage cahoots with the MAGA rioters. Who knew what when? And in the White House, what exactly was the lame-duck loser doing while the besieged Capitol Police were waiting for military assistance? What did the insurrectionist-in-chief know during that three hour gap, and when did he know it?

If a Democratic-led commission were to ultimately deliver a devastating verdict – which is likely where the facts will indeed lead it – then of course the Republicans would try to discredit it as “partisan.” Let them do their thing. Better to have them scream at top volume from outside the probe, than to have them working to sabotage the probe from the inside. Because you know that if a bipartisan commission were to ultimately be created, McConnell and McCarthy would be free to appoint GOP members who wear the Trump armband and take their marching orders from Mar-a-Lago.

It’s despicable, of course, that the party doesn’t think the attempted violent overthrow of democracy in its own backyard is nearly as serious as (oh, for instance) the terrorist attack on Benghazi – to which they devoted more than 30 hearings conducted by nine congressional panels over a three-year span, including a select committee of their own creation with no bipartisan sheen – but this is what we’ve come to expect from a cult that’s crafting incremental fascism in plain sight.

The negotiated bipartisan commission bill states that the panel, having unearthed the truth about why Jan. 6 happened, would then seek “corrective measures” in order “to prevent domestic terrorist attacks against American democratic institutions” in the future. Who could possibly be against that? But we know the answer. Which is why Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and one of Trump’s sharpest critics, is pleading with Democrats to grow a pair. He knows it’s futile to negotiate with terrorists:

“THEY SENT PEOPLE TO KILL YOU. Get a goddamned grip. Play offense. Drag them. Here’s what you don’t get; the Trump GOP as comprised today isn’t stupid. It’s evil. They’re smart. They’ll play to your goodwill and instinct for a bipartisan veneer on the Jan 6th issue. They’re conning you. Stop f-g around. Announce the panel. START. Don’t delay. Time is fleeting, and 2022 is roaring into position. You need to nationalize the (midterms) over, you know, the little things like whether it’s OK to send a violent, armed mob to the Capitol to overthrow an election.”

Yeah, what Rick said. Democrats have no choice, because the only choice has been thrust upon them. They can continue to indulge the GOP and pretend that this nation still has two pro-American parties…or they can do their duty and stand up for truth, justice, and the American way. Nancy Pelosi has already signaled that course of action: “If they don’t want to do this, we will.”

Just do it.

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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]

The Republican party has devolved into a motley mix of goose stepping fanatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene and sniveling cowards like Kevin McCarthy. But worst of all are the bloviating opportunists who seek advantage by simply blowing with the wind.

Which brings us to Chris Christie.

I’ve yet to decide whether the ex-New Jersey governor who left office with a 13 percent approval rating is pathetic or shrewd or some combination thereof. But he’s so desperate for a piece of the action, so hungry for relevance, that he thinks he can have a bakery of cakes and eat them too.

Christie keeps showing up on ABC News’ Sunday show to audition for the 2024 Republican nomination, but because he’s not quite sure whether the party is permanently or temporarily in thrall to the MAGA sociopath, he keeps trying to have it both ways. He’s so anxious to be on center stage that he’ll say whatever it takes, no matter how transparent his naked calculations may appear.

His latest shtick is that Liz Cheney basically deserves to be dumped from the House GOP leadership team because she keeps saying something that her colleagues don’t want to hear – namely, that President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. He said Sunday that Cheney continues “to press this issue publicly in a way that (is) antagonizing the people who (are) against her, and I think you don’t have an entitlement to be in leadership.”

Actually, the “issue” is that Cheney is simply telling the truth. Christie’s apparent position – for the moment, anyway – is that Cheney is not “entitled” to be in leadership if she insists on telling the truth to people who prefer to wallow in lies. In other words, Christie wants the MAGA liars to believe that he’s sympathetic to their side.

He also declared that Cheney, by pressing this “issue” so publicly, is “sending a clear signal” that “she’s not comfortable in leadership anymore, and she doesn’t want to be in it.” Christie apparently can’t fathom that Cheney may be simply motivated to tell the truth.

Last January, shortly after the failed Capitol coup, Christie appeared to share her motivation. He surfaced on TV in high dudgeon about Trump: “The president caused this protest to occur…What we had was an incitement to riot at the United States Capitol, we had people killed, and to me there’s not a whole lot of question there” about who’s responsible. “If inciting insurrection isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is.”

Fast forward to early May. Most Republicans have donned the Trump armband and signed on to the Big Lie. And Christie has re-calibrated accordingly. A few weeks ago he fled to Sean Hannity and declared that Trump was a fantastic president. Granted, “there were some things that happened specifically at the end of the presidency that I think had some things that clouded his accomplishments,” but “overall I give the president an A.”

How can Christie gift Trump an A grade if he also believes that the guy deserved to be impeached for assaulting our democracy and inciting a violent insurrection? How can Christie simply dismiss Trump’s neo-fascist acts as merely “some things that happened” in the final days?

The answer is easy. He’s trying to run for president again and he’ll say whatever it takes to suck up to the base.

His current position, as best I understand it, is that what Trump incited on Jan. 6 was some kind of aberration, not a logical extension of who Trump was and has always been.

On the one hand, Christie has told The New Yorker that Trump on Jan. 6 “breached something that I think none of us should have to put up with.” On the other hand, he told the magazine that “what happened (on Jan. 6) didn’t happen two years ago or three years ago,” and was therefore some kind of isolated incident. That sorta jibes with what Christie said about Trump in his 2019 memoir – where he wrote that “my friend Donald” has “many of the qualities that have defined America’s leaders.”

Is your head spinning yet? Yup. Is it worth parsing Christie any further? Nope. Because his game is nakedly obvious.

As Michael Korda, the English writer and publisher, wisely observed many years ago, “An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.”

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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]

Kudos to Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. Her House GOP leadership post hangs by a thread because she refuses to mouth Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election, and Wednesday she boldly framed the stakes: “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth…”

But we also need to recognize the inconvenient truth that she is rebelling against the cult of disinformation that her father helped build. Dick the veep was a notorious liar who helped turn the GOP into the monster that’s poised to devour his daughter.

Lest we forget – it was barely two decades ago – Republican leaders on Capitol Hill were steadfastly silent while Vice President Cheney lied us into the disastrous war in Iraq. He shaped the intelligence on Iraq to reflect his post-9/11 fixation. As our British allies wrote about Cheney’s march toward war, in a now-infamous 2002 memo, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

But rather than revisit all of Cheney’s shameless BS, I’ll simply detail what I consider his most flagrant departure from truth. He flogged one particular lie for years, even as the death toll mounted, and virtually no Republican ever uttered a word of protest in defense of factual reality.

Cheney repeatedly insisted, after 9/11, that Saddam Hussein was in close cahoots with Osama bin Laden. His assertion was absurd – Hussein was a secular tyrant with no love for Muslim extremists, and President Bush’s Daily Brief of Sept. 21, 2001 stated that there was “scant credible evidence” of any “significant collaborative ties” between Saddam and Osama.

But Cheney didn’t care. On “Meet The Press,” in December 2001, he declared that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with a Saddam secret agent. In Cheney’s words, “It’s been pretty well confirmed.”

But Cheney had seized on a rumor that U.S intelligence officials could not confirm. In April 2002, inside sources told Newsweek: “U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials now believe that Atta wasn’t even in Prague at the time.” But Cheney persisted anyway. In September 2002, he said it again on Meet the Press: “We have reporting that places (Atta) in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack.”

Fast forward to June 2004. That’s when the bipartisan 9/11 Commission rebuked Cheney: “We have examined the allegation that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer…Based on the evidence available – including investigation by Czech and U.S. officials, plus detainee reporting – we do not believe that such a meeting occurred.”

But again Cheney persisted. Shortly after the 9/11 Commission released its ’04 report, during an appearance on CBS News, Cheney was asked about the Atta yarn. The questioner confronted Cheney with his own words: “Let’s get to Mohamed Atta for a minute…You have said in the past that (the Atta-Iraq link) was quote, ‘pretty well confirmed.’” This was Cheney’s response: “No, I never said that. I never said that…Absolutely not.” Now he was lying about his lie, which had been captured for posterity on Meet the Press.

No wonder Cheney left the vice presidency with an approval rating of 13 percent. He was the prime driver of a war built on lies, but for years there was barely a whiff of dissent within the GOP. And to the best of my knowledge, I don’t ever recall Liz calling out her dad and declaring, amidst all the needless death and suffering in Iraq, that the Republican party had reached a crossroads and needed to stand for truth.

Granted, family fealty trumps all. But before we canonize her current profile in courage, we need to contextualize it, to recognize that the GOP’s cult of disinformation did not blossom overnight. It was seeded by serial dissemblers like Dick Cheney, and it’s a shame that his own daughter is poised to become collateral damage.

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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]

It’s hard these days to keep track of all the decrepitude in public life, so forgive me if I highlight some new sleaze that has likely escaped your notice.

In the waning days of the Trump dystopia, a group called Americans for Prosperity – which is bankrolled by conservative billionaire David Koch – spent more than a million dollars on what it called “a national campaign” to ensure that Senate Republicans jammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, earlier this week an affiliated Koch group – the Americans for Prosperity Foundation – asked the high court to overturn a California law that requires charities to disclose the names of their biggest donors.

In other words, Amy Coney Barrett, who owes her seat in part to the secret dark money that was spent on her behalf, decided to sit in judgement of a Koch request to protect secret dark money. And she made it clear, during oral argument, that she’s prepared to do just that.

Hang on. Isn’t there a concept called “conflict of interest”? Isn’t a judge with a conflict compelled to recuse him/herself from such a case?

It would seem so. The Code of Judicial Conduct, embedded in federal law, specifically require that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judges of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned” – by a reasonable, objective person. In fact, the high court applied that standard back in 2009 when it ordered a West Virginia supreme court justice to recuse himself from a case that involved a coal company CEO – precisely because that CEO had donated $3 million to the justice’s election campaign.

But here’s the catch: The U.S. Supreme Court exempts itself from that federal law.

There is no Supreme Court code governing conflict of interest. There are no ethics rules. There is no accountability. The high court justices police themselves, which of course means that, in practice, they do not police themselves at all. The court defies the traditional legal principle of nemo judex in causa sua (nobody should be a judge of his own case). It deems itself exempt from the code of conduct that governs the lower federal courts. Aside from the nine justices at the top of the pyramid, all other federal judges are inhibited from putting themselves in any situation that might convey an appearance of impropriety.

This outrage has been obvious for a long time. Eleven years ago, Clarence Thomas sat in judgement of Obamacare despite the fact that Virginia Thomas, his conservative activist wife, earned roughly $165,000 working for several groups that fought and lobbied against Obamacare.

A bipartisan coalition of 107 law professors from 76 law schools asked Congress to require that all federal judges with perceived conflicts at least explain in writing the reasons why they’d refused to recuse themselves. A tepid reform, yes. But right now the Supremes don’t have to explain anything. So when Barrett joined the rest of the court during oral arguments on the Koch empire’s dark money plea, she didn’t need to explain anything.

Actually, during her Senate confirmation hearing last fall, she was asked about the impending Koch case and whether she was planning to recuse herself. In response she said that it would “not be appropriate for me as a judicial nominee to offer an opinion about such abstract issues or hypotheticals.” Which was a word-salad way of saying “No.” In a separate written answer, she stated: “I commit to faithfully applying the law of recusal if confirmed” – a meaningless promise, because in practice the Supremes ignore that law.

So, for the Koch empire, it’s clear that Barrett was a cost-efficient investment. If she joins her conservative colleagues to nix the California donor-disclosure law (highly likely), that will embolden the dark-money forces to challenge the many state and federal laws that currently require political groups to reveal the names of their donors.

There once was a time when conservatives argued in favor of transparency, claiming that unlimited campaign donations would not corrupt politics as long as the public knew who the donors were. As one prominent conservative thinker declared in 2010, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”

So said Justice Antonin Scalia. But that credo was so 11 years ago.

And it sounds especially archaic now, with Amy Cony Barrett having been bought and paid for.

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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]