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Republican pollster Frank Luntz met last weekend with 17 vaccine-resisting Trump voters to better understand why they won’t take the simple step of protecting themselves and their fellow citizens.

Their answers were predictably ignorant. One guy said, “I mean, we’re just going to be shot up and shot up and shot up. We can’t live like this. This is not sustainable.” One woman complained about “being bullied, being humiliated, basically, by the media. I don’t really see the point in getting it if nothing is going to change, and I haven’t gotten sick.”

But the piece de resistance was their enthused opinion about fake vaccination cards. They want one. If they were to get one, think of all the freedom they would have!

The cult of American selfishness is truly a phenomenon to behold. One woman in the Luntz focus group said she’s “1,000 percent” in favor of obtaining a fake card with the CDC logo (widely available these days on eBay and elsewhere) so that she could do anything she wants. And one guy said, “If I have a fake vaccine card, yeah, I can go anywhere,” especially to ballgames in parks – like Yankee Stadium – that currently require proof of vaccination. Others at the focus group table shared their desire to go to concerts or go on trips where proof of shots is mandatory.

These people are contemptible.

Their concern for the community is zero. Their self-absorption is total. Their determination to commit fraud and walk among us – to breathe among us – will spread COVID-19 (especially the variants), extend the pandemic, sicken more people and kill more people. Every health expert says this, but alas, as we well know, Freedom-lovers don’t like it when the “elites” try to “bully” them.

Ask yourself this question: As life incrementally returns to something resembling normal, would you want to eat inside a restaurant next to an unvaccinated idiot with a fake CDC card? Or stand shoulder to shoulder at a concert? As Nenette Day, an assistant special agent in the federal Department of Health and Human Services inspector general’s office, reportedly says, “It disturbs me, having been in law enforcement this long, this flippant attitude that people have.”

What explains this flippancy? It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

There is much to admire in the American creed, as we who love this country can attest. But the pandemic continues to expose the worst of us – most notably our selfish individualism. There’s a crackpot belief, shared by millions, that “freedom” is a license to be irresponsible toward others, and that any requirement to care for the welfare of others is some kind of commie nanny-state diktat.

After all, one of the bibles on the American right is Ayn Rand’s The Virtues of Selfishness (“To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose, are two aspects of the same achievement”). And the current icon is Donald Trump, who codified selfishness last year when he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” In normal times, these strains of individualism are merely obnoxious. Today, they’re downright dangerous.

President Biden is demonstrating that government can actually work – more than 200 million vaccination shots in less than 100 days – but his administration can’t bring America back on a decent timetable if so many people plan to “own the libs” by obtaining fake vaxx cards and spreading more disease. Haven’t we suffered enough already?

Tammy from Virginia said in the Luntz focus group, “I was zero (on) the vaccine. I’m still a zero.” Yes, she certainly is.

Excuse me if that sounds like “bullying.” I’m just thinking of the welfare of others, even if Tammy is not.

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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 want to malign anyone’s religious faith. I really don’t.

But it’s a tad disturbing that 45 percent of the nation’s 41 million white evangelical Christians are vowing not to get vaccinated.

As one Texas nutritionist told the press the other day, “It would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here.” Has this woman not learned that the virus is contagious? And that we’ll never reach “herd immunity” (thwarting the virus due to a dearth of fresh hosts) unless roughly 85 percent of the population is vaccinated? How nice of her to entrust the health of those around her to God’s will, without their having a say in the matter.

Granted, a lot of nationally prominent evangelical leaders are trying to talk sense to their parishioners. Rick Warren is telling his people to get vaccinated: “God revealed a lot of his will when he gave you that brain. And he expects you to use it.” Robert Jeffress says: “We talk about life inside the womb being a gift from God. Well, life outside the womb is a gift from God, too.” But as Joel Rainey, a West Virginia church leader, reportedly laments, “(Pastors) get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20.”

Suffice it to say that unless these evangelical refuseniks live up to what they purport to believe – that God put them on earth to love everyone, that they have a moral duty to care for others as well as themselves – the pandemic will last far longer than it otherwise would. And they will have blood on their hands.

One’s religious faith is deeply personal, and my attitude is: Hey, whatever gives you comfort, whatever gets you through the night, whatever helps you make sense of this often-perplexing existence. But if or when one’s faith adversely affects others who don’t share the faith…then we’ve got a problem. Especially when the issue is life or death.

As Kevin Schulman, a Stanford University professor of medicine, said the other day, “This (vaccine) is the most important product launch of our lifetime – and we need to get 85 percent market share.”

By all accounts, the refuseniks don’t trust science and won’t be swayed on that basis. Nor do they trust government, even though their idol, Donald Trump, agreed to be vaccinated and recommends it.

The best advice, apparently, is to try to persuade these folks by speaking their own language. Connie Schultz, an Ohio-based columnist who grew up in a devout Christian family, suggests this parable from her childhood church:

A town’s river has overflowed. Floodwaters are headed for the home of a woman whose faith in God is unflappable. A police officer knocks on Laurie’s door. “Ma’am,” she says, “Your house will soon be underwater. Come with us, please.”

“Oh, no, thank you,” Laurie says. “God will save me.”

An hour later, water is starting to seep into Laurie’s second-floor hallway. Emergency workers paddle a boat up to her bedroom window and yell, “Ma’am, you’re going to drown. Get in the boat, please.”

“God will save me,” she tells them, waving goodbye.

An hour later, Laurie is sitting on her roof. A helicopter hovers overhead, dangling a rope ladder within her reach. “Ma’am!” a man yells. “This is your last chance! Climb. Up. The rope!”

Laurie cups her hands around her mouth and yells, “God. Will. Save. Me!”

Minutes later, Laurie drowns. She arrives at heaven’s gate. “Why?” she yells at God. “Why did you let me drown?”

God starts counting on his fingers. “I sent you a police car. I sent you a boat. I sent you a hel-i-cop-ter.”

I like that story. But since we’re all in this fight together, I like a proverb that first appeared in print 153 years ago, one that is easily tailored to our present circumstance: “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”

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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]

Republicans and corporate America have been conjoined for so long that any breach in the bond is almost impossible to imagine. Yet we’re seeing one now, thanks to the GOP’s decision to give free rein to its authoritarian impulses.

The way it has long worked is easy to explain. Corporate America shovels big bucks to the Republicans, who in turn ensure via legislation that corporate America makes as much money as possible, which in turn ensures that the Republicans will be further rewarded. That’s why Mitch McConnell has long championed corporate donations as “free speech” and insisted that those donors have the right to give money without disclosing their names.

But now that some corporations have belatedly decided it’s in their best business interest to oppose the GOP’s unprecedented vote-suppression efforts (most notably in Georgia), all of a sudden Republicans like McConnell are outraged. Apparently it’s freedom when corporations say and do stuff that echoes the GOP agenda, but if they dare stray from the lockstep party line – and speak ill of the strategy to sabotage democracy – then Republican heads detonate with maximum decibels.

And so now that Georgia-based Coca Cola has denounced the state GOP’s voter-suppression law as “a step backwards,” and that Georgia-based Delta Airlines has accurately pointed out that the law “will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right”…well, suffice it to say that McConnell and other party hacks are suddenly not big fans of corporate free speech.

In a statement Tuesday, McConnell complained that “parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government,” and he warned that unless these firms cease their “frantic left-wing signaling,” they would pay a steep price: “Corporations will invite serious consequences.”

You have to laugh at these people. They’re all for corporate free speech – unless corporations say something they dislike. Then their impulse is to threaten some form of punishment. (A government crackdown on rebellious corporations? Gosh, that smacks of socialism.)

McConnell and his pals don’t seem to grasp the irony of the situation: Coca Cola, Delta, and Major League Baseball (plus, in Texas, American Airlines and computer magnate Michael Dell) have decided that defending the right to vote would best serve their interests in the free market. They decided that silently abetting authoritarianism would be bad for business, pissing off customers as well as their employees. Yes, folks, it’s all about the free market – which Republicans purport to worship.

Granted, you can make the case that Republicans have reason to be angry. After all, corporate America has long pumped money into the GOP, to the same state legislators who’ve been concocting vote suppression bills nationwide. Since 2015, corporations have reportedly steered $50 million to those state legislators – not necessarily for the express purpose of suppressing the vote, but simply because they were Republicans (for whom vote suppression and racial gerrymandering has long been a top priority, well known to anyone paying attention).

Their state legislative races are financed by the Republican State Leadership Committee. Here’s a partial list of recent corporate donors to the RSLC, just give you a flavor: 3M, Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, Autozone, Bank of America, Best Buy, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Capital One, Charter Communications, Chevron, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Comcast, ConocoPhillips, Ebay, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Facebook, FedEx, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Honeywell, iHeartMedia, JPMorgan Chase, Juul, LexisNexis, MasterCard, Microsoft, MillerCoors, Motorola, Nationwide, PayPal, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Raytheon, Reynolds American, Sheetz, Target, TIAA, T-Mobile, UnitedHealth, UPS, Visa, Volkswagen, Waffle House, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Waste Management, Wells Fargo, and Yum Brands.

So corporations have long been political players, lobbying for interests that typically align with Republican priorities; the only thing that’s different now – albeit with only a handful of prominent firms – is that, from the GOP’s perspective, they’re suddenly playing for the wrong team.

One more irony: The GOP, in its knee-jerk opposition to President Biden’s infrastructure plan, insists that it’s unfair to finance the rebuilding of America by hiking taxes on corporations. So what are they going to do now – agree to hike taxes on corporations, as punishment for “woke” free speech?

Three words: Pass the popcorn.

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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]

What welcome words these were, from a newly elected president: “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure…our highways bridges, tunnels, airports…which will become second to none, and we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

That must be Uncle Joe, right?

Think again people. That was Trump, riffing in the wee hours of the dark night he was elected in 2016. But predictably, his purported quest to repair our crumbling infrastructure turned out to be just another con.

So how refreshing it is to finally have an administration that’s willing to go big, because nothing less will suffice.

President Biden’s progressive infrastructure plan carries a price tag 10 times bigger than the one Trump failed to fight for. He wants to pay for it by hiking taxes on those most able to afford it, and the public is on board. According to the latest national poll, 54 percent of Americans support a plan financed by a higher corporate tax rate and tax increases on people making more than $400,000 a year. (Only 27 percent oppose the idea.)

With the wind at his back, Biden is well aware that now is the time to push hard for necessary transformational change. He clearly wants to be an acronym president in the mold of FDR and LBJ. “I’m convinced that if we act now, in 50 years people are going to look back and say this was the moment that America won the future,” he said Wednesday.

Will he get everything he wants? Probably not. Republicans have already rediscovered their hostility to debts and deficits, neither of which they cared about during the MAGA era, so they’ll likely do nothing to help Biden repair America and put people back to work. The whole concept of using federal spending to address long-festering crises (economic, social, foundational) is anathema to a cult-of-personality party that equates governance with trash talking on Twitter. And it’s hard to foresee the GOP buying Biden’s provisions to expand Amtrak.

In the end, it may be necessary in the Senate to squeeze the infrastructure plan through the “reconciliation” procedure (as happened with the COVID-19 rescue plan) because it’s budget-related and thus would require only a simple (Democratic) majority rather than the artificial 60-vote filibuster threshold. And along the way, some wish-list provisions that don’t quite meet the definition of “infrastructure” (strengthening labor unions; spending $400 billion on home caretakers for the elderly and disabled) could wind up excised.

Nor are all Democrats united on everything. Some progressives still don’t think the infrastructure plan is big enough, while some centrists think it’s too ambitious for the business groups that need to be brought on board. On the other hand, surely there’s some common ground, even between the parties, because who can possibly be “against” repairing highways and bridges – which will create jobs in every state, red and blue?

The time is now to go bold, because if not now, when? Biden’s plan in the broadest sense connects with Democrats and independents – and by any measure of self-interest, it theoretically should appeal to Republican Senate and House members who care about bringing home the bacon to their states and districts. They’ll probably vote against it anyway, then boast in press releases about the arriving bacon – as many have done with the COVID-19 rescue benefits.

Most importantly, a president whose election derailed America’s march to autocracy feels the weight of this historic crossroads. As he said Wednesday, “I truly believe we’re in a moment where history is going to look back on this time as a fundamental choice having been made between democracies and autocracies… It’s a basic question. Can democracies still deliver for their people? Can they get a majority? I believe we can. I believe we must.”

When Obamacare was enacted a decade ago, Biden famously blurted that it was “a big f-g deal.” What he’s proposing now is far more ambitious – much to the surprise of those on the left who fought him in the Democratic primaries.

If he can pull off a sizeable chunk of the sweeping infrastructure package, that BFD could put him in the history books as JRB.

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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 has been obvious for a very long time that Washington D.C. deserves statehood – just for starters, it has more people than Wyoming or Vermont and its residents pay more in total federal income tax than residents of 21 other states – but the foes of statehood just seem to get stupider with each passing year.

Earlier this week, during a House hearing on statehood, Georgia Republican congressman Jody Hice, a former right-wing radio host, offered a creative rationale for the status quo. He said that “D.C. wants the benefits of a state without actually having to operate like one,” because, for instance, it “would be the only state in America without a car dealership.”

Granted, the Founding Fathers failed to foresee the internal combustion engine, but one would search in vain for any language, in any of the amendments enacted during the modern era, that cites car dealerships as a basis for statehood. And it’s clear that Hice doesn’t get out much, because if he were to walk just nine blocks from the Capitol dome, he could buy a Tesla. Or if he were to stray a few miles north, he could buy a used car at Jimmy’s Auto. And so on.

Zack Smith, a GOP witness from the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, shrugged off the fact that D.C. residents are federally taxed without any representation. Instead, Smith contended that the residents have lots of ways of making their voices heard, asking committee members, “How many of you saw D.C. statehood yard signs, or bumper stickers, or banners on your way to this hearing today?”

Translation: Wyoming and Vermont have two senators apiece despite having smaller populations than D.C., but hey, the D.C. are empowered in their own way, because they’re free to put up yard signs.

None of these lame verbal gyrations can mask the conservative opponents’ true intent: To block the creation of a new state and deny equal rights to 712,000 taxpaying citizens, the majority of whom (53 percent) are people of color – and who tend to vote Democratic.

Republican clout in the Senate hinges on sustaining the dominance of the rural white states. Their main complaint about D.C. statehood is that it would be, in the words of one Kentucky Republican congressman, a “political power grab, and we’re going to make sure that America knows what (Democrats) are trying to do.” Donald Trump weighed in last year, warning that statehood would benefit “the wrong party.”

Well, here’s a news bulletin: Whenever new states have been proposed, there has always been a partisan element.

Republicans did it in 1864, when they tried to rush Nebraska to statehood because they wanted three new electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln’s re-election campaign. And they wildly succeeded with their push for new rural western states late in the century.

One historian points out: “In 1889 and 1890, Congress added North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming – the largest admission of states since the original 13. This addition of 12 new senators and 18 new electors to the Electoral College was a deliberate strategy of late-19th-century Republicans to stay in power after their swing toward Big Business cost them a popular majority. The strategy paid dividends deep into the future; indeed, the admission of so many rural states back then helps to explain GOP control of the Senate today.”

Bingo. Why should senators and representatives from those states have disproportionate influence over the citizens of D.C.?

The GOP’s “power grab” argument doesn’t hold water, so its next refuge is the Constitution. Statehood opponents claim that the founding document is on their side, but that’s wrong. The Constitution requires only that the federal seat of government shall not be located within a state. The current statehood bill would merely shrink the federal district to the two-square-mile area that includes the Capitol, Supreme Court, White House, and National Mall…and would make the rest of the district (where taxpayers live) the 51st state. Passage in the House is expected this summer.

Of course, statehood won’t happen unless Senate Democrats dump the filibuster and its artificial 60-vote threshold. The good news is that statehood has more polling support than ever before, and that the intertwined movements for equal rights and social justice have made representation for people of color more imperative.

It’s about protecting and expanding democracy, regardless of car dealerships.

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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]

Once upon a time, in a dystopia far far away, Trump decreed that Obamacare shall die. In his memorable words, “What we want to do is terminate it.”

How’d that work out?

Not only did Obamacare survive the Mar-a-Lago loser – and 10 years of attempted Republican sabotage – but today it’s more alive than ever. Because one of the most under-reported aspects of the American Rescue Plan are its provisions to bolster and expand the Affordable Care Act.

We need to take notice before the news cycle inevitably moves on, because this is historic news for 20 million Americans whose coverage had long been targeted by GOP saboteurs – and for potentially millions more who can sign up with new federal help.

Thanks to Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to “protect and build on the ACA,” we should rename it NoMalarkeyCare.

We’d been so conditioned for so long to endure bad news that we now often need an attitude adjustment in order to process something good. But it’s all there, tucked away in the rescue plan: Higher subsidies for people who buy health coverage through the ACA exchanges, brand new subsidies for people who weren’t eligible before, and hefty financial aid to red states that have not yet expanded Medicaid under the ACA.

As medical experts point out, “Medicaid expansion is critical to vulnerable populations disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.”

It’s hilarious to think back to 2017, when Trump held a victory party in the Rose Garden after House Republicans, then in the majority, passed a bill that was designed to cripple what he called the “ravages” of Obamacare. (That quest later died in the Senate.)

Lest we forget, this was the party that tried and failed umpteen times to kill the coverage of 20 million Americans, the party that refused to accept that Obamacare was the law of the land even after the Supreme Court upheld it twice. (A third Republican challenge to overturn the entire ACA was argued in the high court last fall, but the betting is that it too will fail.)

Yes, it’s fun in retrospect to highlight the GOP’s greatest rhetorical hits. Like when they warned about Obamacare’s “death panels.” (There were no death panels). And when House Speaker John Boehner warned that Obamacare would usher in “Armageddon.” And when they predicted that few Americans would bother to sign up. And when Mitch McConnell said, “I don’t think Albert Einstein could make this thing work.” And when fellow Senator John Thune said the law was “destined to fail.” And when virtually all of them consulted the GOP talking-point cheat sheet and chanted the phrase “train wreck.”

It’s brain-dead politics to think you can win by vowing to take away something that Americans have, a lesson Republicans should’ve learned in 2018, when Democrats captured the House after campaigning to protect Obamacare. And you certainly can’t win by replacing something with nothing. Republicans had a full decade to come up with something better than Obamacare, but let’s face it, health reform featuring a robust federal role is not something that Republicans do.

I’m reminded of what happened in 1935, when the New Deal Democrats introduced the concept of Social Security. Republicans predictably dissed that law too. New Jersey Republican Senator A. Harry Moore warned that Social Security “would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords.” That law was rickety at the outset, but once it got traction, it was improved and expanded in subsequent legislation. Today, I doubt you’ll find a single grassroots Republican, senior or disabled, who refuses a Social Security check.

So put your hands together for a Biden-buttressed Obamacare. When the original was signed into law in 2010, the vice president was overheard ballyhooing the event as “a big f-ing deal.” This one is even bigger.

Once again, Republicans have been reduced to history’s roadkill.

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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]

How fortunate we are that Joe Biden is in the room where it happens.

As evidenced Thursday night, during his Fireside Chat-style assessment of America on the cusp of recovery, he is the manifest inverse of the fraud who preceded him.

Granted, Trump set the bar so low that even an ant could hurdle it. Nevertheless, it was refreshing to be reminded what a real president sounds like. A real president focuses on us instead of flattering himself. A real president levels with us instead of lying. And a real president actually tries to summon the powers of his office to help people instead of killing them off.

Ask yourself whether we’d be mass vaccinating – and on track to normalcy by the fourth of July – if we were still stuck with The Former Guy. Not a chance. He had already done enough damage. As the New England Journal of Medicine reported last fall, “Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to…charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies…Trump’s rejection of evidence and public health measures has been catastrophic.” And as The Lancet, a British medical journal, concluded last month, Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic caused “tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.”

But enough about him.

Biden is demonstrating – his newly signed Rescue Plan buttresses his rhetoric – that the federal government can be a force for good in bad times. He said last night: “Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the American people. No function more important. We need to remember, the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us.”

Republicans and conservatives have spent decades maligning and seeking to sabotage “big government.” Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Well, guess what: When tens of millions of people are suffering – medically, economically and spiritually – and when states and localities can’t shoulder that burden, it behooves “big government” to step up.

Indeed, many Americans who normally mouth the tiresome talking points about “socialism” are more than happy to accept that proffered help. Check out the CNN report from red West Virginia, where a Trump voter says he’ll gladly use his stimulus check “to pay off the rent, pay off the bills. People are behind, you know? I’m sure I’m not the only one.” Check out the polls that show 75 percent support for Biden’s rescue package – including 59 percent support from self-identified Republicans.

Biden lamented that, in recent years, “we lost faith in whether our government and our democracy can deliver on really hard things for the American people.” His abiding mission is to rekindle that faith – to save lives and ultimately save democracy from the threat of home-grown fascism – by delivering for the American people, regardless of whether they voted blue, regardless of what “the loudest voices say on cable or online.”

There are times when the urgent need for federal help transcends ideology, when it is not a matter of “left” or “right,” when it is merely the logical decent course of human events. Biden instinctively understands that this is one of those times.

Arguably Biden’s best asset, as evidenced again Thursday night, is that he connects with people’s pain. An empath is someone who’s highly attuned to the emotions of those around them, to the point of feeling those emotions himself.

Perhaps any president (except the last one) would’ve said these words: “We are fundamentally a people who want to be with others, to talk, to laugh, to hug, to hold one another. But this virus has kept us apart. Grandparents haven’t seen their children or grandchildren. Parents haven’t seen their kids. Kids haven’t seen their friends. The things we used to do that always filled us with joy have become things we couldn’t do and broke our hearts.” But Biden – by dint of his DNA and seasoned by his own tragedies – exudes the emotions behind the words.

With 20/20 hindsight, it’s lucky for us that he bombed as a presidential candidate in 1988 and 2008, because – a bit like Winston Churchill, who finally became prime minister in wartime 1940 after serial setbacks – Biden has landed in the moment that suits him best.

He will suffer defeats, as all presidents do. But this is his time. And he wants it to be ours.

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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 we had a vaccine that would cure our sick obsession with the Royal Family, I’d be the first to sign up. I’d cut in line for that. If 100 percent efficacy required three doses, I’d raise my arm for that.

At some point in the 19th century, when some ill wind blew through the British monarchy, a fusty British commentator named Walter Bagehot lamented how simply awful it was to have that happen: “Our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it…In its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon the magic.”

Well, guess what. Daylight long ago dashed the magic and killed the mystery. What we learned – long long long before the teary saga of Harry and Meghan – was that the institution is archaic and that its inhabitants are parasitic.

By dint of bloodline, the royals are forever free to luxuriate – or, if they so desire, to curse their fate – while forever suckling on the taxpayers. Forbes has estimated that, in dollar terms, the British monarchy is worth roughly $88 billion. The taxpayers kick in roughly $130 million a year. The queen’s personal worth is roughly half a billion. All told, the royals have a darn good deal, especially since Britain’s current budget deficit is roughly $86 billion.

A commentator in the Irish Times newspaper said it best the other day: “Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbor who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbor who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

I can’t improve on that. Nobody but nobody does anti-monarchy snark better than the Irish.

All of which is why I had to laugh when I saw photos of Harry and Meghan showing off their custom chicken coop (which is how celebrities say “we’re regular folks!”), and heard that Meghan sat with Oprah sporting a $4,700 Armani dress. I don’t doubt Meghan’s sincerity about being traumatized by her stint inside “The Firm,” but it’s not as if we haven’t heard that tale before. Hello, 1990s? Princess Di?

When Harry’s mom was dishing publicly about her mental and physical stress as an outsider on the inside, the monarchy was deemed to be in crisis, its future imperiled. One journalist living in London in 1992 wrote: “The House of Windsor has lost much of its moral authority,” and, at minimum, “polls show that eight in 10 Brits think the queen should pay taxes like everyone.” (The guy who wrote that was me.)

So the Meghan yarn is really nothing new. Even the racial angle (the royals dreaded a Black baby) should hardly be a surprise, if one remembers that Crown’s traditional “moral authority” was built upon the island empire’s subjugation of people of color in faraway colonies.

And bad marriages have always plagued the royals. If memory serves, Henry VIII beheaded several wives. Imagine the public outcry if only they’d been able, in their final days, to tweet about the abuses they suffered. Frankly, Meghan would’ve benefited from doing even a smidgen of historical research. She was shocked that she had to curtsy in front of the queen? She didn’t have a clue about the life arc of her dead mother-in-law?

I suppose this latest royal psychodrama is grist for public fascination the same way a car wreck draws rubberneckers by the side of a highway. I suppose it’s human to feast on the woes of the entitled rich and wonder how we commoners would fare in such luxurious circumstances.

But forgive me for feeling bored. What we got this week was just old whine in a new bottle.

I well remember, back when Diana went public in 1992 about her woes with Charles and the queen, what veteran royals reporter James Whitaker told the BBC. Whitaker was a loyal keeper of the flame: “Although it’s been a bloody battle, and a lot of people have come out bruised, in 10 years people will look back and say, ‘That was a bad period, but didn’t they do well? Haven’t they recovered well?”

Nearly 30 years later, how’s that going?

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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]

We know – or think we know – why so many home-grown goons stormed the U.S. Capitol. Most notably, a defeated cult leader pumped his Kool-Aid down their throats.

But that’s not the whole story.

Trump was able to gin them up because they were so dumbed down. They had no idea they were doing anything wrong. They felt justified to breach the legislative branch simply because the president had decreed it. They had no clue about separation of powers, or co-equal branches of government, because they’d never learned about either. They truly believed that the vice president could magically overturn the election because they’d never learned how our democracy actually works.

For this, we can blame the demise of civics education in America.

In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln warned in a speech that unless children are taught “reverence for the Constitution and its laws,” we might fall prey to “mobocratic” rule. What we suffered on Jan. 6 was a mobocrat invasion – perhaps a harbinger of the future.

In a new report released this week, a group called Educating for American Democracy tells the tale:

“Civics and history education has eroded in the U.S. over the past fifty years, and opportunities to learn these subjects are inequitably distributed. Dangerously low proportions of the public understand and trust our democratic institutions. Majorities are functionally illiterate on our constitutional principles and forms. The relative neglect of civic education in the past ­half-century – a period of wrenching change – is one important cause of our civic and political dysfunction.”

Granted, it’s tough to prove that the Capitol mobocrats brutalized cops and smeared their feces simply because they lacked civics instruction. Suffice it to say that a demagogue’s odds of success are heightened when the people he seeks to exploit have little understanding of how the system works – and likely don’t know what they don’t know.

I wish we could poll all the insurrectionists, because I bet we’d discover that a disproportionate share would flunk a civic literacy exam. Last year, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation reported that only one-third of native-born Americans (and only 19 percent of those under age 45) would be able to pass the basic test that’s given to immigrants who aspire to become citizens.

Some stats for our Hall of Shame: 57 percent of native-born Americans don’t know how many justices serve on the U.S. Supreme Court; 60 percent don’t know what countries the U.,S. fought in World War II; only 13 percent know when the U.S. Constitution was ratified; only 24 percent could name one thing that Ben Franklin was famous for (37 percent said he invented the light bulb).

When I was a public school kid – at the risk of sounding old – we had civics classes all year long (commonly called Social Studies), and I distinctly remember that we couldn’t advance to fifth grade unless we correctly named all nine members of the high court. But today, 31 states reportedly require only a half-year of civics education, and another 10 states require nothing.

In public education during the last half century, civics has taken a back seat to science, technology, engineering, and math. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with the STEM curricula – we need people on the cutting edge of those disciplines.

But two educators, making the pitch for civics, recently warned: “Without a basic understanding of our constitutional system, the foundations of democracy and the separation of powers enshrined in it, how can Americans discern fact from fiction? Without understanding what generations have fought and died for – those core principles of putting country before leader or party, the checks on power our Founders insisted on – how can they be informed and empowered citizens that our system requires to survive?”

Chief Justice John Roberts agrees: “(Our constitutional) principles leave no place for mob violence…We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”

He wrote that 13 months before the Capitol was stormed.

If we continue to ignore these warnings about our education system, too many Americans will remain putty in the paws of demagogues. As the current cult leader exclaimed on the stump five years ago, “I love the poorly educated!”

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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]

Republican Sen. John Cornyn is very upset about Neera Tanden, the well-qualified woman tapped by President Biden to run the Office of Management and Budget. He is shocked, shocked! that tweeting is going on in American politics, and that Tanden has done some of it.

Cornyn, speaking for virtually all Senate Republicans, says that Tanden shouldn’t be confirmed to run OMB because she has frequently tweeted harsh criticism of GOP bigwigs. He says that, “in light of her combative and insulting comments,” the president should “select someone who at the very least has not promoted wild conspiracy theories and openly bashed people.”

Wait a sec…Cornyn reads means tweets and considers them to be serious disqualifiers for high office?! As Johnny Carson liked to say on the old Tonight Show, “This I did not know.”

I was under the distinct impression that Cornyn, and his Republican pals, didn’t pay attention to mean tweets. That they were too busy to read them. That they basically shrugged them off. Like, for instance, whenever their Dear Leader thumbed his phone to make combative and insulting comments, to promote wild conspiracy theories and openly bash people.

Like, for instance, what happened last June, when an elderly Buffalo man, a peaceful protestor, was hospitalized with a head injury after cops shoved him to the ground. Trump responded by lying on Twitter that the old guy was probably an Antifa plant. The press asked Cornyn what he thought about his president’s tweet.

His reaction: “I’m not familiar with it. Not particularly…A lot of this stuff just goes over my head.”

The rest of the Senate Republican ostriches chimed in. Mike Braun said, “No real response to it.” Rick Scott said, “I didn’t see it.” Marco Rubio said, “I didn’t see it. I don’t read Twitter.” Kevin Cramer said, “I know nothing of the episode, so I don’t know.” Pat Roberts said, “I don’t want to hear it…I’d just as soon not.”

But Tom Cotton best summed up their attitude on a different occasion, when Trump tweeted that four female House members of color should go back where they came from (three were born in America, one was a naturalized citizen). When Cotton was asked what he thought of Trump’s tweet, he said: “The president is gonna tweet what he’s gonna tweet.”

So no big deal, right? The bankrupt casino owner who vaulted into politics by relentlessly tweeting the lie that Barack Obama was a fake American – who reigned by sliming anyone who criticized him and retweeting crackpot calls to violence – got a pass every time because his soulless enablers covered their eyes.

Back in our brief dystopia, Kevin Cramer spoke for his fellow wimps when he said “I don’t know whether the president should be careful or not about what he tweets.” But now, all of a sudden, they’re clutching their pearls about Neera Tanden, declaring that she shouldn’t be the OMB director because she wasn’t “careful” about what she tweeted.

She did tweet tough stuff about Republicans during the MAGA era. Tanden said (among other things) that Susan Collins was “pathetic” (which happens to be true),” that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz” (which happens to be true), and that Mitch McConnell was “Voldemort.” It would have been more politic of Tanden to be less outspoken, and it’s puzzling that the Biden team didn’t anticipate that Senate Republicans would try to knock out her nomination by citing her tweets.

Alas, their hypocrisy prevents them from putting things in perspective. Tanden has never tweeted threats to wage nuclear war, or retweeted cartoons showing a journalist getting beaten up. She hasn’t tweeted fascist lies about a “stolen election” or white nationalist agitprop that sows Islamophobia, racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.

Perhaps I’m just imagining it, but the mostly white male Senate Republicans seem extra sensitive about mean tweets thumbed by a woman of color. Indeed, a number of Biden’s women of color nominees seem to be meeting Republican resistance. The party that’s been thrown into the minority, thanks to Trump and their fealty unto him, seems to have a problem saying yes to a new administration that looks like America.

If Tanden’s nomination goes down, it’s likely that another qualified woman of color will get the OMB job. There’s only so much Republicans can do to turn back the clock. And huffing about tweets is transparently weak, after five execrable years of playing deaf and dumb.

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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]