Cagle World

If you’re looking for fresh evidence how we’re sleepwalking toward fascism, look no further than the pre-holiday court ruling which decreed that even though Donald Trump is an insurrectionist who “acted with the specific intent to incite political violence” on Jan. 6, he still belongs on the 2024 ballot – despite the constitutional provision that bars insurrectionists from seeking power.

This Nov. 17 ruling, in Colorado, is a classic example of how our supposedly durable institutions are failing us at one of the most crucial junctures in American history. It’s like saying, “The defendant is guilty of robbing banks, but we have to let him go free. We can’t punish him because the laws against robbery don’t mention banks.”

A group of Colorado voters recently sued to keep Trump off the state’s primary ballot, rightly citing the U.S. Constitution’s 14th amendment, which unequivocally declares that “No person shall… hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States…shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

Similar disqualification efforts are pending in at least 16 other states.

A Colorado district judge, Sarah Wallace, got the case. After meticulously sifting the factual evidence, she concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that “Trump materially aided the attack on the Capitol,” that he “acted with the specific intent to invite violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification” of Joe Biden’s victory.

Bottom line: “Trump engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 through incitement.”

Then she got cold feet.

She inexplicably concluded the aforementioned 14th amendment allows an insurrectionist to run for president. In her words, “there is scant direct evidence regarding whether the Presidency is one of the positions subject to disqualification” – despite the specific language that prohibits any officer of the United States from holding any office if that officer engaged in insurrection.

Don’t words matter anymore?

In what conceivable universe is the office of the president not covered by the words any office, civil or military, under the United States?

My beef is shared by principled conservatives who believe in the literal meaning of words and phrases and sentences. Two such legal scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulson, recently assessed the 14th amendment and concluded that of course the presidency meets the definition of any office. They write, “At the risk of belaboring the obvious: Article II (of the Constitution) refers to the ‘office’ of President innumerable times. It specifies the length of term for which the President ‘holds his Office,’ certain minimum qualifications for eligibility ‘to that Office,’ what happens upon the President’s removal ‘from Office,’ or inability to discharge ‘the Powers and Duties of said Office,’ and the oath he shall take before entering ‘on the Execution of his Office.’ If the Presidency is not an office, nothing is.”

One of our most eminent conservatives, former federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig, was clearly blown away by the ruling that keeps Trump on the ballot: “It is unfathomable as a matter of constitutional interpretation that the Presidency of the United States is not an ‘office under the United States’…It is plain that the entire purpose of (the 14th amendment), confirmed by its literal text, is to disqualify any person who, having taken an oath to support the Constitution, engages in an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution. The former president did exactly that when he attempted to overturn the 2020 election and remain in office in rebellious violation” of the Constitution.

The Colorado voters who sued to keep Trump off the ballot are appealing Judge Wallace’s decision, understandably so. Rather than follow the logic of her own decision, Wallace let Trump off on a technicality thinner than a thread of dental floss, and kicked the can to the higher courts. Maybe she really believed that her splitting of hairs was prudent; maybe she was worried about the death threats that would inevitably flow in if she’d disqualified the insurrectionist.

Granted, it’s great that Trump has finally been branded an insurrectionist in a court of law – a finding that may buttress Jack Smith’s criminal case in the Washington trial slated for March. But we’re engaged in a war to save democracy, and institutional timidity won’t cut it. Fascists feast on loopholes.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

Ladies and gentleman, here is your United States Senate, then and now:

Sen. Daniel Webster on March 7, 1850: “It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States (with) a just sense of its own dignity, and its own high responsibilities, and a body to which the country looks with confidence for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing counsels.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Nov. 14, 2023: “I’m not afraid of biting. I will bite. I’ll bite 100 percent. In a fight, I’m gonna bite. I’ll do anything. I’m not above it. And I don’t care where I’ll bite by the way.”

Scientists have long told us that we humans evolved from apes. Maybe now we’re going backward.

This week, the “honorable” Mr. Mullin – a meathead Oklahoma Republican with a martial-arts body who now inhabits what was once known as The World’s Most Deliberative Body – put on quite a show.

At a Senate hearing Mullin got mad at witness Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, because O’Brien had hurt his feelings in a string of mean tweets. O’Brien had challenged him to a confrontation “Anyplace, Anytime.” Senators since time immemorial had long ignored such silly taunts and conducted themselves in a manner appropriate to their high station in public life, but hey, was a manly man of real manhood supposed to just let a taunt like that go unanswered? Of course not!

“Sir,” he sneered at O’Brien, “this is a time, this is a place. We can do it right here…Stand your butt up then,” whereupon he rose from his seat and started to twist off his wedding ring to maximize his punching power because I guess what real men do in bars down near the tractor pull. Then came this classic admonishment from the committee’s chairman, Bernie Sanders: “Oh stop it! Sit down, you’re a United States senator!”

Mullin is just the latest manifestation of kickass machismo inspired by faux manly man Donald Trump, who set the tone in 2016 when he said this about a protestor at one of his rage rallies: “You’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.”

Mullin subsequently doubled down on a podcast with those aforementioned remarks about fighting-biting, and then he went on right-wing Newsmax: “This is not anything new,” because “Andrew Jackson had nine duels while he was president and finished all nine of ’em.”

That is absolute nonsense. Jackson dueled a lot in his younger days, but never as president. And I question whether it’s wise to justify one’s behavior by invoking a genocidal slaveowner who liked to duel more than 220 years ago.

Anyway, Mullin’s self-advertised lust for fisticuffs – and, on the same day, ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s playground move, elbowing a Republican rival in the kidney – has prompted me to ponder why guys like that seem so compelled to assert their (toxic) masculinity. Forgive me if this sounds like dime-store psychology, but it would appear that deep down they feel threatened by our 21st century culture (gender equity, empowered sexual minorities, and much more), all of which have stoked their resentments and fears of appearing “soft” and “weak.”

Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, talks about stuff like this. So do macho motivational gurus like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. The latter, in particular, wants guys to step up and double down. If this strikes you as kind of sad, rest assured you’re not alone. Sean Illing, a commentator on the Vox website and former philosophy academic, has written: “It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.”

The local news folks in Mullin’s Oklahoma don’t seem impressed, either. They put him on the air and posed this question: “Senator, we tell our kids so often, ‘Do not resort to violence.’ You challenged someone you disagreed with to a fight. How do you justify that?” Well, Mullin sure put those snowflakes in their place: “Fights happen. Boys are boys.”

I’ll side with Bernie Sanders on this one. When Mullin rose up, ready to rumble, Bernie exclaimed, “God knows, the American people have enough contempt for Congress, let’s not make it worse!” But this is what happens when MAGA meatheads confuse muscle with governance.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

Unlike you, dear reader – who’d prefer to boil your eyeballs than watch another Republican “presidential” debate – I dutifully endured Wednesday night’s farce-a-thon, patiently waiting for the GOP’s shrinking junior varsity to address the most timely political issue plaguing the party: Abortion.

Given all the humiliating defeats Republicans suffered in Tuesday’s elections – from Ohio to Kentucky, from Virginia to Pennsylvania – I was interested to hear whether these candidates (minus AWOL Trump) had any new ideas on how to halt the losses that have piled up ever since Trump’s high court theocrats killed Roe v. Wade.

Finally, 99 minutes into the two-hour event, the topic came up. And they have no clue what to do.

To get there I had to slog through so much muck along the way – like when Vivek Ramaswamy attacked Nikki Haley’s daughter and Haley responded by calling him “scum.” Or when Tim Scott, declared “we have sleeper terrorist cells in America, thousands of people have come from Yemen, Iran, Syria and Iraq,” despite zero evidence that it’s true. Or when candidates vowed to strengthen our (supposedly) weak military without ever mentioning that a fellow Republican, dumb jock Senator Tommy Tuberville, is holding up hundreds of military appointees.

Ron DeSantis brought up Tuesday’s election debacles (“We saw last night, I’m sick of Republicans losing”) without acknowledging why Republicans have been losing – namely, because independents and young people and suburban women are furious about the Republican crusade against reproductive rights. He also neglected to mention he’s part of the problem, having signed a Florida law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy (i.e., virtually all abortions). He had nothing to say about what he’d do about abortion if he were president (he won’t be). He also said Republicans need to “do a better job” on abortion referenda, without ever explaining how.

Nikki Haley riffed – as she did in previous debates – about how we as a nation need to find “consensus” on abortion, but that’s rhetorical vapor. There is no possibility of “consensus” because either you believe that women have the right to control their bodies free of government meddling, or you don’t. Meanwhile, she’s sorta kinda opposed to the enactment of federal restrictions on abortion, but only because it’s politically unlikely, given the high bar of 60 filibuster-proof Senate votes and a Democrat in the White House.

Tim Scott declared, “I would certainly as president of the United States have a 15-week national limit. We need a 15-week federal limit,” which (1) ain’t gonna happen, for the reasons Haley cited, and (2) Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin championed that very same proposal in Tuesday’s statewide elections… and got his butt kicked, losing both legislative chambers.

Chris Christie acknowledged that, in the post-Roe era, different states are going to have different abortion laws, but he never said what he’d do about the religious Republican zealots on Capitol Hill who are currently agitating for some kind of national ban. Indeed, nobody on stage uttered the name “Mike Johnson,” the zealot who runs the House and has co-sponsored a bill mandating a national abortion ban at roughly six weeks.

Lastly, ghastly Vivek Ramaswamy jabbered that Ohio’s abortion-rights referendum “effectively codifies abortion all the way up until the moment of birth without parental consent,” which is a blatant lie (big surprise). In reality, parental consent for minors stays on the books in Ohio, and “up until the moment of birth” is standard right-wing demagoguery, because late-term abortions (for emergency medical reasons) are exceedingly rare. Like, less than one percent of the national total. He also had nothing to say about what Republicans should do going forward, which is fine by me, because he isn’t worth another noun or verb.

What about the frontrunner, who skipped last night’s debate and took refuge among his suckers at a rally up the road? He’s not saying much about abortion, either – but he’s on record with this braggadocio: “I got rid of Roe v. Wade…I was so honored to have done it.”

“Thanks a lot, ball and chain!” no other candidate will ever dare say.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

To the shock of nobody, Speaker Mike Johnson has already proven himself to be a contemptible little man, pitching a crackpot deal to fund aid for Israel by swiping the money from the bolstered IRS program that cracks down on rich tax cheaters.

Surely Johnson must know that by letting the rich off the hook, it shifts the tax burden to the middle class, right? Maybe he consulted his Bible and found a comforting passage – something like, “Be not honest about what thee knows, lest it enlighten even those in thrall to thou.”

But what fascinates me most about Speaker Mike is his Biblical devotion to the dinosaurs. It’s kind of funny, until we examine it closely.

Given the MAGA GOP’s steady descent into madness, I suppose it’s no surprise that the cult would award the speaker’s gavel to a guy who thinks the earth is only 6,000 years old and thinks that prehistoric creatures hitched rides on Noah’s Ark. But hey, the Book of Genesis says that on the sixth day of creation all land animals, humans and dinosaurs alike, were created at the same time; as Mike decreed unto us in a 2021 interview, the ark episode “is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

I’ve got say, that’s quite a brain twister.

That’s what they teach at the Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky. Mike is personally and professionally close to Answers in Genesis, the group that founded the park; prior to his House career, Mike did legal work for the park. He and the group sing the same hymn. The group says that what’s written in Genesis, about the dinosaurs and everything else, “is a simple but factual presentation of actual events.”

For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the fact the Earth is scientifically estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, and that dinosaurs predated humans by roughly 65 million years (according to geological findings). As Janet Kellogg Ray, an adjunct biology professor in Texas has written, “The timeline just doesn’t work.” But even if we contrive to ignore the timeline, and instead take Speaker Mike at his word, we’re still stuck with a serious conundrum:

How the heck did Noah fit those weighty dinosaurs on board without breaking the boat?

Take, for instance, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which weighed roughly seven tons. Or consider the far more capacious Titanosaurus, which reputedly tipped the scales at anywhere from 57 to 85 tons. Noah’s boat, according to Genesis, was only 450 feet long and 75 feet wide, so how did he manage the miraculous feat ascribed to him by the Bible – especially on a boat made of wood?

Those creatures surely stressed the vessel – unless, maybe, Noah’s contractor had miraculous foresight and built the boat with steel plating, aluminum, fiberglass and epoxy resin. That would’ve kept it afloat for 40 days, although…well…there would’ve been another problem: In that time the notoriously carnivorous T. Rex would’ve eaten all the little two-by-two animals.

The Bible doesn’t address that particular problem, which is quite an omission for a purported “factual presentation of actual events,” but no matter. Speaker Mike insisted in a 2022 podcast that the Kentucky ark and creationist museum is a can’t-miss: “For all of our friends who have not made a visit, it’s hard to describe. It’s really an awesome experience.”

I don’t begrudge Bible adherents for believing what they want to believe. After all, freedom of worship is constitutionally enshrined. What’s dangerous, however, is a House Speaker who’s tethered to fairy tales. The same guy who believes that dinosaurs bestrode an ark 6,000 years ago despite all factual geological evidence also believes that Trump won the last presidential race despite all factual legal evidence – and, if necessary, he’ll likely say the same if Trump (or any other Republican) loses in 2024.

And that’s not funny at all.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

To the surprise of absolutely nobody with a functioning intellect, House Republicans have finally solved their leadership crisis by replacing an election-subverting Trump butt-kisser (Kevin McCarthy) with an election-subverting Trump butt-kissing Christian nationalist backbencher with no leadership experience who says that his abhorrent policy views in the secular realm are dictated by God in the religious realm.

Just what we need running the House: An evangelical fanatic who touts the blessing of a felonious criminal defendant who was fined $10,000 for contempt of court. A guy who formerly ranked 213th in House seniority is now second in line to the presidency. Every time we think we’ve hit bottom in this benighted nation, another cellar trap door creaks open.

Mike Johnson (who?), the new House Speaker (what?) sayeth this: “My faith informs everything I do,” everything from his desire for a national abortion ban to his lust for national criminalization of “inherently unnatural” gay sex. This farce is surely prompting Constitution author James Madison to spin 360 degrees – given his fervent support, in an 1819 letter, for “the total separation of the Church from the State,” and his 1788 statement defending the nation’s founding document: “There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.”

But what else should we have expected from the MAGA cultists and their fellow travelers? Even the so-called moderates who hail from blue districts fell into line for a theocrat who in a podcast last month put a topsy-turvy spin on our nation’s core principles and dissed Madison to the max: “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around. If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history.”

I reviewed it. Johnson is wrong and dangerous. God has apparently texted unto him that “homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” and therefore gay marriages as sanctioned by the Supreme Court and federal law shall thusly be overturned.

God has apparently texted unto him that the Supreme Court’s precedents separating church and state (rulings that go back 76 years) run afoul of the Bible. God also apparently believes that the fight for freedom in Ukraine isn’t worth financing with American bucks, because Johnson has twice voted no.

Oh, and you’ve heard about the latest mass shooting, this time in Maine? Johnson said “prayer is appropriate in a time like this,” because of course. That’s better than voting for gun safety laws, which Johnson won’t do.

God has also apparently decreed unto him that he shall continue to preach the fascist lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Indeed he was a key saboteur, goading 125 of his House colleagues to sign an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, supporting a baseless lawsuit that sought to throw out the election results in Pennsylvania and other key battleground states. He said that his refusal to certify Joe Biden’s victory was based on “God’s discernment.” And besides, God had apparently informed him that Venezuela elected Biden, because he recited that lunatic lie in a radio interview: “When you have (fraud) on a grand scale, when you have, you know, a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela…it begs to be investigated.”

Bottom line: This guy is basically Jim Jordan in a suit coat – a seditionist with a smile and a splash of biblical fervor.

The big question, of course, is whether God’s humble servant will wreck the House and make us even more of a laughingstock on the world stage at a time when our allies need us most – and render us even more ineffectual at home, with another government shutdown on the horizon. Granted, Johnson is checked and balanced by a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, and his House majority is tiny thanks to the non-existent red wave in the ’22 midterms, but one lunatic chamber can wreak great havoc thanks to the separation of powers.

Rich Lowry, a veteran conservative commentator, says that Johnson’s tenure (assuming it lasts) might be rocky: “How to hold together the various factions that are inevitably part of a majority coalition? This isn’t easy, and gets much harder if members care more about their primetime cable hit than making any responsible contribution, even in opposition to the leadership… The chaos of the last few weeks may make it a little more likely that they are eventually relieved of the burden of being part of a majority next November.”

Perhaps – but only if voters pay sufficient attention. Are they?

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

The judge in Donald Trump’s most important criminal trial has put a muzzle on the mad dog. It’s about time.

Granted, free speech is a sacred right in this country, guaranteed by the First Amendment. But the right to publicly say whatever we want – to even lie with impunity – is not deemed cool by the courts in all circumstances.

In 1991, for instance, our highest court ruled that it’s impermissible to make “extrajudicial statements” that “pose a threat” to “the integrity and fairness of a State’s judicial system.” The justices wrote: “Few interests under the Constitution are more fundamental than the right to a fair trial by impartial jurors,” and therefore, “narrowly tailored” restrictions on free speech become necessary when statements are “substantially likely to have a materially prejudicial effect” on trial proceedings.

That’s basically the way U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled earlier this week, to protect the integrity of the impending coup trial in Washington, where the defendant will face four criminal charges. Trump is already in victim mode, ranting that a federal gag order has never been slapped on a presidential candidate ever before in American history. Of course, such a gag order has never been imposed before because no previous presidential candidate has ever been a criminal defendant, much less one who has personally attacked prosecutors and judges and the judicial system in general.

Trump has long been cruising for this bruising – such as pining for the execution of Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley, a potential witness – and it’s high time he got treated just like any other criminal defendant who tries to trash talk an impending trial.

“In 30 years as a federal prosecutor, I cannot recall ever seeing a defendant on pretrial release in a felony case threaten the life of a witness – or, in Trump’s case, suggest that a witness should be executed – and remain on pretrial release,” said Glenn Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney “The judicial system’s casual treatment of Trump’s unending threats, harassment and intimidation of witnesses is as perplexing as it is alarming.”

Granted, we should concede that Trump – by dint of his decision to run for president as a way to elude jail – is not like any other criminal defendant. Gag orders are indeed issued in high-profile cases, but there are zero court decisions that specifically address the speech of criminal defendants who run for office, much less the presidency. So what Chutkan did may not be the final word, if higher federal courts weigh in.

She was careful, however, to distinguish between what Trump can say and what he cannot. He remains free to lie his ass off, as usual, about President Biden and the Justice Department (as he did pre-gag order, claiming with no basis in fact that “the Biden administration” had ordered Chutkan to gag him); he remains free to trash talk his rivals in the presidential race (if he wants to keep calling Nikki Haley a “birdbrain,” and Chris Christie a fatso, the fine); and he remains free to lie his ass off about stuff he knows nothing about (in Iowa yesterday he said that you can’t buy flypaper anymore “because of cruelty to animals”). That’s all free speech, broadly covered by the First Amendment.

But he’s hereby barred from calling Jack Smith “deranged,” calling prosecutors “a bunch of thugs,” inviting his twisted followers to “go after” court personnel, attacking what Chutkan calls “any reasonably foreseeable witness,” and impugning the professional integrity of the judges (most notably Chutkan). As she said in court yesterday, shortly before imposing the gag order, “His presidential candidacy does not give him the cart blanche to vilify…public servants who are simply doing their job…This is about language that presents a danger to the administration of justice.”

Two inevitable questions: How long will it take for Trump to violate the gag order (hence, the terms of his pretrial release)? And if that were to happen, what’s Chutkan prepared to do?

We’ve yet to see how far Trump will go to play the martyr. In Iowa, he said: “I am willing to go to jail if that’s what it takes for our country to win and become a democracy again.”

That works for me.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

Last week the MAGA brats in the U.S. House ousted their Speaker and basically crashed the chamber because that’s what nihilists do, they seek and destroy. But now come the consequences.

A major Middle East crisis has rocked the world, and, for the gang that can’t govern, play time is suddenly over.

Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, one of the adults in that benighted chamber, said it well when asked on CNN whether he and his colleagues can adequately respond, especially by aiding Israel to the fullest financial extent.

“I look at the world and all the threats that are out there, and what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we’re dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a Speaker of the House?” McCaul said. “I mean, how does Chairman Xi in China look at this when he says democracy doesn’t work? How does the ayatollah look at this, knowing that we cannot function properly? And I think it sends a terrible message… We’re just in too dangerous of a time right now to be playing games with national security.”

No kidding. But this is what happens when a cult gets a whiff of power. It weakens the country it purports to love, and never more glaringly than when an international crisis flares and the western world looks to us for leadership – ideally, unified bipartisan leadership. Instead, we’re hampered not only by the clowns in the dysfunctional House, but by a pair of clowns on the Senate side – most notably dumb jock Tommy Tuberville, whose blockade of military promotions has left us without a Chief of Naval Operations, a job that seems a tad important right now. There’s also Rand Paul, the Covid conspiracy theorist, who has been blocking a string of ambassadorial appointments – which means that, in this urgent moment, we don’t have a U.S. ambassador to Israel. Or to Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon.

Nevertheless, cultists have been quite voluble about the breakout of war, taking refuge in lies. The biggest whopper – which you’ve likely heard because it has landed in the mainstream media via relentless cult repetition – is that President Biden funded Hamas’ terrorist attacks. Because he (supposedly) bribed Iran to recently release some American-dual citizen inmates by giving it $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars; Iran then (supposedly) gave that money to Hamas, which then (supposedly) used it to finance its terrorist attacks.

All nonsense. The $6 billion wasn’t U.S. tax dollars – it was Iranian oil revenue that the U.S. had frozen. The money didn’t go back to the Iranian government, and, indeed it hasn’t even been released yet –it’s being held by third parties in Qatar, and the U.S. will have a role in overseeing how it’ll be spent. And it’s all earmarked for humanitarian needs like food and medicine.

But the lie is still being recycled because it’s so much easier than actually doing stuff.

There once was a time when both parties worked together in the wake of an international crisis, but today that ethos is as archaic as the videocassette.

Some Republican congressmen seem to understand the urgency of the moment. Rep. Brandon Williams of New York wrote on social media “the nation in the world needs America’s Congress to be functioning,” while fellow New York Rep. Michael Lawler warned “uncertainty and chaos in the U.S. breeds vulnerability around the world.”

It’s clear the most destructive cultists could use a good dose of James Madison.

In the 10th Federalist Paper, the architect of the Constitution lamented that zealots who exploit “human passions” have all too often “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.” He envisioned that a Congress would quell such passions. It would be “a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

That would be nice. But, as the late singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith once penned, “If wishes were changes/ We’d all live in roses.”

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

“In yet another spasm of dysfunction, the batty House Republicans have now conspired to trash the very notion of sane governance…What we just witnessed was the most vivid example yet of the destructive power of Republican extremism… a party exhibiting all the cognitive sanity of a drunk driving into a tree.”

I wrote that. Eleven years ago.

Late in 2012, the looniest far-right House Republicans were plaguing their own Speaker, John Boehner, holding up a budget deal and threatening the government with financial ruin. One Republican strategist lamented on Twitter that Boehner’s thankless job was akin to “herding cats on crack.” I wrote that the extremists (back then, we called them tea partiers) were incapable “of acting in the public interest, accepting half a loaf for the greater good of governance.”

You get my drift. Everything old is new again, except worse. With the likes of Matt Gaetz and his hair now running the show, having just purged their own Speaker (a first in U.S. history), those tea party stalwarts of yesteryear look like statesmen.

You know things are uniquely dysfunctional when a dirtbag like Kevin McCarthy works overtime to run the MAGA playbook – kissing Trump’s rear after Jan. 6, voting to overturn the election, launching a fake impeachment probe of Joe Biden, indulging rank and file morons like Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert – and it still wasn’t good enough for the House MAGAts.

Cue the Talking Heads song:

Hold tight, wait till the party’s over
Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

This Republican abyss has been a long time coming – nearly 30 years in the making, back to when Newt Gingrich as a rookie Speaker introduced ideological confrontation as a party brand and forced a government shutdown in 1995. That’s when the nuttiest stuff started happening.

Newt led the House’s impeachment probe of President Clinton, and then, when he was outed as an adulterer and quit Congress, his anointed Speaker successor, Bob Livingston, was outed as the squire of multiple mistresses and chose to quit his seat, whereupon the Speaker job went to Dennis Hastert, who, after he left Congress, turned out to be a serial child molester and spent 15 months in the slammer.

Then came Speakers Boehner and Paul Ryan, both of whom ultimately quit the chamber because they could no longer abide the nutcases in their ranks. In Ryan’s case, the top nut was Trump.

(By the way, McCarthy sucked up to Trump after Jan. 6, but did Trump lift a finger to save him during the purge offensive? As if we need to ask.)

What happens next, post-McCarthy, is anyone’s guess. Who in their right mind (assuming there is such a person in that mindless bunch) would want to wield the Speaker’s gavel? It’s tempting to just kick back with popcorn and watch the spectacle. In the words of commentator Jason Linkins at The New Republic, “What Republicans are enduring can’t be solved by rational people appealing to better natures that don’t exist. The only way out is for the GOP to eat shit, every day, until their bellies are full.”

But full bellies aren’t likely to bring sufficient enlightenment to solve our most immediate woes – like the fact the government’s lights will go out in mid-November, and that financing for Ukraine’s war against Putin fascism dearly needs the federal money that Putin’s MAGA House allies are thwarting.

Gee, I don’t remember this kind of juvenile nihilism going on when Nancy Pelosi ran the House with a similarly thin majority. But if that’s what Republicans want to advertise about themselves – burning down the House, highlighting their inability to get things done – then perhaps that political malpractice can grease a Democratic takeover in 2024.

Here’s a quote from an Ohio Republican congressman, lamenting his party’s dysfunction: “It’s unbelievable, this is horrible, I’m angry. I’m sad for my friend the Speaker, and I’m sorry for the country. We deserve better.”

The guy said that in 2012.

Or, as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue.”

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

These Republican presidential squabble-debates are so worthless, so utterly devoid of value, that they make three-dollar bills look like Bob Menendez’s gold bars.

How is it possible for these B-team blowhards to yammer on for two interminable hours without once mentioning that the cult’s AWOL authoritarian, Donald Trump, recently pined for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

Wednesday night, during the second Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election, wouldn’t it have been a decent gesture to at least thank General Mark Milley for his 43 years of service to his country and the Constitution? Shouldn’t the hapless trio of questioners (two were Fox-related) have asked the candidates whether it’s right to threaten a military leader with death? And whether it’s wise to pledge support to a potential nominee who’s formally accused of 91 felonies, who has been formally judged to be a sex assailant, and who, this very week, has been formally judged to be a serial financial fraudster?

Especially the latter.

Republicans have long revered private enterprise and hard-earned wealth. Yet they’re poised to pledge fealty in 2024 to a fake whose purported empire has been built on a pile of sand. We know this now, officially, because a judge in New York has crunched the incontrovertible numbers and concluded that Trump is the Great and Powerful Oz with the curtain yanked open.

Turns out, Trump for years has blatantly inflated the value of his assets – everything from skyscrapers to golf courses to his Mar-a-Lago estate – padding his bottom line by billions, defrauding banks and insurance companies in the process. Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling in a civil lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general, says Trump lives in “a fantasy world, not the real world,” because he has repeatedly lied in his annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favorable loan terms and lower insurance premiums. Indeed, those financial statements “make abundantly clear that Mr. Trump was fully responsible for the information contained within” them – and the laws governing such statements do not “insulate liars from liability.”

For example, the judge concluded that Trump has inflated the value of his Trump Tower triplex apartment by three times its size, resulting in an overvaluation of between $114 million to $207 million. In Engoron’s words, “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.” And the judge discovered that Trump’s financial statements about Mar-a-Lago were wildly amiss – “an overvaluation of at least 2300 percent, compared to the assessor’s appraisal.”

Somebody on the debate stage should’ve had the gumption to say something like this: “Back in 2016, Donald Trump’s entire ‘brand’ was built on the false notion that he was a wildly successful multi-billionaire who’d apply his business acumen to the job of governance. Now we have learned that it was all a lie. Building a fraudulent brand is a failure of character, and we can no longer tolerate that kind of behavior in our party.”

But, as expected, everyone on stage insulated the liar from liability.

Here’s what the liar said on a debate stage seven years ago, during one of the autumn presidential debates: “I built a massive company, a great company, some of the greatest assets anywhere in the world worth many, many billions of dollars…A phenomenal company. And if we could run our country the way I’ve run my company, we would have a country that you would be so proud of.”

But if memory serves, there was a candidate in 2016 who questioned whether Trump was the financial phenom he claimed to be. She said that Trump’s track record was actually quite hinky (multiple bankruptcies), that he was a serial grifter (he’d “stiffed” many of his small contractors, refusing to pay them), and she warned that “sometimes there’s not a direct transfer of skills from business to government,” that “sometimes what happened in business would be really bad for government.”

Best of all, she said this: “Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is.”

On that debate stage, Hillary Clinton was right again.

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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

The easiest way to write about the House Republicans’ purported impeachment probe of President Biden, a theatrical stunt launched with zero actual evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, is to simply focus on MAGA mascot Kevin McCarthy – the hapless Speaker best described by the late sane conservative pundit Michael Gerson as a “simpering paragon of mediocrity, shallowness, cravenness.”

It’s tempting indeed to just target McCarthy, who said two weeks ago that an impeachment probe of a president should only be launched when a majority of House members deem it necessary; in his words, “if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House, and not through a declaration of one person.” Then last week, having (rightly) suspected that he’d fail to muster a majority, he proceeded to open the Biden inquiry based on the declaration of one person, himself.

So pathetic, but so predictable. I wrote last November that McCarthy would be Speaker in name only, “with one ear attuned to his master in Mar-a-Lago and the other bent to the whims of the whackos.” Michael Gerson predicted that McCarthy’s MAGA clowns would practice “governing by gangsterism.”

It’s actually worse than that. This impeachment farce is a textbook manifestation of the nihilistic strategy best coined by MAGAt Steve Bannon: “Flood the zone with s—.”

That’s how Vladimir Putin rolls in Russia. His apparatchiks pump thick clouds of disinformation so that citizens can no longer discern what’s true. Fake stories obfuscate what’s real. People who are exhausted by all the dueling narratives instinctively question the credibility of their foundational institutions.

The American version goes like this: Trump has been indicted in four jurisdictions on 91 felony charges, with more revelations seemingly surfacing every day (the latest is that he wrote to-do notes for one of his aides on the back of classified documents)…but wait!, now there’s a Joe Biden impeachment probe that’s looking at corrupt stuff he does, too. Because everything is a sham and a con and everybody is corrupt and crooked, therefore Trump is no more corrupt and crooked than anybody else. And if Biden is getting impeached for high crimes, then big deal that Trump has been indicted for crimes.

Or something like that.

The flaw in this flood-the-zone strategy is the MAGA House Republicans have zip evidence that Biden has done anything that warrants an impeachment probe. As Republican congressman Ken Buck admits, the McCarthyites have concocted an “imaginary” narrative that the president has personally profited from son Hunter’s business hustles. But “despite years of investigation,” says Buck, Republicans have nada. Buck points out that “impeachment is a serious matter and should have a foundation of rock-solid facts.” Instead, House Republicans have begin impeachment proceedings in the hopes of finding something.

And that’s the opposite of how such an inquiry is supposed to work. First you get strong incriminating evidence, then you launch proceedings. Conservative columnist and attorney David French noted the other day that in 1998, House Republicans began an impeachment inquiry “only after DNA tests on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress exposed that Bill Clinton had lied under oath about their affair.” In 2019, House Democrats began an inquiry “only after (they) received reports that Donald Trump had attempted to coerce President Zelensky of Ukraine” into finding fake dirt on Biden. In 2021, the House launched a second Trump impeachment probe “only after” his election-fraud lies had climaxed in the domestic terrorism of Jan. 6.

But the strategy this time is to simply “flood the zone with shit” by running to the TV cameras and declaring that Biden is a crook, using the impeachment mechanism to find out whether in fact he actually is, and regardless whether the MAGAts find hard evidence or not, they’re already (further) degrading the credibility of what useful idiot Kevin McCarthy calls “the People’s House.” No wonder John Boehner and Paul Ryan bailed on the Speaker’s job; there’s no way to corral the crazies.

The danger, of course, is that half the people in this country will glean the flooded zone and say, “Biden, Trump, the courts, the Congress – they’re all the same.” The danger, with democracy on the line in the 2024 election, is that the right-wing infauxtainment complex will amplify the zone’s shit and put this nation in even greater peril.

As Jim Morrison of The Doors warned half a century ago, “Whoever controls the media controls the mind.”

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Copyright 2023 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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