Cagle World

It’s morning in America. Air traffic controllers will get paid again to ensure our safety. Food inspectors will get paid again to stop the spread of disease. And the economy will stop hemorrhaging money (the shutdown tab was $11 billion). Hopefully, this detestable episode – assuming it’s not repeated – will be viewed as just another Trumpian debacle.

Here are five quick takeaways, culled from the 35 days of needless pain:

here is a concept in the American system called “checks and balances”

How is it possible that Trump failed to process the message that voters sent last November? By a historic margin of nearly 10 million votes nationwide – the most massive repudiation ever suffered by a president in a midterm election – Americans awarded the House to the Democrats and told them to put a leash on Trump.

It’s clear by now that “The Art if the Deal” was just a book title concocted by his ghostwriter, because this guy can’t negotiate a parking ticket. Nancy Pelosi has proven that Trump is just as susceptible to the laws of political gravity as anyone else. Does he really think the next three weeks will melt Pelosi’s steel?

There is a limit to the public’s patience

For many Americans, especially those who rarely pay attention to politics, Trump has likely been viewed as a distant carnival act. But this time, he was hurting real people. His job approval rating, in the latest poll sponsored by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, is 34 percent. Another new national poll says that his job approval among women has dropped to 27 percent. And in the latest Quinnipiac poll, only 28 percent of independents endorsed shutting the government to finance a border wall.

If those trends continue – and it’s hard to foresee a reversal – many Republicans on the 2020 ballot may have to decide whether it serves their interests to follow him off the cliff. And speaking of Republicans…

There is even a limit to the Senate Republicans’ servility

At any time over the past month, Mitch (“We are all behind the president”) McConnell could’ve pushed legislation to reopen the government and sought to rally a veto-proof majority. Instead, he indulged Trump’s intemperate and pernicious actions. As the old saying goes, if you lie down with a dog, you get up with fleas.

But in the end, even some Republican senators opted for flea medicine. Cory Gardner and Susan Collins (both of whom face tough re-elections in blue states), Lisa Murkowski, Ron Johnson (who reportedly yelled at McConnell, “This is your fault!”), Lamar Alexander (who’s retiring in 2020 anyway), and Mitt Romney all signaled their restiveness.If Trump threatens another shutdown in mid-February, perhaps other Republicans will join these slim ranks in rediscovering Article I of the Constitution, which entrusts Congress to “provide for… the general welfare of the United States.”

There are no limits to this regime’s ignorance about how average people live

A quick memo to Trump’s fervent rally-goers: He is nothing like you, and he has no clue. This is a guy who recently thought that people needed a photo ID to buy food. Then he said, during the worst of the shutdown, that his victims can simply go to the supermarket and work out a deal to buy food on credit.

When was the last time he bought food in a supermarket? (Likely, never.) Can you imagine going into Wegman’s, loading up on $300 worth of family food for the week, and saying, “Hey, I have no money, so can we just work along?”

There are no limits to his delusions

OK, we knew that already. But one particular lie – his riff about immigrant women being blindfolded with duct tape and driven across the wall-less border – is a veritable road map of his mind. There isn’t a shred of evidence that this happens, and nobody in his administration has the faintest idea what he’s talking about.

It all reminds me of the scene in “Citizen Kane” when Orson Welles’ blustering plutocrat was nailed by a political foe. Kane, pig-headed as always, vowed to fight on. But his foe said, “You’re making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would. If it was anybody else, I’d say that what’s going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.”

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Are we capable of connecting two dots? The fake border crisis distracts us from the true national emergency: A suspected Russian asset sits in the White House.

We don’t know whether Donald Trump ginned up the shutdown to draw our attention away from the increasingly hair-raising evidence that he is indeed a clear and present danger to our national security. But suffice it to say that, without the shutdown, the public would be far more focused on what was once deemed unimaginable – that, in the words of former Republican foreign policy aide Max Boot, “a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.”

In the last few days, via two bombshell news stories, we have learned that the sitting president was – and perhaps remains – the target of an FBI counterintelligence investigation, and that the sitting president has repeatedly concealed his communications with Vladimir Putin. As a result, according to the Washington Post, “there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face to face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.”

The significance of these developments should not be underestimated. Frank Figliuzzi, an ex-FBI assistant director and former head of the counterintelligence division, said over the weekend that the FBI will launch such a probe only when it has “specific and articulable facts,” based on highly classified information that could include “intercepted communications.” And what’s most arguably disturbing about Trump’s secret conversations with Putin is that more people in Moscow than in Washington are privy to what Trump told Putin and vice versa.

These stories – as well as the recent revelation that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared 2016 polling data with a Russian pal tied to Russian intelligence – appear to confirm former CIA director Michael Hayden’s warning, on the eve of the election, that Trump was a “useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow. They also appear to confirm former acting CIA director Michael Morell’s August 2016 warning that Trump was “an unwitting agent of the Russian federation.”

I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that if Barack Obama had ever been the target of an FBI counterintelligence probe, and if Obama had concealed the content of his conversations with the leader of a hostile power, and if his campaign manager had shared polling data with someone tied to a hostile power that was invading an election on Obama’s behalf… if all that was publicly known, Republicans on Capitol Hill would’ve drafted articles of impeachment and launched hearings. And they would’ve been right to do so, because such behavior is dangerously un-American.

And yet, even though we are currently in the midst of the most dire scandal in American history, there was barely a peep of protest over the weekend from anyone in the GOP.

Trump has been buoyed thus far by the blind loyalty of his fan base, and by the reluctance, among many Americans, to accept the fact that we’re living through a non-fiction version of a conspiracy novel. But this multifaceted plot will only become more real when Robert Mueller wraps his investigation. What we already know is likely a mere trickle of the flood that awaits us.

So as we focus the brunt of our attention on the government shutdown, let’s not forget that the true national emergency is the guy who precipitated it. Over the weekend, even Fox News host Jeanine Pirro felt compelled to address it. With Trump on the phone, she posed this question: “Are you now, or have you ever, worked for the Russians?”

And this was his reply:

“I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked. I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written. And if you read the article, you’d see that they found absolutely nothing. (Fact check: The Times article reaches no such conclusion.) But the headline of that article, it’s called ‘The failing New York Times’ for a reason, they’ve gotten me wrong for three years. They’ve actually gotten me wrong for many years before that. And I can tell you this, if you ask the folks in Russia, I’ve been tougher on Russia than anybody else, any other – probably any other president, period, but certainly the last three or four presidents, modern day presidents. Nobody’s been as tough as I have from any standpoint including the fact that we’ve done oil like we’ve never done it, we’re setting records in exporting oil and many other things.”

Dip your fork into Trump’s word salad. You’ll find that he never answered the question. But earlier this week, when the press posed the same question, he took another whack at it: “I never worked for Russia. It’s a disgrace that you even asked that question because it’s a whole big fat hoax. It’s just a hoax.”

Do we all feel better now?

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

True news: Donald Trump storms out of a White House meeting after he doesn’t get what he wants (billions of dollars for a fake crisis), and tells off congressional Democratic leaders by tweeting, “bye bye.” His cultists duly applaud.

Alternative news: President Hillary Clinton storms out of a White House meeting after she doesn’t get what she wants… What do we imagine the reaction would be?

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, who might’ve joined a Trump administration, would be surfacing on cable TV to say that Hillary’s temper tantrum confirms his oft-stated belief that women are more emotional than men.

Fox News would be booking Marc Rudov, a misogynist author who joined Bill O’Reilly in 2008 to discuss what Bill called the potential “downside” of electing a female president. To which Rudov replied, “You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings, right?”

Newspapers would be flooded with letters to the editor, contending that Hillary’s female biology was protracting the government shutdown – much like this letter from a Trump cultist, published in the Williamsport, Pennsylvania Sun Gazette shortly before the 2016 election: “They call us sexist just because we are critical of Hillary Clinton and her health. What if that time of month comes and she is sick at the same time?”

Sean Hannity would be citing Hillary’s walkout as proof that “Grandma” lacks the temperament to negotiate with Congress. As he said in 2015, “What, are we going to call the president of the United States ‘Grandma’? It’s nice she can change diapers, feed the baby… it doesn’t exactly qualify someone to have her finger on the nuclear button.”

Rush Limbaugh would be saying that Hillary stormed out of the meeting because her bladder was too weak. As he said in 2015, when Hillary used a debate commercial break to visit the bathroom, “Why not wear a diaper? If you can’t hold it for two hours, get a Depends.”

Conservative talk show hosts would say that Hillary’s walkout was inevitable, because she was just being her shrill bitchy self. As radio jock Chris Plante said during the 2016 campaign, “I find Hillary Clinton’s voice to be shrill. It sounds like a cat being dragged across a blackboard.”

The Grammy award-winning rapper known as T. I. would be saying: “Was I right or what? As I told you all four years ago, ‘I can’t vote for the leader of the free world to be a woman … I just know that women make rash decisions emotionally – they make very permanent, cemented decisions – and then later, it’s kind of like it didn’t happen or they didn’t mean for a lot of it to happen.’ So now we got Hillary getting all emotional, storming out of a meeting – that’s what I was talking about.”

And losing 2016 candidate Donald Trump would be phoning into “Fox and Friends” with his incisive critique: “Was I right, or what? She doesn’t have the right temperament to be president. To manufacture a fake crisis and then storm out of a crisis meeting – disgusting. She doesn’t have the right look to be president. When she quit that meeting – which a negotiator with the best brain would never do – I bet you could see blood coming out her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever!”

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Phew, what a year it was! The one-trick phony in the White House lied an average of 15 times a day, all-Republican rule crashed and burned with a government shutdown, and Brett Kavanaugh really likes beer.

But the biggest story of all was the multifaceted exposure of the Trump crime scene. For that reason, I invite you to begin the new year old by testing your scandal aptitude. Here are my dirty dozen questions.

1. Which of these enterprises is not under federal or state investigation?

a) Trump Organization

b) Trump presidential campaign

c) Trump inaugural committee

d) Trump administration

e) Trump National Golf Club

f) Trump Steaks Ltd.

2. In Helsinki last summer, when Trump was asked whether he held Russia accountable in any way for the 2016 election invasion, he replied:

a) “We have the worst laws.”

b) “I was dealt a lot of bad hands.”

c) “I think that the United States has been foolish.”

d) “I’m not the president of the globe.”

e) “My whole life has been heat.”

3. True or false: Jerome Corsi, the right-wing operative who allegedly served as a conduit between Russia-backed WikiLeaks and the Trump camp, was similarly outed in the 2004 presidential campaign as one of the “Swift Boat” liars who smeared John Kerry’s Vietnam war service.

4. Earlier this year, Trump said: “What’s happening is a disgrace.” To what was he referring?

a) Michael Cohen dropping a dime on him.

b) Michael Flynn dropping a dime on him.

c) Stormy Daniels talking about spanking him with a magazine.

d) The Justice Department trying to hold him accountable.

5. Trump lavishly praised Putin as “extremely strong and powerful” because…

a) Putin denied invading our election on Trump’s behalf.

b) Putin hosted the best beauty contests with the best girls.

c) Putin successfully destroyed press freedom in Russia.

d) Putin jailed political enemies whenever he felt like it.

6. Who said what? Match the former Trump insider – Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Henry McMaster, Gary Cohn – with his reported description of Trump:

a) “idiot”

b) “moron”

c) “fifth or sixth grader”

d) “dumb as s–t”

e) “dope”

7. Michael Cohen recently confessed in federal court that he’d arranged hush money for two Trump extramarital paramours, seeking to hide the trysts from voters – and that he’d done so “at the direction” of Trump. Last April, when the press asked Trump point blank whether he knew about those payments, he replied:

a) “Whatever payments I make go directly to charity, but you people never write about that.”

b) “Why don’t you ask me about Little Rocket Man?”

c) That’s a Democrat question.”

d) “Whatever Michael does is very legal and very cool.”

e) “No.”

8. After our intelligence agencies conclusively nailed Russia for its pro-Trump election invasion, Trump insisted that he had “never said that Russia did not meddle in the election.” That was a baldfaced lie, because he’d previously said…

a) “I don’t believe they interfered.”

b) “It could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

c) “It was the DNC that did the hacking.”

d) “It’s probably more likely that Michael Avenatti and Horseface did the hacking.”

e) “It’s very hard to say who did the hacking.”

f) All of the above

9. Who is Natalia Veselnitskaya?

a) The Russian spy who pleaded guilty earlier this month to charges that she sought to infiltrate our presidential election via her contacts in the GOP and NRA.

b) The Kremlin-connected informant who met secretly at the Trump Tower in June ’16 with Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr.

c) The name of an alleged Russian hooker mentioned in the famed Steele dossier.

d) A prominent Russian troll farm hacker indicted by Mueller for conspiring to defraud the United States.

e) The fictional Russian spy played by Keri Russell on “The Americans.”

10. If a Democrat had dared to campaign for the presidency while simultaneously pursuing a multi-million dollar Moscow business deal with the Russians (as Trump did, according to federal court documents), Republicans on Capitol Hill would have…

a) held even more hearings than they did on Benghazi.

b) called it a treasonous act of collusion.

c) created the hashtag #BetrayedAmerica.

d) shrugged it off and said, “Very legal and very cool.”

e) squirted lighter fluid on their hair and tossed a lit match.

11. Which of these items does not accurately describe Matthew Whitaker, the Trump hack who has been installed as acting attorney general?

a) Served on the board of a sleazy company that was shut down by federal regulators in 2017.

b) Allegedly worked behind the scenes with Roger Stone to post Democratic documents stolen by Russia.

c) Collected over a million dollars as the leader of a mysterious right-wing foundation that had no other employees.

d) Lied on government documents, falsely claiming that he was an Academic All-American while playing college football.

12. True or false: In October, when Trump told the U.N. General Assembly that his regime “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of the country,” he was laughed off the podium.

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ANSWERS: 1. (f – Trump Steaks has long been defunct.) 2. (c – although the other quotes are real) 3. True 4. (d) 5. (a) 6. (a-Kelly, b-Tillerson, c-Mattis, d-Cohn, e-McMaster) 7. (e) 8. (a,b,c,e) 9. (b) 10. Seriously, you’re wondering? 11. (b) 12. False. Amidst the ridicule, he stayed at the podium. Then he said, “Didn’t expect that reaction.” But we certainly did.

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Did my ears deceive me? Did I actually hear Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republicans and one of Trump’s infamous abetters, actually warn us that the president is a clear and present danger to our national security?

In so many words, yes. And it’s about time. Maybe, just maybe, the Republicans in Washington – most notably, the Senate Republicans who might be tasked with voting in a 2019 impeachment trial – are finally rousing themselves from their long shameless slumber. If Toomey’s willingness to speak out is any indication, maybe it means they’re finally awakening to the long-proven fact that Trump is betraying their party principles, imperiling our increasingly fragile democracy, and wreaking global havoc. And heck, maybe they’ll actually do something about it.

Granted, Trump’s racism, serial lies, and endless scandals (both foreign and domestic) should’ve triggered Republican ire long ago, but, hey, in this desperate hour we’ll take what we can get. If Trump’s impulsive military retreat from Syria – which blindsided the military and the anti-terrorism experts – is the seminal event that wakes up the Republicans, fine.

When Toomey was asked earlier this week whether he was disturbed by Trump’s foreign policy wreckage, he replied, “Yes.”

“The president has views that are very, very distinct from the vast majority of Republicans and, probably, Democrats, elected and un-elected. And I think the president does not share, I would say, my view that the Pax Americana of the post-war era has been enormously good for America,” Toomey said. “I don’t think the president shares that view nearly to the extent that the rest of us do. And I think senators need to step up and reassert a bigger role for the Senate in defining our foreign policy… I think senators should speak out. And look, we were elected separately from the president. We don’t report to the president.”

We should hold our applause, of course. Trump would not be where he is if Republicans had stepped up in 2016. Instead, they succumbed to the laughable fantasy that this guy could be controlled by “adults.” But we are where we are, and, at this point, it’s nice to hear rumblings of dissent from a Republican who will still be on the job in 2019. Because, frankly, I’m tired of hearing from Bob Corker.

The lame duck Tennessee senator is heading for the exit, and whenever he talks the truth about Trump, I can’t help but remember that Corker did nothing with his subpoena power as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No oversight, no probes, no signals to Trump (beyond occasional verbal jibes) that he’d pay a price for his wanton behavior.

Remember when the GOP prided itself on being the national security party? Some Republican senators clearly do. Last week, in a letter to Trump, four of them (Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio) said that his decision to cut and run from Syria was “a premature and costly mistake” that “threatens the safety and security of the United States.”

It’s a noteworthy development that such a quartet is essentially calling Trump a threat to American security. David Frum, the conservative commentator and ex-Bush speechwriter, offers this perspective: “So long as Mattis stayed on the job, Republicans in Congress could indulge the hope that responsible people remained in charge of the nation’s security. That hope has now been repudiated by the very person in whom the hope was placed… And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?”

What indeed. A former Trump aide, a self-described “Trump ally,” told Axios last weekend that if Republican senators become sufficiently terrified about Trump’s threats to our national security, many will be less willing to save him in the wake of a House impeachment. The Trump ally said: “Once Republican lawmakers start rebuking the president publicly like this over policy, it makes it easier for them to say, ‘It’s not Mueller or ethics. There are other concerns.’ Then it’s a slippery slope.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What are Senate Republicans prepared to do in the short term? Assuming that Trumpnominates a new Defense secretary to replace Mattis, would they vote to confirm someone who supports Trump’s pro-Putin weakening of America? Would Toomey vote to confirm such a person?

His reply: “The president’s views are so divergent, certainly, from mine that I think I’ll be much – this one – this one’s going to be tough. I’m going to be looking for a defense secretary that shares a more traditional view about America’s role in the world.”

Is it actually possible – at this eleventh hour of peril – that some Republicans are rediscovering their spines? What a gift to America that would be.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

We’re nearing the midpoint of Donald Trump’s first-term tenure – assuming he makes it to the finish line – yet we in the media still haven’t decided whether it’s wise or wasteful to award air time to Kellyanne Conway.

Cosmic questions abound. Would the cable shows violate the spirit of the First Amendment if they refuse to book the empress of alternative facts – or would they be performing a public service? Where’s the red line that separates the policing of lies from the suppression of speech?

Earlier this week she was on CNN, lying again. The topic this time was the hush money that Trump paid his extramarital paramours on the eve of the 2016 election. Conway breezily declared that her boss didn’t even know about the hush money until quite recently. She lied: “In April of 2018, Donald J. Trump, the president, and everybody else, were told about the payments.”

In truth, we learned this past summer – thanks to a released audio recording – that Trump personally discussed at least one of the hush payments with Michael Cohen… in August of 2016.

She disgorged lots of air pollution that night, particularly when she disputed host Chris Cuomo’s observation that Trump is a serial liar. Her response: “You’re saying he’s not telling the truth. That’s a slur. That’s a slur.” This woman has lies within her lies within her lies. She’s like a Russian nesting doll.

That gig on CNN – which lasted a torturous 39 minutes – prompted Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan to argue vociferously for a Kellyanne ban. Sullivan wrote that “it’s time for the mainstream media to enter the No Kellyanne Zone.” Putting Conway on the air is “journalistic malpractice.” At a time when an instinctively autocratic regime is warring against truth, “it’s more important than ever not to give falsehoods a megaphone… When news organizations hand a megaphone to lies – or liars – they do actual harm.”

Sullivan was actually freshening an argument that dates back to the dawn of the Trump occupation.

I still remember a time, shortly before Inauguration Day, when Conway lied on the air that the Trump-Russia scandal was fake news, that it was just a bunch of “Democrats” stirring up trouble “after the election results are in.” In truth, 17 intelligence agencies had warned about Russia’s pro-Trump campaign invasion back on Oct. 7, 2016 – in a report that Trump had ignored. And I still remember a TV appearance, in February 2017, when she rejected the publicly available evidence that disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn had compromised himself, and America, in his backstage dealings with Russia. Conway shrugged, “That’s one characterization.”

I understand the temptation to nix her. But forgive me for introducing a little nuance.

The press, in the spirit of fairness, needs to engage with defenders of the Trump regime. The eternal challenge, however, is to find quality defenders – Trumpists who can do the job without lying a lot. It’s tough to engage with a regime that lies as it breathes. And hosting Conway, or anyone else from the depths of that bottomless barrel, runs the obvious risk of pumping verbal swill into viewers’ heads.

But that’s always the risk of free speech. Lies have permeated our discourse since the earliest days of the republic, when John Adams’ allies warned that if Thomas Jefferson were elected, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.”

Perhaps it’s better to keep her on the air; that way, we expose the regime’s jabberwocky. Conway herself tweeted last year, “His message is my message.” And most Americans at this point are wise to her act anyway; despite her longstanding lies about the Trump-Russia scandal, a landslide 62 percent currently believes that Trump has not been truthful about it.

And lest we forget, she’s being checked and balanced in her own household. The other night, roughly one hour after Conway denied on CNN that Trump is a liar, her husband George surfaced on Twitter: “Given that Trump has repeatedly lied about the Daniels and McDougal (hush money) payments – and given that he lies about virtually everything else – to the point that his own personal lawyer described him as a ‘f***ing liar’ – why should we take his word over that of federal prosecutors?”

Wait, I have a better idea: Keep her on the air, and give her a show with George. The ratings would be boffo.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

In case you’re wondering why you should care about a scandal-ridden House race in North Carolina – the last race on the midterm calendar that has yet to be decided – I’ll simply quote congressional expert Molly Reynolds, who’s based at the Brookings think tank in Washington: “Fundamentally, all Americans have a stake in ensuring that our elections are conducted fairly and that their ability to exercise their right to vote isn’t impeded by fraudulent actors.”

“Fraudulent actors” indeed. According to the evidence (including sworn affidavits) unearthed by the bipartisan state Board of Elections, Republican operatives hired a convicted felon to essentially steal absentee ballots and tilt a House race to the Republican candidate. As a result, the Board of Elections has refused to certify the GOP’s 905-vote victory.

Yes, folks, this is an actual provable case of “election fraud” – as opposed to “voter fraud,” the imaginary epidemic that Republicans routinely conjure out of thin air to justify their attempts to pass photo ID laws and limit early balloting.

Republican Mark Harris, a right-wing pastor, appeared at first to have narrowly beaten Democrat Dan McCready, a former Marine, in the sprawling district that includes the suburbs of Charlotte. McCready’s performance was impressive, considering the fact that the district’s voters supported Donald Trump by 12 points in 2016, and that, in terms of voter registration, the House district is roughly 15 points more Republican than the national average. But now it appears that McCready may not have lost after all.

According to the bipartisan elections board, it’s very weird that Harris, the Republican, racked up 61 percent of the mail-in absentee votes in heavily Democratic, lower-income Bladen County. How was it possible for Harris to get 61 percent when the county’s registered Republicans requested only 19 percent of the absentee ballots? It turns out that a Republican firm, working for the Harris campaign, hired a guy named Leslie McCrae Dowless – a convicted felon previously jailed for fraud – who supervised a very dodgy operation in Bladen County.

What we know so far, from the elections board investigation and the sworn affidavits, is that Dowless directed his workers to collect absentee ballots from voters (collecting someone else’s ballot is a violation of state law). Even worse, Dowless’ workers appear to have filled out many of the ballots (tampering with someone else’s ballot is also a violation of state law). It also appears that a sizeable number of requested absentee ballots were never returned at all, which has prompted investigators to believe that ballots filled in for Democrat McCready may have been tossed in the trash.

That’s why the elections board won’t certify Harris’ squeaker victory. And consider the big picture: A week or two ago, it appeared that the biggest blue wave since 1974 had reduced Republicans to 200 seats in the House, a decisive minority. But thanks to their election fraud in North Carolina, they could wind up with only 199.

The elections board has the power to call for a new House election, which would inevitably draw national attention. That wouldn’t be fun for Harris, whose campaign has been hit with subpoenas.What did he know about Dowless, when did he know it, or was he deaf and dumb about the chicanery conducted on his behalf? A North Carolina operative has privately said, “Harris is damaged goods. How is he going to be able to raise money after all this (for a new election campaign)?”

All of which brings us to Donald Trump.

Remember last year, when he fraudulently declared that more than three million people cast ballots illegally and thus deprived him of victory in the 2016 popular vote? Remember last month, when he fraudulently declared that the counting of ballots in the Arizona Senate race was poisoned by “electoral corruption”? Remember last month, when he fraudulently declared that ballots in the statewide Florida races were “missing or forged… showed up out of nowhere,” and that the whole process had been “massively infected”?

No surprise, those were all lies. But now, in North Carolina, we have real evidence of real election fraud perpetrated by the GOP… and yet, nary a word about it has been typed on Twitter.

Trump’s focus is elsewhere – namely, on himself – but it would be nice if our highest elected official could bring himself to acknowledge a manifest assault on the integrity of the ballot. Because North Carolina is clearly a smocking gun.

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Thirty years ago at The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the early autumn of 1988, I was handed my first assignment as a political writer. The presidential candidates, Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, were saturating the airwaves with campaign ads – to an extent never seen before – and I analyzed the imagery in a dozen articles.

It was obvious, right from the start, that Bush was sloshing in the sewer. His ad campaign – crafted by two of the GOP’s most notorious junkyard dogs, Roger Ailes (future founder of Fox News), and Lee Atwater (the preeminent race-baiter of his era) – broke new ground for TV demagoguery and foreshadowed the lying toxicity that is now routine.

I’ll stipulate that Bush, now dead at 94, was a well-mannered nice guy in life. During his 1989 Inaugural speech, he promised a “kinder, gentler” America, and he indeed tried to set a tone that’s the antithesis of what we’re forced to endure today.

But what he did during that 1988 campaign – and what we in the press allowed him to get away with – can’t be whitewashed. Bush’s TV ads lied so relentlessly that the press began to realize, for the first time, that its traditional rules – balance and objectivity – were inadequate to the task at hand. Thanks to Bush, the practice of fact-checking was born.

Alas, it didn’t happen very often. Most political reporters, shackled to the traditional rules, generally focused on the “negative” tone of the ads and left the impression that both candidates were throwing mud in equal proportions. Parsing the falsity of the ads was still considered “subjective,” and it only at the close of the campaign when most reporters wish they had fast-checked far more often.

Most infamously, one ad contended that Dukakis was a soft-on-crime governor who had furloughed a black inmate, Willie Horton, who in turn had taken advantage of his freedom by raping a white woman. This was buttressed by a second Bush ad, which asserted that he had allowed 268 first-degree murderers to escape from the furlough program. In truth (rarely reported), the furlough program had been created by Dukakis’ Republican predecessor, and only four of the furloughed inmates had murder convictions.

Other Bush ads falsely claimed that Dukakis was soft on national defense: “Michael Dukakis has opposed virtually every defense system we have developed.” In truth (rarely reported), Dukakis supported the Stealth bomber, the Trident II submarine, the SSN21 Seawolf attack submarine, a new ballistic missile called the D5, and a slew of other weapons. I managed to fact-check those Bush ads late in the campaign, but under the rules of that era, I couldn’t report that his ads were full of “lies.” The editors OK’d the phrase “dubious credibility.”

Other Bush ads falsely painted Dukakis as a polluter who had dirtied Boston Harbor. One of the visuals showed a sign reading, “Danger/Radiation Hazard/No Swimming.” In truth (rarely reported), Dukakis in 1986 had created a new agency to clean up the harbor at a cost of $6 billion – and that President Reagan in 1987 had vetoed a Clean Water Act that would’ve helped finance a harbor cleanup. And in truth (rarely reported) the sign in the ad, warning about the danger of radiation, was not posted at Boston Harbor. It appeared decades earlier at a Navy yard where nuclear subs were often repaired.

The press’ sporadic fact-checking efforts could not keep pace with the Bush campaign’s lies. But there was general agreement, after the election, that fact-checking should become more routine. Even the strategists in both parties called on the press to do it. Democratic adviser Robert Squier told an audience of political reporters, “When a candidate says something that is untrue, say so. Don’t stand on the sidelines. Be a referee.” And Republican adviser Dan Sipple said, “If reporters don’t analyze the truth and falsity of the ads, it’s bastardizing the role of the press, which is to inform.”

In subsequent decades, we in the press have often shirked our responsibility – most infamously, during the prelude to junior Bush’s disastrous Iraq war – but senior Bush and his ad-makers essentially taught us that we should be arbiters of truth, not stenographers in the service of lies. The fact-checking industry that flourishes today was birthed in the sewer of 1988.

Thanks, Poppy!

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

There’s an old saying, attributed to nobody in particular, that Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Their current opportunity is to close ranks after a major victory – their biggest haul of House seats since the Watergate midterms of 1974 – and march in 2019 with unified determination to battle the Trumpster fire.

But alas, Democrats being Democrats, some House rebels have decided to celebrate the party’s return to power by trying to dump their House leader – the same leader who, by dint of her strategic savvy and fundraising prowess, deserves major credit for leading them back to power. Yup, their first official act is to launch an intraparty feud. Go figure.

Most Americans probably aren’t focused on the fate of Nancy Pelosi, the ex-House Speaker who hopes to ascend again at the start of 2019. I won’t bore you with the latest inside maneuvers. Suffice it to say that the last thing Democrats need, now that Americans have decisively voted for checks and balances, is a narrative that shows them fighting over the spoils of victory. Fox News is already blasting “Democrats in Disarray,” and even if Americans don’t follow the intramural details, they’ll get the gist.

Democrats have surged into the House majority in the 2018 midterms, flipping nearly 40 seats, drawing 8.5 million more votes nationwide than the GOP, and winning on suburban GOP turf in red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Kansas, in large part because Pelosi helped make it happen.

She successfully urged her House candidates to hammer away at health care by defending the Affordable Care Act (the same act that she shepherded through the House in 2010). She successfully urged her House candidates to forego pie-in-the-sky rhetoric about impeaching Trump (which most swing voters didn’t want to hear). She reportedly raised $130 million to fuel the Democratic message.

And when Republicans recycled the strategy they’ve pursued since 2006 – demonizing Pelosi in TV ads -they failed abysmally. The 58,630,154 Americans who voted blue – the highest total in midterm history, and poised to go higher when the remaining votes are tallied – did so because they opposed Trump and/or endorsed Democratic priorities. Going forward, they will continue to oppose Trump and endorse Democratic priorities… unless the Democrats screw things up.

The current intramural quest to dump Pelosi as the new Speaker has great potential to screw things up. Some were elected after pledging to disrupt the party’s status quo. They have a variety of complaints: Pelosi is either too liberal or too establishment or she’s an old face at a time when the party needs new faces in order to win. One of plotters, Congressman Filemon Vela of Texas warned last year, “I think you’d have to be an idiot to think we could win the House with Pelosi on top,” but he’s still plotting despite being proven wrong.

Having won the House with Pelosi on top, the Democrats’ chief challenge during the run up to 2020 is to expand on the beachhead they’ve seized in the House. That will require a Speaker who knows how to herd cats, who can count votes and instill discipline, and who can ensure that the issues America cares about (climate change, health care, economic help for the average Joe) will not be trumped by the Democrats’ understandable urge to investigate everything.

The rebels’ quest to dump Pelosi would be greatly aided if they had somebody who was as qualified as Pelosi. But they have nobody. One rebel leader, Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio (who has previously tried and failed to dump Pelosi), has publicly insisted: “There’s plenty of really competent females that we can replace her with.” But he hasn’t identified a “really competent female” who can muster the House votes to win a Speaker election, or match Pelosi’s leadership creds.

Here’s a wild unsolicited suggestion: Pelosi should pledge to serve only one term as Speaker, and vow to step down if the Democrats hold the House in 2021. In the meantime, she should loosen the seniority rules and empower the diverse new members who are determined to end the Democratic party’s ossification. That’s a fight worth having – all in the service of their ultimate goal: Confronting Trumpism. As Katie Hill, one of the newly-elected Democrats reportedly said in a private meeting last week, “We don’t have time for internal squabbling – we have to get things done.”

That’s preferable to what humorist Will Rogers used to say: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Charles Dickens wrote this about the French Revolution:”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair … ”

There’s no better way to describe America on the morning after the midterms.

There is wisdom and hope: Democrats took back the House – knocking off Republicans in states like Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, and Texas – and thus positioned themselves to hold Donald Trump accountable and halt the Republican legislative agenda. When the votes are finally tallied, Democrats will have trounced the Trumpist GOP in the House by roughly eight percentage points nationwide – a solid rebuke of the president who lost the popular vote in 2016 and has debased this nation ever since.

But there is also darkness and despair: Republicans, blessed with a Senate map that gave them red-turf home-field advantage, expanded their control of the upper chamber – and gave them new impetus to stack the federal judiciary with conservatives who will reign for decades. Millions of voters clearly embrace his racist demagoguery. In states where Democrats were once competitive, his lies and detestable rhetoric have leached into the Republican mainstream. He is now the face and fist of the GOP.

Beginning in January, when Democrats take control of the House, the Trump-Republican agenda will be officially dead. No more massive tax cuts that skew the goodies to the richest Americans. No more idiotic assaults on Obamacare. No more crackpot schemes to spend on a border wall that Mexico was supposedly going to pay for. Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Mitch McConnell can talk all he wants about slashing Social Security and Medicaid, because now it ain’t happening.

And Democrats will now have the opportunity to craft an alternative agenda – with bills to combat climate change, expand background checks of gun buyers, raise the federal minimum wage, protect Robert Mueller, toughen ethics laws, protect voting rights and curb campaign finance abuses. Granted, the Republican Senate will block whatever they pass. But, at minimum, Democrats can use the House as a policy incubator- with 2020 in mind – to show the voters what they stand for. And who knows, maybe Trump will make occasional attempts to find some common ground, perhaps agreeing to spend what’s needed to finally repair the nation’s roads and bridges.

But I’m skeptical, for two reasons: (1) Trump can’t breathe without an enemy, and the temptation to assail the Democratic House, for the next two years of his permanent campaign, will likely consume him. (2) The Democratic base, which is justifiably furious about Trump’s serial scandals, and about the servile GOP’s failure to hold him accountable, will demand that the Democratic-run committees drill down into his family business deals (which allegedly violate the Constitution’s ban on monetizing public office), his myriad security abuses, his porn star payments that broke the campaign finance laws (according to his ex-lawyer, confessed felon Michael Cohen), and there’s much much more.

Adam Schiff, the articulate Trump critic and ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee, is slated to become the panel’s chairman – and he’ll be armed with subpoena power. “There are serious and credible allegations that the Russians may possess financial leverage over the president, including perhaps the laundering of Russian money through his businesses,” Shiff said last month. “It would be negligent to our national security not to find out.”

That’s precisely what a responsible Congress is supposed to do. Trump has run rampant during the two years of all-Republican rule, and Tuesday night Americans nationwide – most notably, college-educated women – voted for checks and balances. That’s the good news, the best of times.

But it’s likely we haven’t yet seen the worst of times. The odds are overwhelming that Trump, faced with strong congressional pushback, will behave like a cornered rat. His base will duly applaud his defiance, as will his allies on Capitol Hill – not just in the GOP-strengthened Senate, but also in the House, where those who survived the blue wave are mostly denizens of the reddest Trumpist districts. He may do whatever he feels is necessary to save his skin, at the expense of the national interest – hopefully without starting a war.

As Dickens wrote of the French Revolution, “we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” What, pray tell, is our destiny during the next two years of divided government? As our corrupt imperial Leader likes to say, “Stay tuned!”

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Copyright 2018 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].