It’s hard for me to describe how much I once loathed Richard Nixon. As a college student during the Watergate scandal, I celebrated when he quit on the cusp of impeachment. I firmly believed, along with millions of others, that Nixon was the lowes..
On Saturday, when Trump feted the death of Robert Mueller with sociopathic glee (“Good, I’m glad he’s dead”), I asked myself the same question that I’ve pondered for years: Didn’t his mother ever wash his mouth out with soap? The mere ac..
Let’s rewind the clock a few weeks and revisit Donald Trump's State of the Union speech, because one particular passage strikes me in hindsight as delectably delicious: “Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my ..
“The rank deceptions, the slippery wordplay, the willful ignorance…” That’s a succinct description of the Trump regime’s bumbling bid to win our support for war in Iran. But hang on a sec. I wrote those words a long time ago, to describe G..
An open letter to MAGA cultists everywhere: I know the next two sentences will strike you as elitist, but so be it. Anyone who’s shocked by your Sun God’s illegal military thrust into Iran is clearly stupider than a box of rocks. Anyone who actu..
It’s nice the U.S. Supreme Court decided the other day to take Donald Trump to the woodshed and school him on the Constitution. Two cheers to the high court for finally (albeit belatedly) doing something reining in Trump a tad. John Roberts’ maj..
I found it perversely entertaining watching shrieking she-devil Pam Bondi as she sought to defend her dirtbag tenure at the Department of Pedophile Protection. She made the Wicked Witch of the West look like Mother Teresa. Any second I expected her ..
My friends would tell you I have a freakish memory. On the up side, I know the date of the Mets-Pirates double-header I saw at Shea Stadium (July 3, 1966), and I know the date I was hiking the rim of a canyon in Yellowstone (July 30, 1977). But on t..
Let’s talk about the F-word. Not the one uttered 269 times in "Reservoir Dogs" and 569 times in "The Wolf of Wall Street." I’m talking about the one that should be on everyone’s lips - because it so concisely describes our current hellhole and..
Given what’s going on in Minnesota - another day, another ICE execution - it’s understandable few have noticed the latest authoritarian move to suppress vital information and deny us the right to judge it for ourselves. I want to revisit a chain..
If we still lived in a rational democracy, the masked thugs in Trump’s ill-trained paramilitary force would be in full retreat. By wide margins in multiple polls (CNN, Quinnipiac, Economist/YouGov, Data for Progress), Americans say the fatal shoot..
As I tally the growing list of artists who have scraped Donald Trump off their shoes by exiting the MAGA Kennedy Center - the latest refugees are Nashville banjoist Bela Fleck and the entire Washington National Opera - I can’t help but recall so m..
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review website as one of the nation's top political scribes, and by ABC News' online political tip sheet as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation, " Dick Polman is the national political columnist at Philadlephia NPR affiliate WHYY, and has covered or chronicled every presidential campaign since 1988.
A Philadelphia resident, Dick roamed the country for most of his 22 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has been blogging daily since 2006. He's currently on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "Writer in Residence." He has been a frequent guest on C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and various NPR shows - most notably Philadelphia's "Radio Times" on WHYY-FM.