Ruffles and Churlishness

Did you listen to Donald Joffrey Trump venting his spleen all over the National Prayer Breakfast and White House East Room?

If so, you have my condolences. I had been listening to NPR yesterday and had to turn it off lest I fall violently ill.

I'll let Chris Cillizza pick through the sea of bile:

Trump spent the bulk of his stream-of-consciousness "speech" savaging his various enemies, which included, well, almost everyone not in the room.
"It was evil, it was corrupt," Trump said of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which concluded that the Russians sought to actively interfere to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.
"We caught 'em in the act ... dirty cops, bad people," Trump said of, well, something.
"We went through Russia, Russia, Russia ... and it was all bullshit," Trump said.
"Little did we know we were running against some bad and evil people," Trump said.
"A man who got James Comey to choke -- and he was just talking in his regular voice," Trump said of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley. (Trump went on to call Comey, the former FBI director, a "sleazebag.")
"There were some that used religion as a crutch. ... A failed presidential candidate so things can happen when you fail so badly running for president," Trump said of Sen. Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump on abuse of power.
"A guy who can't stand the fact that he ran one of the worst campaign in the history of the country," Trump added on Romney.
"Two low-lifes," Trump said of former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
"Adam Schiff is a vicious horrible person," Trump said of the California Democrat.
"Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person. ... I doubt she prays at all," Trump said of the Speaker of the House.
"They want to destroy our country," Trump said of Democrats.
"Top scum," Trump said of the FBI leadership.

Hoarseness indicating that he must have been screaming late into the night and bellowing at the White House staff all morning, Trump singled out Senator Mitt Romney, the sole Republican to vote his conscience, for special abuse.

"I don't like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong," Trump said Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast, a typically apolitical event.
That statement was a not-so-veiled reference to Romney, who said on the Senate floor ahead of his vote: "As a Senate juror, I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice."
Trump doubled down on his castigation of Romney during an East Room speech in which he declared victory.
"And then you had some that used religion as a crutch. They never used it before," Trump said. "But you know, it's a failed presidential candidate, so things can happen when you fail so badly running for president."
Trump later added, when addressing Utah's other Republican senator, Mike Lee, at the victory ceremony, "Say hello to the people of Utah. And tell them I'm sorry about Mitt Romney."

The two events were disgusting, petulant, churlish performances that whoever the Democratic nominee is this fall should probably force us to listen to again and again.

But as Cillizza points out, what is even worse is that all the Republicans in the East Room clapped and cheered all of this.

Well, that's not terribly surprising. We've seen the antics of Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes and Rand Paul and the rest throughout this impeachment process. We've seen Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham swear an oath to be impartial in the Senate trial after they publicly announced that they would not.

But what astonishes me is that, by all accounts that I've read, not one person walked out of that heretofore non-political National Prayer Breakfast.

We all know that Trump wouldn't know Two Corinthians from Article Two of the Constitution. But nobody was offended by his self-righteous tantrum at the podium?

None of the clergymen and women who told reporters how disappointed they were? Not even the featured speaker whose talk was all about going beyond mere civility and tolerance to love one's enemies and reject contempt?

Nobody?

Q Toon: Acquittal Now...

It's been one hell of a week in U.S. politics, and it ain't even over.

Iowa Democrats couldn't figure out their state-of-the-art caucus results app on Monday. Tuesday on live TV, Trump gave a Presidential Medal of Freedom to a guy about whom the nicest thing you can say about him is that he's got stage IV cancer; and Nancy Pelosi tore up the speech.

The U.S. Senate, as expected, voted Wednesday to exonerate Donald Berzelius Trump of both impeachment charges against him. The votes were largely along party lines; Mitt Romney was the lone Republican to vote with the Democrats on Article One — so I have to apologize for 25% of this meme the other day.

Heck, I almost regret all those cartoons I drew critical of him in 2012. We could have done a lot worse than Romney for president. And eventually did.

With all that has transpired this week, you might be forgiven if you've forgotten all those Superbowl commercials companies spent $435 million upon (roughly the Gross National Product of Tonga) in the hopes of dazzling football and Latin music fans on Sunday night. Tide shelled out a good portion of that total on a series of ads starring It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day wandering hither and yon with a stain setting on his shirt.

I had hoped to come up with something based on any of the LGBTQ-friendly commercials. There were several of them, I assume, because San Francisco's team was in the game. Amazon featured Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi heading out for the evening. One Million Crabby Moms complained about a pair of drag queens in a garish commercial for Sabra hummus. Lil Nas X had cooler dance moves than CGI Sam Elliot for Doritos.

For my money, the ads were neither inspired nor inspiring. I almost had a different cartoon drawn until I discovered that at least two nationally distributed editorial cartoonists had already published the exact same idea. I ended up drawing McConnell's Crew and the Oobleck into the wee hours of the morning.

And I have waited all week without seeing Tide's #LaundryLater commercial on TV ever since. They must have blown their whole annual ad budget on Sunday.

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This Week's Sneak Peek

I downloaded Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Works Volume 1 last week — an album I've been meaning to get for a long time. I've only had a smattering of cuts from the two-disc set recorded onto different cassette tapes, which I never listen to any more because I haven't had a car with a cassette player for some seventeen years.

I had completely forgotten the Greg Lake song "Hallowed Be Thy Name," which contains this cute little couplet worth sharing today:

"There isn't a man in a mansion
That an accurate pen won't puncture."

Impeach Bill, Volume 2

Last week, Starrcrossedback Saturday thrilled and delighted dozens of you with a handful of my cartoons leading up to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

September, 1998

Just to summarize, certain Republicans eager to overturn the popular election results had been looking for grounds to impeach Clinton from the very day he was sworn into office. When his denial under oath of having had "sexual relations" with a White House intern was proven false by what the mainstream media delicately called "DNA evidence" on her dress, Republicans had their fumus boni iuris.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

In the U.S., there's always an election coming up; the Republican Congress launched their impeachment proceedings on October 8, with just one month left until midterms.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 10, 1998

Midterms in the sixth year of any presidency tend to go very poorly for the incumbent president's party, but 1998 turned out to be an exception to the rule. Republicans didn't lose enough seats to forfeit their majority in either chamber of Congress, but Democrats gained five seats in the House and held even in both the Senate and gubernatorial races.

in UW-M Post, December 15, 1998

Thus Democrats could complain loudly about Republicans' push to impeach, but they couldn't stop it, even though some Republicans hoped to find some lesser punishment the Congress might agree upon. Members of both parties offered bills to censure Clinton instead, a statement of formal reprimand carrying no enforcement or penalty, but none ever came to the floor for a vote.

Q Syndicate, December, 1998

Instead, the House voted to impeach Clinton on December 19, 1998, so Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist went right out and got some celebratory gold stripes stitched onto the sleeves of his judicial robe. (Yeah, Jerry Springer wasn't available.)  The Senate trial lasted from January 7 to February 12, forcing Clinton to deliver his State of the Union address while the impeachment trial was underway. But in the end, not only did Republicans fall short of the two-thirds majority vote to remove Clinton from office, they came up six votes short of even a simple majority.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

The problem Republicans faced was that the electorate knew that Bill Clinton was a philandering, slick-tongued good ol' boy when we elected him, and we didn't care.

Much the same as the Democrats' problem now: a well-distributed minority of the electorate knew that Donald Trump was a corrupt, self-absorbed, lying bully when they elected him. And they're never going to care.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

In presenting Trump's case this week, attorney Jay Sekulow played remarks Chuck Schumer, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler and other congressional Democrats made last time around, making much the same arguments that Republicans are making this time around. That impeachment Clinton would negate the previous election. That going ahead would mean that every president with a Congressional majority of the other party will be impeached. That the process is political.

Well, yes. The process is political. The founding fathers envisioned it that way; that's why impeachment isn't decided by the courts. (The founding fathers envisioned that senators would be representatives of their respective state legislatures, not of their political party; but we're stuck with what the system has become, and I don't think repealing the 17th Amendment would be much of a help anyway.)

And maybe. The Republicans' defense team has already started their preemptive impeachment trial of possible President-to-Be Joe Biden, prosecuted by the former Florida Attorney General bought off by President Trump, Pam Bondi. If they retake a majority in the House in 2020 or 2022, they're all set to go. Just like they were in 2016 if the election had gone the other way.

But no. Removing a president does not negate the previous election. Bob Dole would not have been inaugurated president in 1999, and Hillary Clinton won't get to move back into the White House this year no matter what. Al Gore might even have been a stronger candidate in 2000 running as the incumbent. By the Trump lawyers' logic, the only U.S. President in history that any Congress was constitutionally allowed to impeach and remove from office was the unelected Gerald Ford — which, ironically, would have elevated a Democrat to the presidency.

Q Toon: Bernie's Brand New Bro

Comedian/podcaster Joe Rogan — depending on your age, you may remember him from News Radio, Fear Factor, The Joe Rogan Experience, or The Fast and the Furious, in which case you're confusing him with Vin Diesel — endorsed Bernie Sanders for president last week.

“I think I'll probably vote for Bernie... He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.” 

The Sanders campaign put out a video touting Rogan's rather tepid endorsement, only to receive heated demands from fellow progressives from MoveOn.org to the Human Rights Campaign to apologize.

“It's one thing for Joe Rogan to endorse a candidate. It's another for @BernieSanders’ campaign to produce a video bolstering the endorsement of someone known for promoting transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and misogyny,” MoveOn tweeted Saturday.
“We urge Sen. Sanders and his campaign to apologize and stop elevating this endorsement. We stand in solidarity with folks hurt by this.”

“Bernie Sanders has run a campaign unabashedly supportive of the rights of LGBTQ people. Rogan, however, has attacked transgender people, gay men, women, people of color and countless marginalized groups at every opportunity,” said HRC President Alphonso David. “Given Rogan’s comments, it is disappointing that the Sanders campaign has accepted and promoted the endorsement.” 

Rogan's fans enjoy his coarse, politically incorrect, blunt, no-holds-barred brand of humor, I presume. I've seen Rogan described as libertarian, which makes his endorsement of a card-carrying socialist all the more bizarre. But he has had a wide variety of guests on his podcast, including Sanders, during which episode I assume Rogan refrained from deliberately misgendering transgender persons, or talking about "walking into Africa" in New York City, or sharing his insights on the history of Islam.

To his credit, Sanders has a history of reaching out to people in settings that most Democrats view as enemy territory, to wit his address to the students of Liberty University in 2015. For that matter, how ballsy is it for a guy to mount a credible run for the Democratic presidential nomination — twice — when he isn't even a Democrat?

In the end, candidates know that there is a risk to associating with others who may support them but may have said or done things with which one might be uncomfortable, whether it's Joe Rogan, or Jane Fonda, or Alec Baldwin, or Bill Maher. It's a question of how publicly and closely one wants to be associated with them. There's no hard and fast rule to this; one can't expect to accept support only from sainted souls pure as the driven snow.

Somewhere between one and thirty-six, however, there is a number of photographs one can be in with Lev Parnas after which one cannot credibly claim not to know him.

Trump of Doom

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jay Sekulow.