DMZ America Podcast #137: Biden on the Ropes Over His Age, NY Special Election, Impeaching Mayorkas

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (of the Left) and Scott Stantis (of the Right) discuss the week’s current events and politics. First, the political classes try to determine whether Joe Biden’s reelection bid can be salvaged after the special counsel’s devastating assessment that he’s too senile to be charged with a felony over mishandling classified documents and, if not, will Democrats force him out and how exactly will that work?

Next, Democrats take disgraced Congressman George Santos’ former seat in New York by a comfortable margin. What, if anything, does this portend for the GOP’s chances overall this fall?

Finally, Republicans take a second stab at impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the border crisis, and succeed. Everyone gets an impeachment! But does it matter?

Watch the Video Version: here.

Distract-ocracy

28% of Americans, a record high, tell the Pew Research poll that they are disgusted by both major political parties. It’s not hard to imagine why; the system is distracted by impeachment and other inside the Beltway issues while bread and butter problems that affect ordinary people get ignored by the political class.

DMZ America Podcast #117: Should President Biden Be Impeached? What is the Legacy of Rupert Murdoch? and Are the Two Major Political Parties Switching Positions?

Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis discuss and dissect the issues of the day.

First up, the U.S. House of Representatives has begun an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden. The question before the House and the country is; if the facts of the Hunter Biden fiasco be traced back to President Biden, should he be impeached?

Next up, Ted and Scott discuss the legacy of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The good, the bad and the ugly. (Scott contends that Murdoch is as important a figure as William Randolph Hearst.)

Lastly, Scott asks Ted to expand on his recent syndicated column, documenting the fact that the Republicans and Democrats are realigning themselves in surprising and unexpected ways.

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 117 Sec 1: Should President Biden Be Impeached?

DMZ America Podcast Ep 117 Sec 2: What is the Legacy of Rupert Murdoch?

DMZ America Podcast Ep 117 Sec 3: Are the Two Major Political Parties Switching Positions?

 

Spook or Kook?

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says there will be a formal impeachment inquiry to look into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere in order to determine whether Joe’s involvement rose to the level of an impeachable offense.

Civics 2023

Clinton was impeached over lying about oral sex, Trump was impeached twice, Biden will likely be impeached soon and Trump faces 78 felony counts on various rounds of charges. Lawfare as political combat has become normalized to the point that, in the future, elections will matter less than the courts to politicians.

After Impeachment, Clinton Paved the Way for Trump

            The laws of political physics, it seemed, had been reversed.

            The president had been exposed as a pathological liar and a serial cheater. The butt of relentless jokes on television comedy shows and online, his reputation and legacy in tatters, he endured the ultimate opprobrium a federal official can face under the American constitutional system, impeachment, as well as the worst indignity possible for a lawyer, disbarment.

            The president, of course, was Bill Clinton. The year was 1998. But just when it seemed that he was doomed to slink off into the humiliation of single-digit approval ratings and Richard Nixon-esque oblivion, the opposite happened. Despite Monica Lewinsky and “it depends on the meaning of is” and impeachment, Democrats didn’t abandon him. To the contrary, they came to his defense.

Senate Democrats refused to ratify impeachment with a formal conviction. Liberal voters, including many whose support for Clinton had been tepid at best, rallied around a president they thought had been unfairly and excessively targeted by a partisan independent counsel, Ken Starr. They didn’t care that Clinton, an attorney, had lied under oath in a legal proceeding over a credible sexual harassment allegation. Republicans, they believed, had weaponized the legal system and the constitutional process over a minor personal matter in order to kneecap the leader of their party and, by extension, discredit liberalism as a whole.

            As the impeachment process dragged on, Clinton’s team deployed political jujitsu embodied by Hillary’s description of the crisis as having been caused not by her husband’s affair with Lewinsky or his lying about it under oath, but by vicious Republicans and their “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Clinton’s approval ratings soared to 70%, an all-time high. “Clinton’s resilient popularity presents a puzzle,” Pew Research’s Molly Sonner and Clyde Wilcox of Georgetown University wrote in 1999. “Why, in the midst of a tawdry scandal, were his approval ratings so high?”

            Now Democrats are asking themselves similar questions about Donald Trump, whose approval ratings among Republicans have increased following each round of criminal indictments, like a Hydra that grows several heads to replace each one you cut off. Republicans aren’t ditching Trump. They love him more than ever. To the New York Times, “These series of falling dominoes—call it the indictment effect—can be measured in ways that reveal much about the state of the Republican Party.”

            “The rally around the flag is not a new phenomenon in American politics, but Donald Trump has certainly taken it to a new level,” Tony Fabrizio, a GOP pollster who works for Trump’s super PAC, told the Times.

            Perhaps. But it was Bill Clinton, who socialized with Trump for decades, who first demonstrated that a clever politician, no matter how beleaguered or which party he leads, can frame specific charges against his person as a partisan attack against all his supporters. For Democrats in 1999, Clinton may have been a jerk—but he was their jerk, and they would be damned before they let the Republicans, whom they despised, destroy him.

Republicans in 2023 are playing out a similar dynamic.

Unlike Trump, who never admits fault, Clinton issued half-hearted apologies of the “I’m sorry you’re upset” variety. “I take my responsibility for my part in all of this,” he said after conceding that, after having declared that he had not had sex with “that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” in fact, he had had oral sex. “That is all I can do. Now is the time—in fact, it is past time—to move on,” he argued. To Republicans’ disgust, Clinton’s plea resonated with Democrats. MoveOn.org, the liberal policy group and PAC, began as an email petition group that asked Congress to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” It was one of the first political viral sensations on the Internet.

            By any objective standard, the Republicans’ impeachment effort backfired, beginning with the 1998 midterms. “The Republicans were all full of themselves going into the election,” then–Democratic Representative Martin Frost of Texas, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told The Atlantic. “They expected to pick up 20 or 30 seats.” They got clobbered.

Most analysts cite 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore’s reluctance to embrace Clinton and understand that he had been rehabilitated as one of the vice president’s major campaign mistakes; indeed, Clinton might have won a third term had he been allowed to run again. In 2001 Clinton left office with the joint-highest approval rating of any modern president, along with FDR and Ronald Reagan. He became a sought-after speaker and eminence grise within his party. A recent YouGov poll finds that 49% of respondents like him, compared to 32% dislikes.

            There are numerous differences between Clinton’s sex-tinged scandal and Trump’s legal challenges. But the reactions of their respective partisans—circle the wagons, stand by their man, ignore the facts, screw the other party—are strikingly analogous.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

How a Bill Becomes a Law, 2023

Divided government and wild dysfunction has completely decimated the traditional idea of how the United States government is supposed to pass and enact legislation. Look for nothing of value to get through Congress or, for that matter, from the President’s desk.

Democrats’ Wimpy Impeachment Has Made Trump Stronger Than Ever

Image result for trump impeachment

            “Many Democrats fear that Trump may be laying an impeachment trap,” Stephen Collins wrote for CNN last May. “It’s possible that the wider political divides get, the more Trump benefits. The spectacle would help him charge up the political base he needs to turn out in droves in 2020 with claims their 2016 votes were being stolen by political elites.”

            Give that man whatever passes for a cigar in this smokeless age.

            Any number of metaphors serves to illustrate the unintended effect that the hapless failed impeachment of Donald Trump is having on his base of support. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; the Democrats did just that with an attack that didn’t stand a chance of felling its target.

            If you’re thinking about taking a swing at a bully at a bar, be sure you can deliver a roundhouse punch that’s going to lay the bastard out flat on the floor. But if you don’t have what it takes to bring him down with the first blow, sneak out to the parking lot.

            The coronavirus outbreak has me thinking about disease. There’s a medical metaphor that I like best: when fighting off an infection it’s better not to use any medication than to take a weak antibiotic and risk strengthening what ails you.

            No matter the analogy, President Trump emerges from his Senate impeachment trial as a more formidable adversary than he was before. While his overall popularity remains at about 46%, the number of voters who “strongly” support him just hit a three-year high, indicating that he is better off than before impeachment. This should come to the surprise of no one who remembers the humiliation of Bill Clinton. Republican overreach over Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky led to the Democrat leaving office in 2000 with soaring popularity.

            Probably the biggest movement in favor of Trump has been with formerly “anti-Trump Republicans” who now see the truth of the President’s supporters’ claims that Democrats would do and say anything in order to get rid of a sitting Republican president. The ranks of Never Trumpers are shrinking, throwing a wrench into the strategy of centrist candidates like Biden and Buttigieg.

            Polls in key swing states show disproportionately high disapproval for impeachment. Voters in these places tend to prefer antiestablishment candidates. Impeachment allows Trump to frame himself as the rebel getting picked on by the in-crowd, Congressional Democrats.

            Impeachment — more specifically, this very lame, rushed, pro forma impeachment — also dispirits Democratic voters who see, once again, that the Democratic Party only seems to wage wars it knows it can’t win. What’s the point of voting for these clowns?

            One thing is for sure: no matter what perfidy is discovered or comes to light in the future, it’s going to be all but impossible to take a second stab at impeachment. Now Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Impeaching the same President twice is all but inconceivable.

            How did this happen? Democrats made one mistake after another.

            First and foremost was the lousy choice of impeachment counts. Pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens looked and felt too much like political business as usual, not a breach of normality so outrageous as to justify removal from office. Shades of Rob Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois.

            The Ukraine line of inquiry prompted as many questions as it tried to ask. If Trump is corrupt, what about the Bidens? Why were we giving aid to Ukraine in the first place when millions of Americans are homeless or poor? Why should Americans care about Ukraine? The country certainly isn’t, as Democrats alleged, important to American national security.

            A slim majority thought the Ukraine call was wrong. But they didn’t care enough to impeach him over it.

            Americans did care about emoluments and the president using his office to enrich himself. They did care about his wacko temperament and erratic behavior. They did care about separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Inexplicably, the Democrats let the good bad stuff go.

            Democrats screwed up badly with timing. You don’t have to be James Carville to know that it’s foolish to start an impeachment trial at the beginning of a presidential election campaign. You certainly don’t do it when many of your big-name candidates are senators who can’t campaign because they are stuck in Washington. Yet that’s exactly what Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff did.

            Starting the impeachment process so late in Trump’s first term forced Democrats into a rushed pro-forma process. Because Trump Administration officials broadcasted their intention to resist congressional subpoenas and the courts might have taken months to compel them to testify, Democratic prosecutors didn’t bother to subpoena key Republican witnesses or documents. (GOP obstruction became the basis for a dubious second count, “contempt of Congress.”)

            None of this would have been a problem had the “resistance” started working on impeachment in 2017. If they were worried about the politicizing effort of impeachment on the midterm elections, they could have begun impeachment in December 2018, which would have given them enough time to work through the court system last year.

            No serious student of politics thought there was a real chance that this process, rushed over a relatively inconsequential issue, could convince 17 Republican Senators to vote to remove a president for the first time in American history. Nevertheless, Democrats started a fight they knew they couldn’t win.                        

            Now liberals are dispirited. The president goes into his reelection campaign stronger than ever. A second term looks likelier than ever. Heckuva job, Nancy and Adam.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The Peoples Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

css.php