Opinion

I have written many pieces over the last few years about Donald Trump's criminal culpability and I've always believed that if he's never held accountable for any of it — either his shady business dealings or the numerous crimes against the Constitution that he committed while he was president — the nation may never recover. Trump's corruption is so blatant that if he gets away with all of it, it's impossible to see how there can be any more pretense of equal justice under the law.

Having said that, I've also written more than once that I'm just not optimistic.

Just when you think conservatives have reached their nadir, the absolute bottom of the stupidity barrel, they start slinging poop like a bunch of over-stimulated chimps.

During the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican senators picked up all kinds of rhetorical turds to hurl. They only soiled themselves, wallowing in victimhood and Q-Anon innuendo about her supposed affinity for pedophiles.

Until last month, Mark Pomerantz had been a special assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s Office. He and others worked on a criminal case involving Donald Trump in connection with the Trump Organization. But a new DA, Alvin Bragg, indefinitely suspended the Trump case. Afterward, Pomerantz and another prosecutor quit.

On Wednesday, the Times published a copy of Pomerantz’s resignation letter. In it, Pomerantz explained why he believed Bragg to be wrong, though he did not question Bragg’s authority or sincerity. The evidence, Pomerantz said, would show Trump is “guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law” before he’d become president.

At the beginning of the confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina promised that Republicans wouldn't turn the whole thing into "a circus."

Spoiler alert: He was lying.

It’s somewhere between comical and tragic watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Lindsey Graham throws his trademark hissy fit and storms out, John Cornyn tries to sound erudite and fails, Marsha Blackburn outs herself as a fanatic, Ted Cruz thinks Black judges should vet children’s books about racism, and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton just end up making fools of themselves.

A recent press release from the South Carolina Department of Corrections tells us that “the department is now able to carry out an execution by firing squad.”

It is worth reading the execution protocol:

During Tuesday's Senate hearing to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., provided yet another reminder that his true talent as a troll lies in how shameless he is.

Certainly aware that by getting "racist babies" in headlines, people would assume he's talking about himself, Cruz forged ahead, indifferent to the inevitable jokes, just focused on getting that sweet, sweet attention. The immediately infamous "racist babies" exchange, of course, had nothing to do with the actual job Jackson is nominated for. Instead, Cruz used his allotted questioning time to freak out over "critical race theory," which is the trendy scare term in right-wing circles to demonize basic concepts like "racism is bad" and "racism is real." So Cruz ginned up the outraged over a book called "Antiracist Baby."

Alaskans will be asked to vote almost entirely by mail in coming months to fill the Congressional seat vacated by the death of Rep. Don Young.

That of course defies a basic tenet of Trumpism. Former President Donald Trump’s false claims that mail-in ballots are corrupt have underscored his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And as Politico reported last week, the effort to create public doubts in the process was put in motion earlier in 2020 than previously reported.

The former president keeps telling on himself. During an appearance Sunday on Jeanine Pirro’s radio show on WABC, Donald Trump expressed, yet again, his sympathy for Russia’s reigning kleptocrat.

"He's got a big ego," Trump said of Vladimir Putin. “I think what's going on now is hard. I understand he's gotten rid of a lot of his generals."

From the incalculable humanitarian disaster that has seen millions of Ukrainians flee their home country, to the appalling carnage on the streets of Mariupol that was devastatingly humanized with the death of a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, the costs of Putin’s unjustified war of conquest will be with us for decades to come.

But the truth also has become collateral damage these last weeks, as Putin has twisted language beyond meaning to justify his atrocities. Russian officials and conspiracy theorists have, for instance, promoted the baseless claim that the attack on the maternity hospital in Mariupol was “staged,” USA Today reported.

The conspiracy theory that Russia invaded Ukraine to stop Anthony Fauci from engineering the next Covid-19 has turned the US far-right against Ukraine and for Russia.

The evolution of this bizarre fantasy can teach us a lot about how the US rightwing incubates and adapts Russian propaganda for domestic consumption.

The common wisdom in the Beltway media was that the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden's first nominee to the Supreme Court, would be a relatively low drama affair. Prior to her naming, there had been a flurry of fake outrage from the Fox News pundits over Biden's promise to nominate the first Black woman to the court. In the face of Jackson's impeccable resume, however, even the most racist Republicans struggle to deny her qualifications.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson's efforts to "raise questions" about Jackson's credentials fell mostly flat. More importantly, Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate. Republicans can't block her nomination, since Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell destroyed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 when he wanted to seat Donald Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch. Her nomination won't really change the balance of the court, as Jackson is replacing liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, so the assumption is that Republicans won't bother to put up much of a fight. But, of course, that assumption overlooks one critical factor in the hearing process: Senate Republicans with presidential aspirations see these hearings as a way to pander to the racist, misogynist, conspiracy theory-loving GOP base.

When I hear Republicans blaming President Biden for high gas prices, I’m reminded of what scribe Mary McCarthy once said of her rival Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

I wouldn’t go quite that far in condemning Republicans for their current propaganda. But aside from those two little words, they’ve been weaving a panoply of lies that would make Putin envious.