Winners & Losers: The Inquisitor
The power of the pardon, and a question than nearly crashed out the President.
Welcome back to your weekly scorecard of winners and losers. The world is on fire (perhaps you’ve heard), and when we talk about it with our friends, we usually say something like, I can’t believe that happened. Or we say, What a shit show!
The implication is that these EVENTS are awful. The things that are happening? They are bad. But the thing is, the awful events, these terrible things that are happening, they are the result of actions taken by actual, real-life, flesh-and-blood people.
People are behind this mess. To simply say something that’s happening is either good or bad doesn’t even begin to solve the problem. To stop the terrible thing that is happening, we must stop the terrible people who are causing it to happen. Banks don’t rob themselves.
To stop the terrible thing that is happening, we must stop the terrible people who are causing it to happen.
There was an incredible 2018 New York Magazine article by Frank Rich about Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s one-time lawyer and mentor and, some claim, the worst person who ever lived. If you get a chance, you really should read it. But the thing that stuck with me all these years is that Donald Trump was simply allowed to become Donald Trump. No one stepped in. No one stopped him. When Hillary Clinton was asked why she went to his wedding, she said something along the lines of, Bill was giving a speech in the area and we thought it would be a laugh, so we went.
When Trump was asked why she came, he said, I told her to come and she came.
Sit with that a minute. He was a known grifter, even back then. He was a clown. Hillary and everyone who said yes instead of no gave him credibility. Nobody called him out, and here we sit.
That’s the long way of saying: this column is just one very small way of calling them out. The grifters. The fascists. The clowns. The losers.
But don’t despair! For every loser, there’s a winner. These are the people saying no. The people who are doing the work, so that you will know how to do it, too, when it comes time (it’s time).
This week’s loser is a guy who has continued to fail upward and now sits in a position of extreme and terrifying power. When we look back at the rubble of our incredible Democracy, where we once lived free and prosperous lives, we will see him standing atop it with a sledgehammer.
And our winner is a woman who did something so simple and normal, but so audacious in times like these that it can’t go unheralded. She asked a question.
Week 3: Ed Martin (A loser; The Loser, sort of)
Ed Martin has a long and winding journey to this week’s top spot on the Loser board. Just to give you a refresher, he was Trump’s pick for US attorney in Washington, D.C., but was derailed by none other than Republicans like Tom Tillis, who couldn’t stomach Martin’s comments regarding the law enforcement officers who fought off the insurrectionists at the Capitol.
FYI, Martin said two of the officers were lying about being mistreated and suggested they were guilty of perjury.
So he’s an asshole. And since his nomination was scrubbed, he’s also The Loser in this scenario. But leave it to a guy like Ed to fail upward!