A game: Go around the circle: Name a high-profile figure (one without an inmate number) who’s less qualified to be attorney general than noted child connoisseur Matt Gaetz.
George Santos? Kanye West? Beavis? Butthead?
I know; it’s tough. The only person I can think of who is less suited to enforce our laws is he who soon will swear again on a Bible that he will do that.
The Grand Old Prevaricator still supports Gaetz – even after a report by a GOP-controlled committee found the former Florida congressman spent more than $90,000 on drugs and sex – with partners including at least one teen. Meanwhile, the report alleges, he blew away House limits on gifts, such as $1,000 for a passport for a woman with whom Gaetz was sleeping.
It was too much for many House Republicans but not for the man who’s still grousing that Gaetz won’t be his concierge as the nation’s top lawman.
The president-elect knows full well Gaetz is trailed by a circus train of legal trouble. But Gaetz has the only qualification that matters: absolute loyalty to do the bidding of the MAGA king
That would be in keeping with what New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie calls “the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government.”
An unfair swipe? Who else, facing a straight flush of criminal indictments, could or would run to pals and appointees in the Supreme Court to plead “immunity!”?
Speaking of robed brethren, two of three GOP-appointed justices on a Georgia appeals court say an ill-defined relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and one of her prosecutors is sufficient to kick her off the racketeering case against the former president and the gaggle of hench people who conspired to overturn the 2020 election.
Hear, hear, say Republicans. To the dunking pond with her.
Here’s false equivalence for you: On one side, an ill-defined relationship by two people, one being a D.A. One the other, an attempt by a defeated president to dynamite an election through fraud and intimidation.
Of course, the first matter is a greater concern to Republicans.
It’s all blood sport, folks. This is about giving a powerful dude the power he desires.
It’s also about looking the other way regarding what he did dating back to when voters removed him from office four years ago. What an indictment – of half the nation.
Acknowledging that many voters were beyond clueless about the criminal cases built against the guy they chose in the 2024 election, a whole bunch of other voters simply chose to look the other way or knew the power of deflection. “Look away. Look here!”
Voters in (still-blue) Colorado saw deflection at its finest when red caps gathered in the city of Aurora to genuflect before their chosen leader.
There he dropped by to stir fears and myth about the Denver suburb’s “takeover” by a Venezuelan gang that wouldn’t even fill an Amazon delivery van.
Behold – giant black-and-white blow-ups of brown-skinned teen-age villains.
Meanwhile the MAGA throng rained curses on local news media assembled for reporting that the candidate’s claims were way, way, almost comically overblown.
The truth didn’t matter one bit.
Back to that Georgia court ruling against Fani Willis, who is appealing it to the Georgia Supreme Court: the two justices who won the argument cited the “odor of mendacity” regarding Willis’s ill-defined relationship with her employee.
The court majority cited “an appearance of impropriety that could only be cured” by Willis’ disqualification.
“Impropriety!” “The appearance of it!” “Disqualify!” say hypocrites who put an X on their ballots beside the name of a convicted felon.
Maybe we could “lock her up”?
Ah, there’s no concern at all on the right about the ill-defined but clearly improper relationships justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have established with gift-giving Republican power brokers who want them to rule on their side. Add Chief Justice John Roberts’ choice not to do a damn thing about that “appearance of impropriety.”
None of this is a problem if you’re trained to look the other way.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.