Kay-Lie Maga-Ninny: When it Comes to Lying, You’re a Perfect 10

Kayleigh M., Like other press secretaries in the Cards Against Democracy, you are in the ten slot, and you’re a diamond.

There have be so many in your role. The Donald changes press secretaries like a #ProudBoy changes his wife-beater undershirt (about once a month), so how did you earn one of the first four positions in our deck? The last straw was probably when you accused a reporter of not having curiosity about ballots purported thrown in a river (#whereistheriver) and simultaneously refused to answer his &^%$#! question about that very issue. No doubt the reporter was especially vexed at your disrespectful tone because he was a representative of Trump’s personal propaganda service, also known as Faux “news”.

Being the explainer in chief for a compulsive liar and malignant narcissist has to have been an incredibly difficult job, we just wish you would have done it with greater regard for professional ethics and your own personal integrity.

Ted Yoho: 4 of Clubs

Congressman Yoho, Let’s start with what you deserve some credit for. After all, you did not endorse giving loaded weapons to pre-school kids like Congressman Joe Wilson did when he was famously punked by Sacha Baron Cohen. You also recognized the strategic importance of matters involving Mongolia (seriously). On Mongolia you are an outlier, and we hope that others will pick up this issue in your stead given the way that corner of the planet is rolling. Finally, you did keep to your intention of leaving Congress more or less on schedule.

You were so close! to slipping unnoticed into the background of history. Then you goofed royally by behaving in a spectacularly unstatesmanlike manner (and un-fatherly manner) in front of too many witnesses to allow plausible deniability. And your non-apology from the floor of the House was just a squandered opportunity to show your better self and some sincere contrition. It could have / should have been an historic speech on decorum and mutual respect. We don’t know quite who showed up to give your apology, but if it was your better self then, buddy, you have something to work on in retirement. Do you still have time to truly own your mistakes, denounce your overtly racist president?

Moscow Mitch: You’re the Ace of Spades

Dear Moscow Mitch: Our mail-in ballots have been counted and you have been elected to the position of Ace of Spades in the first edition of Cards Against Democracy. Here below are the deciding factors resulting in your being a Spade, which, lets face it, is the Slytherin House among the suits.

• Your uber-hypocritical efforts to ram through a Trump court appointee in the final weeks before an election after blocking Obama’s appointments owing to an election year;

• Your blocking of witnesses during the impeachment of Donald Trump;

• The fact that you, unlike sycophants hand selected by Trump, were elected and had independent authority, which you refused to exercise; nearly every time you had a choice between your sworn oath to uphold the Constitution or your desire to prop up the Donald you chose selfishly and injudiciously.

• The millions your PAC received from the Russian mob at the same time you were clearing the way for their dumping money into Kentucky assets.

We hope you like the portrait.

The Art of Accountability

Integrity and accountability are in short supply these days. Fortunately, the tools in society’s toolbox for instilling honesty and integrity include familiar means of positively re-enforcing and elevating examples of our better selves (thank you, Alfred Nobel). But we’re members of a species (and an order) with a strong negativity bias, so let us not forget the impact of negative re-enforcement; there we have laws and objective investigative journalistic reporting (thank you, Reveal).

Cards Against Democracy joins a proud tradition of artists who ethically use the power of art and illustration to document, sometimes with seering ridicule, wrong choices and wrong behavior. We would like to think that our caricatures deliver some measure of negative re-enforcement faster than the law (and the IRS) can catch up with evil-doers. We would also posit that the way we present ideas (compared to text alone) is probably given to perception at deeper, more emotional levels of cognition.

Our hope is that Cards Against Democracy  will in some small way instill a culture of accountability by holding up “Hate’s 108” to face themselves in the mirror -and to face the withering gaze of History. Thank you for sharing our work and thereby helping to nudge society’s pendulum from bigotry toward equality; from lies and treachery toward integrity; and from dictatorship toward freedom.