George W. Bush’s popularity ratings are climbing. This should not be — he was a bad president, and we don’t want another one like him. At least Saturday Night Live is explicit about this worrying trend.

If only they hadn’t made him seem sweet; a bumbling nice guy who just dragged us into pointless wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and that are still spinning on.

The same thing happened to Ronald Reagan. Remember Reagan? Avuncular old Ronnie, barely aware of what was going on, yet still corrupt as fuck and seeding the corruption — “supply side economics”, pandering to the religious right, secret wars, dismissing broad swathes of the American public as expendable and better off dead (neglect of the AIDS crisis is just one of his legacies) — that still poisons the Republican party. He got mocked on SNL, too, but even now he’s revered as a Republican saint.

We seem to be trapped in a process of normalization, where instead of aspiring to be better, we dust off hideous relics from the past and pretend they weren’t so bad. Next election, the GOP will nominate some shabby antiquated Reagan impersonator and try to sell us on flawed old memories of past ‘glories’, sweeping the ignominies of the last buffoon under the rug, and trying to sell us on the claim that the current crop of abominations aren’t the product of official Republican policies — but that their new candidate, who will be some greasy selfish flack, is a return to tried and true standard conservatism. They’ll fail. They’ll be worse than the last one.

Meanwhile, the Democrats will look incredulously on the idiot the Republicans nominate, and think all they need to do is prop up someone marginally better to win.

The first Republican president I remember is Nixon. Every single one since has been wretched. Yet they keep getting elected. We’ll never learn.

There are circumstances where saying “I’m sorry” is appropriate. You bumped into someone on the sidewalk, you say it, it means something because you’re expressing regret at an accident, you didn’t mean to do it, you don’t want to ever do it again. We can believe it.

But there’s another kind of sorry, the one where you’ve done something intentionally, repeatedly, and would have kept doing it if someone hadn’t stopped you — your primary regret was that you were caught. Yet we treat these kinds of cases as if they were similar to the “oops, excuse me, I didn’t mean to step on your toes” sort of case. We still expect an apology — a completely meaningless, pointless apology.

Like the Larry Nassar story. The judge seems to get it.

The former sports doctor who admitted molesting some of the nation’s top gymnasts for years was sentenced Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison as the judge declared: “I just signed your death warrant.”

The sentence capped a remarkable seven-day hearing in which scores of Larry Nassar’s victims were able to confront him face to face in a Michigan courtroom.

Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said Nassar’s “decision to assault was precise, calculated, manipulative, devious, despicable.”

“It is my honor and privilege to sentence you. You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable,” Aquilina said.

Yes. What he did was intentional and malicious and repeated hundreds of times. Why would anyone trust any sign of remorse? His ‘apology’ is garbage.

Nassar turned to the courtroom gallery to make a brief statement, saying that the accounts of more than 150 victims had “shaken me to my core.” He said “no words” can describe how sorry he is for his crimes.

“I will carry your words with me for the rest of my days” he said as many of his accusers wept.

This is the same guy who wanted to be excused from listening to the victims’ statements, because they hurt his feelings. The same guy who submitted a letter objecting to the women’s accusations.

“Those patients that are now speaking out are the same ones that praised and came back over and over,” Nassar wrote. “The media convinced them that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I broke their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

This is a whole different category of actions from the accident or error that warrants an apology; this was a purposeful action to do harm to children and teenagers for his own slimy gratification. You can’t say “I’m sorry” to that. There’s no point to it. You’re dealing with a damaged human with bad motivations and no social constraints. An apology here is an excuse told by a psychopath to escape punishment and be set free to commit his crimes some more.

There are a whole bunch of greedy psychopaths who deserve justice in this affair. Charles Pierce hits it just right.

Is there anything about the modern Olympic Games that isn’t corrupt? The people who run them make up a claque of international bagmen, shaking down whole countries and bankrupting cities as though the entire world was their goodie bag. There are drugs and bribery, and there was Sochi, which was a monument to both of them. And now there’s this incredible crime spree that took place right under the noses of the Olympic officials. Back in the day, East Germany had its steroid-peddling doctors. The U.S.A. had Larry Nassar. Two-tie, all tie.

NBC should refuse to pay a dime toward its rights fees until everyone involved in this catastrophe is unemployed. If they so choose, American gymnasts should be allowed to compete in 2020 under the Olympic flag or, perhaps, under the flags of the nations from which their parents emigrated. Their country failed them as surely as did the sporting organizations that purport to represent it. No punishment is too harsh for the inhabitants of this universe of ghouls and gargoyles to which these brave young women were condemned. Burn it all down. Salt the earth so it never rises again.

It would be comical to ask this hierarchy of criminal exploiters to apologize for the institutional child slavery and abuse ring they assembled. They knew what they were doing. They wanted to take advantage of these girls and young women, they built the structures that condoned their abuses, they profited heavily from them. No apology is permissable. They must have it all torn away from them, they must be stripped of their rotten gains, they must never be allowed anywhere near athletics ever again.

I’m too cynical to believe any of that will happen, though. Nassar is getting what he deserves, everyone else will walk away with their wallets stuffed.

Why is Paul Ryan smiling? Because he got paid.

House Speaker Paul Ryan collected nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch and his wife after helping usher through a massive tax reform law. According to a recent campaign finance report filed Thursday, Koch and his wife Elizabeth each donated $247,7000 to Ryan’s joint fundraising committee… The Republican tax overhaul plan passed in December benefited Koch Industries, as it cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, among other cuts. The legislation then got a boost from the Kochs’ multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to highlight its benefits. And 13 days after it passed, Charles and Elizabeth Koch made the near $500,000 donation to Team Ryan, which raises money for the congressman, the National Republican Congressional Committee and a political action committee run by Ryan. On the same day, Charles and Elizabeth Koch also each donated $237,000 to the NRCC.

There’s a word for this: corruption. Ryan is a bought and paid for stooge for billionaires, and he has received his quid pro quo. It’s gotten so bad they don’t even try to hide it any more.

There is a culture of corruption in too many police departments. Case in point: New York police (and who knows who else) hands out ‘get out of jail free’ cards to their officers. Pulled over for a speeding ticket? Wave one of these and the policeman is likely to just wave you on.

The city’s police-officers union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends.

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association boss Pat Lynch slashed the maximum number of cards that could be issued to current cops from 30 to 20, and to retirees from 20 to 10, sources told The Post.

The cards are often used to wiggle out of minor trouble such as speeding tickets, the theory being that presenting one suggests you know someone in the NYPD.

The rank and file is livid.

“They are treating active members like s–t, and retired members even worse than s–t,” griped an NYPD cop who retired on disability. “All the cops I spoke to were . . . very disappointed they couldn’t hand them out as Christmas gifts.”

“Cracking down” means reducing the number by a third, not getting rid of this unethical practice altogether. And clearly the cops are treating these as a privilege to be taken for granted — they deserve these special exemptions. I guess there’s one law for the friends and family of the police, and a different, harsher law for the rest of us.

Tammy Duckworth addresses the Republicans.

I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft-dodger. And I have a message for Cadet Bone Spurs: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong Un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops and millions of innocent civilians in danger.

It’s a good speech. I do have concerns that it takes praising the military, rather than the lives of children or ordinary working people, to rouse some rudimentary sense of shame in the electorate.

Over at the Miami Herald, there is an article about “Twenty life lessons to be learned from the Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump affair, as illuminated by the Wall Street Journal, Slate.com and, fittingly, InTouch Weekly magazine”. The author is…Carl Hiaasen. I read it, and it suddenly sunk in that this situation is exactly what would happen in a Hiaasen novel: bumbling, incompetent crooks, corruption at all levels of government, and now I expect a resolution that does not involve the wheels of justice grinding towards certainty, but chance and chaos terminating a series of coincidences.

I also think that maybe there is something to that “whole universe is a simulation” nonsense, if we’re willing to admit that it is coded as a tragic comic-opera spiced with absurdity.

Morris had their women’s march today — about 160 people turned out. We had approximately twice that number last year, but it was still a substantial crowd.

I like this take from Allen Frances, a psychiatrist.

Confusing mad and bad is a very dangerous precedent. It’s not at all restricted just to Trump. The National Rifle Association happens to believe that whenever there’s a mass murder, the person must have been crazy. It’s not the guns that did it; it’s the crazy person. They actually work hard to get the mentally ill more armed. There are against laws that restrict arms for the mentally ill, but then the minute there’s a serial murder, any kind of homicide, it’s the crazy person who did it, not the gun. We are criminalizing mental illness. We have 350,000 people with mental illness in jail because they couldn’t get treatment. We’re medicalizing bad behavior.

When the Harvey Weinsteins and Tiger Woods and all the others get caught with their pants down, the first claim is sex addiction: “I’ll go off for a rehab program and I’ll be cured in a month.” We’re medicalizing immorality. We’re medicalizing people who rape and say they have mental disorders. Bad behavior is part of the variety of human nature. Only a small portion of bad behaviors are done by people who are mentally ill. Most bad people are not mentally ill; most mentally ill people aren’t bad. When we confuse the two, it’s a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill. It’s terrible for them to be lumped with Trump because most of them are well-meaning and well-behaved, and Trump is neither.

I mean, the other problem with this is it treats Trump as if he’s a one-off and he’s crazy. It takes away from the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him.

The Republican party is full up with cunningly sane people — they are not insane at all. From their perspective they’re being productive and accomplishing their goals in an effective way. It’s just that their goals happen to be driven by narcissism and greed, and are destructive to everyone around them.

That last line is important. I expect the Russians were tinkering with our elections, but all they did was play into the worst features of the American electorate. If we could wall off all foreign interference, we’d still have the problems of gerrymandering and voter suppression and ignorance and xenophobia working to elect Republicans.

I was never a fan of the Aristocrats joke, but I think I like it even less when it’s real-life.

You can read Stormy Daniels account of her affair with Donald Trump for the salacious details, but I don’t care about those. So, two people had sex? Like that’s news. But here’s the part that made my hair stand on end and a snarl curl my lips:

You could see the television from the little dining room table and he was watching Shark Week and he was watching a special about the U.S.S. something and it sank and it was like the worst shark attack in history. He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks. He was like, I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die. He was like riveted. He was like obsessed. It’s so strange, I know.

Fuck you, Donald Trump. Fuck you until you die. And then I wish your body could be chopped into chum and fed to sharks, except you’re probably toxic and unhealthy for them to eat.