CSotD: Actions and Reactions
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Canada has never been a non-aligned country; they were in both World Wars before the US shook off its isolationism. But Carney’s outreach to China reminds me of something a former official of Cambodia told me, which is that even supposedly non-aligned nations need to make friends, and Cambodia had thrown in with the Americans for a very good reason: We were the furthest away.
Obviously, that changed when Sihanouk allied himself with China and, thus, the Khmer Rouge, but that horrific disaster emphasizes the original rule: Align with whoever seems likeliest to do you the least harm.
Canada’s trade outreach reminds me that they made a wheat deal with China back in 1961 when Beijing was a pariah among the nations of the world. It was an opening before the opening, a decade before the US began relations with ping pong diplomacy.
I suspect that the Donroe Doctrine is going to drive away a lot of nations, in this hemisphere and the other, and China is the obvious winner in that process, since Russia’s teetering economy makes aligning with them rather pointless. Nice work, doofus.
And speaking of dumb moves that are likely to prove costly, Trump’s prideful war on Jerome Powell is not just an internal dust-up.
His constant suing and investigating of political opponents is the response of a temperamental six-year-old, but most of them only undermine our own ability to self-govern. However, tampering with the economy in an economically linked and interdependent world poses global dangers and, again, drives away not just allies but trade partners that might be otherwise nonaligned.
As noted yesterday, the details can be hard for the average person to parse, but it doesn’t take a lot of knowledge to understand that an independent fed is the stabilizing tail on our kite, and Trump’s fury over Powell refusing to lower rates upon his command is a temper-tantrum that threatens to crash not just our own economy but the rest of the world’s as well.
You might need some background to fully grasp the level of risk, but if China’s yuan replaces the dollar as the touchstone currency in world trade, we’ll know who to blame, and it won’t be Xi Jinping.
The saving grace may be the affordability problem Dear Leader dismisses as a “hoax,” his universal term for anything that goes against his opinions. He should remember that the price of eggs was a major factor in his 2024 electoral victory, because while eggs and gasoline are currently affordable, Brown understates the pressure American families are feeling.
Dear Leader does hear them, but he continues to degrade the value of a business degree from Wharton with plans that range from the pointless to the unlikely to the impossible.
Beyond clearly not understanding how tariffs work or how to evaluate a trade imbalance, his notion of 50-year mortgages is laughably impractical, and if he does manage to cap credit card interest at 10 percent, nobody is going to loan money to borrowers who actually need it.
Meanwhile, blaming motel maids and lettuce pickers for the rising cost of housing is so transparently farcical that it would bring laughter if he didn’t have his goons out smashing people into the pavement for the crime of having dark complexions.
As Americans respond to that brutality, Governor Walz is urging Minnesotans to keep their protests peaceful so as to avoid stirring up more violent responses from the federal enforcers, but Benson considers that bad advice for reasons her cartoon doesn’t explain.
But in her cartoon a day earlier, she had stated that criticizing the federal government is unpatriotic and that people who seek reforms are inferior to people who accept the dictates that come down from Washington. She’s hardly the only rightwing commentator to condemn those who question the government without explaining why citizenship should require unwavering obedience.
Which certainly wasn’t their position during the Biden administration, or, as they phrased it, during the regime of the Biden Crime Family. And to forestall the what-abouts, I do wonder how liberals who refused to vote for Biden because of Gaza feel about Venezuela, Greenland and Iran.
Speaking of Venezuela, there is much being made of Machado’s giving her Nobel medal to Dear Leader. Leahy suggests it makes her subservient to him, which is a reasonable analysis though I’m not convinced she didn’t realize what she was doing. I suspect she’d have given him a kidney if it might help persuade him to consider the electoral victory her party scored in the last elections there.
And, of course, handing him the medal didn’t give him the Peace Prize and only, as German points out, makes him look vain and foolish and provides echoes of the meaningless participation trophies that conservatives have railed against. There’s even a popular movement brewing to have people send him the meritless rec-league trophies their kids have been given.
But Telnaes is among commentators who mock her for having made a gesture that degraded the award and gained her, and her country, nothing.
At least she still has both her kidneys. And, BTW, she still has the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump just has a medal that means no more than that silly FIFA trophy or the Stolen Valor Purple Heart he was given by someone who’d genuinely earned it.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’m seeing a lot of cartoons accusing Trump of threatening Greenland in order to distract from the Epstein files. It seems an oversimplification, but mostly in the sense that everything he’s doing is an attempt to distract from the Epstein files.
I’ve also seen several cartoons linking the Greenland crisis with the fact that Legos are a Danish invention, which seems more of an insult to Denmark than a comment on Trump’s imperialism. The Danes are not standing alone in this crisis; both NATO and the EU continue to exist despite Dear Leader’s contempt.
The question before us is whether the brutality in Minnesota is the straw that will break this camel’s back?
Or are we the same people who turned their heads and pretended they just couldn’t see?
Well? Are we?
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