CSotD: The Woron Morons
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Best way to start this off is with a Jimmy Margulies cartoon that admittedly is not his most recent, but which does seem to capture the Trump administration's policy, to the extent that they have an actual policy at all.
It's an oversimplification: Trump is actually rolling back policies that go at least to Richard Nixon, and, with a little more stretching, to FDR.
That is, you shouldn't take assaults upon New Deal principles as attacks on the policies themselves, but rather on the principle that, in a decent, civilized society, people care for each other.
First step: Divide that society
Ann Telnaes is not the only observer to decry Pence's cynical publicity stunt at last weekend's Colts/49ers game, but she's the most amusing.
There was some hope that Pence would be a tail on the Trump kite, keeping the craziness at least somewhat stable, but this bit of monkey business provided "stability" in the form of acting faux-rationally to make the boss's paranoid delusions seem reasonable.
Not helpful, Mikey.
Not alone, either: I'm seeing some fairly reasonable conservative cartoonists who had been hanging back and sheltering in less fraught topics shift to lying about the NFL demonstrations, promoting the deliberate distortion of what they're about.
Of course, it doesn't help to have liberal commentators also getting obvious things wrong, my least favorite being the ignorant concept that Trump's taking of a student deferment amounted to "draft dodging."
Bringing a doctor's letter to your physical may have been dodging — though you had to verify a legitimate medical condition, too — but taking a II-S deferment was absolutely not.
Arlington National Cemetery is full of people who took student deferments before serving, and dying, in Vietnam. The vast majority of officers in that war were college graduates, and calling them "draft dodgers" is not simply insulting but incredibly ignorant.
And you can't call other people "morons" if you blather on in willful ignorance yourself.
You also can't expect to cover the economic damage these charlatans do without doing some homework.
Kevin Necessary focuses on the proxy fight at Proctor & Gamble, but the destructive assault on business by Wall Street profiteers has been going on for nearly half a century, and this takedown on the Toys R Us bankruptcy provides a good explanation, and not just because it includes Mitt Romney and Jared Kushner.
As I've recounted here before, my father explained to me, some 47 years ago, how something called a "leveraged buyout" was going to destroy our town, because the new owners of J&L Steel were more intent on paying off debt than mining iron ore.
Shortly thereafter, he resigned rather than help oversee the execution.
In those days, buying something you couldn't afford by borrowing and then forcing the company to pay it off was worthy of comment. Today, it's how we do business: All buyouts are assumed to be leveraged.
And all publicly traded companies are assumed to be in the business, not of making soap or selling toys or publishing newspapers, but of enriching their stockholders.
If you don't get this, you don't understand what is happening to our economy and our jobs and our futures.
And it's okay not to know it, if you then make an effort to learn about it.
Otherwise, to say it again, you don't get to laugh at the other morons.
Now we come to coal. Tom Toles comments on the announcement that "the war on coal is over," and, as the Baltimore Sun appends, "the war on breathing has begun."
This is another direct assault on Obama legislation, as it is intended to be, but, as Pat Bagley's commentary notes, it's part of an overall assault on the Environmental Protection Agency, which was one of Richard Nixon's most admired legacies.
I remember the first Earth Day, which mattered not so much because people walked along riverbanks and hauled out tires and old bed springs and other assorted junk, but because they held teach-ins and genuinely began to educate people about impacts beyond litter.
Which led to a demand for more comprehensive actions, or, as Abbie Hoffman so eloquently put it, "Pick up the Dixie Cup? Sure, I'll pick up the Dixie Cup. Who the ____ is gonna pick up Con Edison?"
The answer was Richard Nixon.
And my grandfather, who was in a position to know, remarked that, if the steel companies had put the money into cleaning up the industry that they spent fighting environmental regulations, they'd have not only cleaned everything up but saved plenty.
Today, we need more teach-ins to differentiate between cleaning the air and water, as we worked to do in the 1970s, and reversing the more insidious impacts of pollution, as the rules being overturned by Pruitt attempt to do.
I like Phil Hands' cartoon; he nails the disastrous illogic and anti-science nonsense of the current crop of executive morons, but it's important to recognize that the impacts of climate change cannot be reversed the way we cleaned up our rivers.
We're looking to slow them down, and we must do that, but the damage done so far is all but permanent. We're going to have hurricanes, we're going to have wildfires, and the impact of climate change will damage certain crops.
We've screwed things up, and the battle now is to keep Wall Streeters from making things worse.
And, by the way, coal is not a particularly profitable fuel, while "clean coal" is the process that Pruitt is promising to end.
But the most hurtful lie Trump & Company are selling is the lie about bringing back jobs:
Coal promoters are no more honest about the value of those jobs than they were in 1902 when this cartoon ran.
The jobs which aren't really coming back weren't really that good to begin with.
The cartoonist may have been inspired by this sarcastic union classic:
(BTW, putting Seamus in pants meant sending the little
fellow to the mines to draw a paycheck as a "breaker.")
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