CSotD: Casting the first stoned
Skip to comments
Bliss hits at a propitious moment, which may or may not be coincidental, since he is now also a Granite Stater and New Hampshire is contemplating legalization.
It's interesting that the chief, official argument for legalizing marijuana is that the surrounding states, plus Quebec, are legalizing or decriminalizing or something.
On the one hand, that's the same argument that's used for opening casinos, though we're hardly "surrounded" on the gambling issue. But if we don't let people piss away the grocery money and the rent here, they'll just go do it in Massachusetts.
On the other hand, I don't recall "All the other guys are doing it" being an acceptable excuse for smoking dope a generation or two ago.
What I do recall is that, when I was a freshman in college in 1967, only the Californians, and few enough of them, showed up on campus already turned on, and I remember sophomore year several of us being horrified by stories of people's little brothers and sisters doing drugs in high school.
We weren't opposed to drugs, but we were strongly of the opinion that you should get your shit together before you started taking it apart.
And I was thinking about this yesterday while listening to NHPR talk about the issue, so Harry hit me at just the right moment: I'm not against legalization, but, then again, I'm not exactly for it, either.
Or maybe I am. Another thing I remember from college was that it was easier to score weed than to buy alcohol, because you only had to ask around and somebody would have some. Scoring alcohol involved standing outside the store like a dweeb, though I'll admit I haven't seen McLovin around the pot shops when I've been to Denver.
Still, I've got some doubts about where this all is heading.
More intergenerational humor today at Rudy Park, where Sadie explains a benefit of single-payer health care in terms even the most dense anti-taxers should be able to understand.
The joke being that, if they hadn't smoked so much pot, they'd have figured this out long since.
The "pay more, get more" aspect of health care and taxation has always been hard to explain to those with no particular sense of social contract, and, unfortunately, it's hard to precisely quantify the difference between paying higher taxes that cover everything versus paying lower taxes and, separately, purchasing insurance and then making co-pays and paying for all the things insurance won't cover.
There are a lot of factors known only to CPAs and Chartered Accountants that make it hard to compare how much cash winds up in the pocket of a person making a certain amount in the US versus a person making that same amount in Canada or Sweden or anywhere else in the civilized world, starting with the fact that — apart from the amount taken from your paycheck for your contribution — the cost of employer-provided insurance is a factor in pay rates.
Perhaps we could start by pointing out that people in nearly every other nation in the world have more vacation and holiday time, but, for the dedicated sociopath, that merely proves that them furriners are all slackers.
Back to the inescapable
I love Barry Blitt's New Yorker cover and feel guilty about not having a more substantive comment to make, but that's about it.
Good commentary sometimes does that.
And I've often said that one of the challenges Don Asmussen saddles himself with in Bad Reporter is coming up with three good topical gags. He's done it this time, hitting on three separate but related issues.
I particularly like the clumsy Photoshop job in the final panel, because a more realistic effort would undercut the phoniness of the excuse.
And "clumsy" is the word throughout this series of events. It's not simply that Trump is not "details oriented" but that he has no freaking idea that there are details in anything.
Like finding out where the Carl Vinson is and what it's doing before announcing that it's headed for Korea.
Like finding out where James Comey is and what he's doing before sending him a chickenshit message rather than firing him face-to-face like a man with normal-sized hands would.
Like coming up with a rationale that would not still be utterly stupid and unbelieveable even if there weren't a trove of video clips and tweets proving that you didn't feel that way until Tuesday.
Like keeping your own press out and letting the Russian press in and then getting the vapors because they released photos of the meeting. On accounta you had no idea that you couldn't trust the Russians, did you?
This whole week has been a series of events that, if scripted by the Democratic Party, would seem like a cynical ploy to make the President of the United States look like a flaming incompetent.
Maybe Trump should open up better relations with Zimbabwe: They have leadership next to which he seems bright and capable.
Joel Pett rightly observes that Trump will brazen it out for as long as we'll let him, and he retains a decreasing but loyal following, chiefly among those who take their information entirely from the far end of the political spectrum.
Rush Limbaugh suggests the Comey firing was a cunning plan to — his term — "troll" Democrats by using Clinton as an excuse. Much, I suppose, as a schoolboy trolls his dog by claiming it ate his homework.
And I saw a cartoonist who shall remain nameless – but who has a record of illustrating rightwing talking points without doing any research — asserting that the notion of Russian interference in the elections is utterly mythical.
I didn't know anybody at any point on the spectrum believed that.
But here's where you see how badly the week has gone for Dear Leader: While many conservative cartoonists are pointedly ignoring the Comey affair, Glenn McCoy is not.
And McCoy is hardly known for liberal views.
So you have no frame of reference here, Donny.
You're like a child who wanders into the middle
of a movie ...
Comments 2
Comments are closed.