CSotD: Poison Pills, True Believers and Front Office Cowards
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Glenn McCoy isn't the only cartoonist to play with the Ringling Brothers/GOP concept, but he's got the most complete take on it, and also gets some cred for speed, though it didn't take a crystal ball to see the results of last night's Indiana primary and he didn't have to wait until the polls closed to start work on this one.
Others have simply applied the parallel to candidates in general, and on the long-term impact on the party, while McCoy goes straight to, shall we say, center ring. Certainly, there's more to it than the White House, but that's the wedge, with down-ticket damage being the rest of what the GOP and conservatives in general must now deal with.
Given the cold-eyed, practical analysis the party laid out in the wake of the Romney debacle four years ago, and the way it was totally ignored by the True Believers, this dismal outlook is a case of having made your bed and now having to sleep in it.
That gets into the more mundane Ringling Bros/GOP parallel of assigning the Grand Old Party to history's dustbin alongside the Whigs, but let's not blame Trump for that: The Poison Pill Politics that encouraged the election of hardliners and future-be-damned extremists wrote the outcome well before he took advantage of the zeitgeist.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Joel Pett offers one of the least frantic and over-reaching views of the True Believers there.
And he's right: You can't condemn either set of refuseniks unless you condemn both.
As I've said many times here, social media tends to magnify things, and it's not clear how many Sanders supporters really feel that this is an all-or-nothing situation, or, for that matter, how much their defections would blunt McCoy's prediction that Trump can't win.
But it seems clear that the only way Trump can win is if people fail to recognize that possibility and its ramifications.
I would hate to think there were many people who, through whatever phantasmagorical thinking it takes, believe there is no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and apparently discount the impact of having two more Scalias placed on the Supreme Court.
Then again, I'm still scratching my head over people who believe you can build a wall across the southern border at all, much less that you can do it without spending tax money.
Utter foolishness is not confined to one side, certainly.
What I like about this cartoon is that Pett avoids passively falling into the trap of accepting the undocumented, unproven "Bernie Bros" concept, and simply depicts a stubborn Sanders fan, which is fair.
As a Sanders supporter who will vote for the Democratic nominee in November, I'm not in the least insulted by Pett's cartoon, nor, I suspect, would the bulk of Bernie fans be.
It is not necessary to slime people to make the point, and the revelation that there is a PAC paying trolls to do so only ratchets up the anti-Clinton mood among Sanders fans.
(BTW, Bernie has publicly, firmly repudiated sexist, extreme supporters. Maybe a parallel statement by Clinton is called for? As Butch Cassidy told the unfortunate gambler, "You don't have to mean it or anything.")
In any case, you can point out the futility and counterproductive nature of stubbornness without insulting people.
Pett does a nice job of the former without stooping to the latter.
And, on a related matter, I tumbled onto the secret of "Seinfeld" before the writers admitted that they hated the show's self-centered characters, so maybe this makes me laugh a little harder.
Good News and Bad
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day and, while we sure have a long way to go towards that goal, the occasion was not without a couple of encouraging highlights from Iran.
The headline event was the release of Atena Farghadani, whose arrest and imprisonment for depicting Iranian legislators as animals (in keeping with a familiar saying in that country) garnered a lot of publicity.
Also freed was Iranian cartoonist Hadi Heidari, who announced the move on his Facebook page with a drawing of a cage whose bars have partially disappeared.
Meanwhile, in a nation poised to elect a leader who promises to make it easier for politicians and other public figures to sue journalists for unflattering depictions, a complaint and cancellation from an advertiser over this piece apparently led to the firing of Rick Friday, cartoonist for the Farm News of Iowa for 21 years.
Let's be clear: This is not on a par with being thrown into an Iranian prison, nor is it the same thing as official government suppression of free speech.
As the statement from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists says, however, it is a troubling sign of the loss of autonomy between the editorial and advertising sides of newspapers.
That may be more insidious than outright censorship, because it preserves an illusion of freedom by hiding the strings that are pulled.
I have witnessed two advertiser boycotts, one by Realtors, the other by car dealers, both very damaging.
Both were also likely unnecessary had a little more judgment been exercised by editors who let sloppy work get into print.
That doesn't mean to spike it. It doesn't even mean to blunt it.
It means to sit down with the reporter (in this case, cartoonist) and see if you can clarify things without deadening the intent and impact. If you're going to get nailed, get nailed for what you said, not what somebody thought you said or for the clumsy way you said it.
Not sure how or if I'd have talked to Rick Friday about this one, but I'm sure that, if he ended up on the curb, I'd have been beside him.
In neither of those cases I witnessed did the publisher or the editor sell out their staff or duck their own responsibility for what appeared in their paper.
I'd rather work for a villain than a coward.
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