CSotD: The Last (Political) Roundup
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As Easter dawns, it brings an end to my Lenten political cartooning fast. It also brings news that Bernie Sanders swept the three contests last night in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, but not without a bit of confirmation of this Adam Zyglis cartoon.
Bernie Sanders swept all three Democratic caucuses Saturday — scoring victories in Hawaii, Alaska and delegate-rich Washington state.
While the underdog’s West Coast wins are not nearly enough to trip up former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's path to the nomination, his wide margin of victory provides his campaign with a burst of momentum heading into a 10-day break before the next primary contest.
Of course they're not nearly enough.
After all, he'd need to win 58% of the remaining delegates, and he barely squeaked past Clinton last night by margins of 72.7% to 27.1% in Washington, and did even worse in Hawaii, where, with the count not quite final, he is holding onto a scant 70.6% to 29.2% advantage. And Alaska barely counts as a victory, with a waffer-theen edge of 81.6% for Bernie compared to 18.4% for the presumptive nominee, President-elect Hillary Clinton.
At least Politico called it a "romp." But even then, they had to emphasize the Futility Factor.
I'm not arguing that the Sanders campaign is not, in fact, futile, but I have a different reason for thinking so than the prattling of pundits. He has an excellent chance of catching up with Clinton, though he'd have a better one if the coverage didn't continue to take on such a discouraging tone.
But, while the powers-that-be have promised that superdelegates will not block the people's choice, that's exactly what they were engineered to do.
After 1972, when grass-roots-choice McGovern edged out party-system-choice Humphrey at the convention – the two candidates having come in with a near-equal delegate count – the Democratic establishment devised the "superdelegate" system to make sure such a popular revolution never succeeded again.
Which is exactly the situation they'll face at this year's Convention.
By the way, I wasn't a McGovern fan. I supported Muskie, whom the White House plumbers knocked out of the race early on.
Hillary, on the other hand, worked for McGovern, so I guess "She who dies by the sword will live by the sword."
Yes, Luke was able to eat 50 eggs. But let's not forget how the movie ended.
What we have here is failure to nominate.
Elsewhere in the World
Jimmy Margulies called the shot, though it didn't take a great deal of insight to know what was about to happen.
And Pat Bagley is right, given the combination of domestic Islamophobia and general sabre-rattling that followed, though the Republicans were hardly the only Americans to walk past piles of black and brown bodies to shed their tears over dead Europeans.
As Steve Sack suggests, those other massacres haven't had nearly the coverage lavished on the Brussels attacks.
It has always been true that a ferry sinking in Asia, killing 300 people, gets less coverage in America than a bus crash in Texas that kills 3. Part of that is a justifiable interest in domestic, over foreign, news.
It's also true that, while buses in America are regulated and highways are generally in good repair, we have a sense that ferries in Third World countries are poorly inspected and often overcrowded. To the extent these things are true, a ferry sinking in the Philippines is not as surprising as a bus careening off a highway here.
But that's the edge of the quicksand, because it's what lets us ignore the bombings in Turkey: Well, they're brown people and they blow each other up all the time over there in Brownpeopleland.
If you don't know Ankara from Kandahar, if you don't know Beirut from Baghdad, you are ignorant, but, then again, what does anyone in this country know about Brussels besides that it's in Europe and they have sprouts and waffles?
I don't think sprouts and waffles are what drives people to change their Facebook profile pictures.
And then …
Just as Margulies wasn't Nostradamus for predicting exploitation of the Brussels attacks, Bruce Plante gets kudos for this cartoon but only in the sense of adding some artistry to something it didn't take much to anticipate.
Given that, first of all, it was something Obama was doing, and, second, that Cuban-Americans are about the only Latinos the GOP can count on for support, the feeding frenzy over opening relations was inevitable.
But I like the idea that the ball is squarely in the catcher's mitt, making a "ball" call hard to justify, and that there is no batter at all, which renders "foul ball" even more nonsensical.
Many conservative cartoonists noted that Cuba has a poor human rights record, but somehow fail to note that Obama has said as much.
I'm never sure how much of this sort of thing is honest ignorance and how much is purposeful dishonesty, but Matt Wuerker points out the obvious hypocrisy of ignoring who else we do business with.
At the same time, Stuart Carlson picks up on a very strong thread in rightwing circles, the idea that, because of a bombing in Belgium, Obama should have raced home.
I have yet to see an explanation of what that would have accomplished, or how we would get anything accomplished if the president of the United States brought everything to a halt any time terrorists struck anywhere in the world.
And given that conservatives have openly dedicated the last eight years to making sure nothing did get accomplished, and less openly opined that Obama isn't even the president of white people in this country, much less the ones in Europe, it's a bit of a mystery.
And, speaking of what is done out of malice and what is done out of ignorance, I can hardly believe that a flood of "he never should have danced the tango" panels were each cartoonist's own spontaneous inspiration.
Ditto, by the way, with Bernie and unicorns. If you're just illustrating someone else's idea, you should give them a little hat-tip in the margin somewhere.
Here's what I mean:
There's no reason the same hideous piece of news cannot inspire a pair of good cartoonists to come up with two very different ways of commenting upon it.
Meanwhile, it is Easter
And Roz Chast has an exhibit of her Ukrainian-style eggs — also textiles and other artwork — at a New York gallery through April 18, but you can see a few more here.
So now Lent has ended, if ivver t'was on a-tall
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