CSotD: What’s funny and what’s not
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Bug Martini has been on a roll lately, and his analysis of the upcoming Rio Olympics put me on the floor.
It's been years since I've given a damn about the Olympics. FIFA is more openly corrupt than the IOC, but at least when they stage a World Cup, you get to see the games.
If TV covered the World Cup the way they cover the Olympics, we'd see only the games the US was competing in, and then they'd repeatedly cut away from the game itself to show you a 10-minute profile of the Pre-Chosen Darling at home with family, or some blow-dry nitwit out in the street sampling the local cuisine.
When I lived near Canada, I could watch their Olympic coverage, and when my son was stationed in San Diego, he got to watch Mexican coverage. In both cases, they were selecting the more interesting events and pretty much showing them in their entirety.
And if you didn't speak Spanish or happened to be watching one of the French channels, what difference did it make?
The games were right there in front of you, and the commentary didn't matter anyway.
Which is precisely the kind of attitude that goes against everything Olympic broadcasting stands for.
Meanwhile, Reality Check suggests a new way to go to Hell, and it's easy-peasy. I think Dave Whamond's humor is delish!
While, over at Monty, little Sedgewick is learning to apply his core values, which segues our discussion into issues of interpretation.
Jeff Danziger comments on today's Brexit vote in the UK.
American voters will have to wait until November to slice off their noses in order to teach their faces a lesson show their superior character by declining to support the lesser of two evils, but here's a preview, because Britain's referendum will depend largely on the extent to which the circulation-generating lies of their salacious tabloid press have succeeded in totally misleading their readers.
Patrick Stewart's Pythonesque take on the more upscale Brexit argument notwithstanding.
Stewart makes a delightful upper-class twit, but I still think the vote will swing on blue-collar gullibility, not bloody-minded snobbery.
I have marveled lately over the obvious nonsense Snopes finds it necessary to debunk in this country, but it pales in comparison to the scale of embecilic idiocy with which Brussels contends.
Though I will grant them this: When a neo-Nazi murders a member of Parliament apparently over her support of membership in the EU, they don't insist all Brexiteers are Nazis, or demand that David Cameron draw that conclusion.
Thus Joel Pett swims upstream against a steady current of conservative cartoonists who insist that Obama pump up ISIS recruiting by giving them credit for the Orlando shootings.
Speaking perhaps not of "mythology" so much as "that which nobody wants to say," the Atlantic had a chilling story in last month's issue suggesting that the presence or absence of ISIS does not determine the chances of peace in post-Hussein Iraq.
The Republicans don't want to hear about it, because it was their boy who blew apart the fragile peace that obtained with Saddam Hussein in power but under the no-fly-zone restraints of the allies.
And the Democrats don't want to discuss it because, while Obama has done his best to avoid further stirring the pot, their anointed successor to him has opposed him, believing you can unsteal the horse by locking the barn door and re-imposing those aforementioned no-fly zones.
According to the article, however, genocide in Iraq does not require the presence of ISIS.
The only way to win indeed was not to play the game, but it's a little late for that now.
And, finally, on the topic of lies and myths that cost lives:
I'd like Pat Bagley's commentary on the Republican obsession with preventing health care even if I didn't have a personal stake in it, but I do, so double my appreciation.
I haven't made a big deal about this, but some of you have taken note that I'm dealing with cancer, specifically Stage 4 bladder cancer. The quick update is that, in about three weeks, I'll undergo surgery and I'm working on a plan for the blog, but, if that doesn't come about, things may go dark here for a month or so while I recover.
Meanwhile, here's the point with regard to Bagley's cartoon:
Whatever hopes of getting through this that I have can be attributed to the Affordable Care Act, because in the years between the collapse of my last employer and the passage of the ACA, I had no coverage and thus avoided going to doctors except in the most dire situations.
Once I could afford coverage, I established a relationship with my family doctor that people without coverage simply don't have.
I am not the only person who, without the ACA, could not have that relationship.
I say this having watched a part-timer without coverage go from one Medicaid doctor to another, getting wildly conflicting diagnoses for what — after it could have been easily treated — turned out to be Lyme.
I visited my GP often enough that, after a bout of the diverticulitis I've had for a long time, I mentioned to him that I'd notice a little blood in my urine, which is what touched off a long series of tests that revealed my cancer.
Here's the thing: The diverticulitis had cleared up in 24 hours and the blood in the urine never recurred. Had I not had that good coverage and the kind of relationship with a regular provider that prompted me to say, "Oh, and, by the way …" there would have been no diagnosis.
Which takes this unholy alliance between the GOP and the health insurance industry out of the realm of political theory and into the realm of political reality: These sons of bitches are willing to kill people like me.
BTW, Medicare plus a supplement are, so far, covering my treatment.
Some of those bastards would like to change that, too.
Now here's your moment of zen
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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