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I got a chuckle out of Dave Whamond's Reality Check today, as I often do. But a chuckle isn't a laff, and isn't generally enough to get a comic featured here.
And it wasn't today, until I switched over to political cartoons and saw what Nick Anderson had posted:
Where is Paul Ryan? Have they disappeared him down the hidey-hole?
I mean, we did see him washing clean dishes at a soup kitchen, a staged show of faux-charity that could have endangered the place's 501c3 status.
(This display of concern was mirrored by a Romney appearance Tuesday where he asked people to bring canned goods for the victims of Sandy, then bought canned goods for them to bring so he could accept them for the cameras. The Red Cross has for some time asked people to donate money rather than burdening them with donations of things like canned goods, but I digress …)
Apparently, Ryan has been sent out on third-tier appearances in places like East Overshoe. This may indicate the second time in a row that the GOP has nominated a Veep candidate only to wish it hadn't, the difference being that (A) Ryan is pretty smart and (B) he's not a fame vampire and, unlike his predecessor, apparently knows how to shut up when asked to.
But, man, it's that whole "Ayn Rand" thing.
The point of adding Ryan to the ticket was that he stands for the principles that won Romney the nomination, and they really are his principles. That second part seems to be the problem, now that the ticket is moving away from principle in favor of electability.
Great to see you, Paul! Thanks for coming! Why don't you go stand over there, next to Waldo … and ix-nay on the Ountainhead-Fay.
Hmm. Must be Delayed Reaction Day.
Today's Bliss also provided a chuckle and then went off in my hands:
"It's all good" is probably as handy a way as any to say "What the hell," but, then, "What the hell," or, as it's spelled around here, "wotthehell," at least says what it means, and you can generally tell by context whether that is "It doesn't really matter" or "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" or "There's not much we can do about it anyway."
There are, you understand, subtle gradations in the use of wotthehell, most of them based on the feckless, irrepressible source of that variant spelling.
By contrast, "It's all good" has a certain element of pointless jaw-flapping that slides it over with "like" and "y'know" into the territory of vapid conversational space-savers, a sort of verbal shrug.
Which made me think of the equally vacuous expression, "At the end of the day," which has nothing to recommend it except that it managed to creep into the mouths of British politicians, pundits and corporate spokesfolks, so that, while a silly thing to say, it is at least said with a nice, plummy accent that makes Americans invest it with a great deal more gravitas than it deserves.
And that, in turn, reminded me that the most prominent use of the term came in the stage production of "Les Miserables," a play I saw more than once and really enjoyed until I suddenly realized that the reason you leave the theater humming the tunes is that there are really only about three or four of them, recycled for two and a half hours.
Still, I realized, if you go back to that play, you'll find Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand peeking out from behind the scenery, offering a look at our past and a potential glimpse of our future:
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