CSotD: Stop Making No Sense
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What if they gave a big convention, the first party convention held before a midterm, and nobody came?
That seems to be the prospect facing Dear Leader. He planned an extravaganza starring himself (naturally) and JD, that would be televised to rally the GOP, and it was going to be fabulous, except it looks like yet another chance for the president to show the nation what empty chairs look like.
In case they’d forgotten what empty bleachers looked like at that parade, or what an empty field looked like at the Great American State Fair.
Politico contacted 70 GOP candidates to ask them about it, and 45 of them explained that they had this other thing, or that they were going to be washing their hair that night, while several others hemmed and hawed and didn’t commit.
You begin to suspect that Trump, narcissist though he be, must feel flop sweat, the ghastly disaster of being on stage with nothing going right, an audience that doesn’t care and the knowledge that you have to finish the set no matter how badly it’s going.
He’s down to 33% approval in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, his lowest ever, though it’s possible Natalie hasn’t let him know that. His staff apparently maintains his bubble and assures him that everything is fine. For instance, there are reports that when Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll told him how many senior officers Pete Hegseth had fired, it was news to the president. He may not be lying when he says how well the war is going; he may just be repeating what he’s been told.
But there’s a point where the truth begins to leak in, and if he stands up in front of an empty auditorium on national television, it’s going to be hard to hide the reality from him.
However, he can’t be too firmly divorced from reality or he’d welcome the coming elections. Instead, he’s working overtime to keep people from voting, so he must sense the blue wave coming and know that low turnout is his only hope.
Juxtaposition of the Day
There has apparently been a fatwa announced that requires all editorial cartoonists to draw a mailbox in which ballots are shredded, because I’ve seen variations of the image every day for the past week or so.
Horsey offers a variation which I like because instead of showing one ballot being destroyed, he has entire boxloads going to the landfill, and it seems the program the USPS has been designing on Trump’s orders will reject multiple ballots — I’ve heard “thousands” — when it detects one that doesn’t fit the required format.
Your ballot won’t be returned to you, nor will you get a notice that your vote wasn’t counted.
We can hope that there are so many cartoons on the topic that people will recognize the gamble of voting by mail in this election, but, of course, that assumes newspaper editors will choose one or more of those warnings for their editorial page.
Which brings us to Margulies’ cartoon. There’s something seemingly counterproductive in the old woman recalling that she was denied the vote after walking so far, but it’s a reminder of how hard people like her worked to get the right to vote, and a thought that maybe allowing people to vote by mail is making it too easy to do and thus too easy to blow off.
But here’s the message for this election: You need to make the effort. There are people who want to stop your vote from being counted. Showing up at the polls is your best guarantee of being heard.
A federal court has temporarily halted the administration’s attempt to take over the states’ job of maintaining voter lists, and it seems unlikely that the plan can go into action before the midterms, given that some states are already mailing ballots to voters.
But we’ve seen a lot of unlikely things happen in the past two years, including a senator who has been not-dead since June 14, such a long time that we’ve already seen multiple Weekend at Bernie’s cartoons and now Deering is bringing in not-dead Elvis to testify that Mitch is just fine, folks, nothing to see here. McConnell has missed 38 votes since he didn’t die, and 56 total since January 1.
The fact that nobody seems to be looking into this should be disturbing, but the only pushback I’ve seen is people pointing out that McConnell, who voted against family leave, is continuing to draw a paycheck without having shown up for work for nearly three months.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
There is something highly toxic about male cartoonists suggesting that men could have babies and the hormonal dysfunctions which sometimes follow. Are these the same cartoonists who insist that cis men can absolutely never become trans women?
That’s hardly their point. Rather, they are advocating that we punish the mentally ill as if they were perfectly healthy.
The basic rule of claiming innocence by insanity, the McNaghten Rules, requires that the defendant not know what they were doing or not know that it was wrong. Lindsey Clancy seems a textbook example of why this legal distinction exists.
She doesn’t deny killing her children, slashing herself and diving out a window in a suicide attempt that left her a paraplegic. As for whether anybody had a clue she needed help,
Clancy saw her psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 different medications, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, tried to enroll in an inpatient program, and confided to her husband that she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Defense experts testified that doctors had missed an underlying bipolar disorder and prescribed pills that made Clancy’s symptoms worse, starting a downward spiral …
The above cartoons were published before her trial ended in a hung jury, though that’s irrelevant to their insistence that insanity doesn’t matter.
Jones’ version was posted after yesterday’s non-decision, and his essay explains things well.
Perhaps he talks to women from time to time.
Or perhaps, rather than being a punishable crime or a male/female thing, mental illness is just incredibly sad.
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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