CSotD: Buckle Up. It’s Getting Rough.
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Murphy’s cartoon seems harsh, but, then again, he isn’t the one who has loosed masked men upon the population or ignored the courts and sent prisoners — many of them legal residents without criminal records — off to foreign gulags without trials.
How many Americans recognize the term stasi? Is Gestapo too harsh?
How harsh is it when the secret police realize they’ve seized the wrong person and say “Take him anyway”?
How harsh is it when Congressional Representatives, legally entitled to inspect ICE holding facilities without making reservations, are accused of trespassing and, when in the course of being seized by the secret police, an elbow makes contact, one is arrested and charged with assaulting an officer?
By the logic of the current administration, Anderson points out, a random elbow is assault, but it’s perfectly legal to intentionally attack police officers with poles, sticks and shields, and to spray them with toxic chemicals.
That may seem freighted with opinion, but opinions can be right, and obviously so. They can also be wrong, and obviously so, and when a misguided opinion comes with arrogant, unchecked power, that’s frightening:
Incidentally, my senator quotes the state motto, but the entire thing, said by General Stark regarding the Battle of Bennington, is “Live free or die, boys. Death is not the worst of evils.” And Stark was not afraid to walk the walk; before that battle, he said to his men, “There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!”
Mister, we could use a man like General John Stark again, which is perhaps why our administration has gotten rid of the JAGs and a substantial number of upper-ranks as well.
If you fear the watch-dogs, just apply Kristi Noem’s solution, metaphorically let’s hope.
And make sure to pack the cabinet with people who understand how to deal with Dear Leader.
The problem the last time around was cabinet members and other staff who said disloyal things like “I don’t think that’s legal,” and “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” and who were known to sneak papers off his desk to keep him from signing them.
The rumor is that his cabinet members and top staff are there for show, which would explain the telegenic but spectacularly dishonest Karoline Leavitt, who only answers questions she likes, openly lies about topics she can’t avoid and, as Bagley notes, gets offended when her bona fides are questioned.
Leavitt’s absurd statements may fly in the fact of obvious facts, like her contention that the president is not making money and is indeed losing income while in the White House.
But it wouldn’t work if he weren’t also capable of persuading his followers that embracing the murderer of an American journalist in the country where most of the 9/11 plotters originated is perfectly okay. And apparently, as McKee says, he’s right, just as he was right in saying he could murder someone in broad daylight without losing his core supporters.
Now it is being reported that Pam Bondi is a photogenic show piece and that Stephen Miller — known as PeeWee German for his cold-eyed resemblance to Joseph Goebbels — is actually running DOJ.
And the new leaders at the FBI are beginning to wish they hadn’t been so loud about corruption, because they’re now in put up or shut up territory, and they can’t back their previous accusations.
Aside from them, the Gaslight policy seems to be working: Dear Leader’s impulsive inspirations are typed up and presented to him as executive orders to be signed, just as if he really had the power to make and enforce laws without consulting the other two branches of government.
And perhaps he does, absent any meaningful pushback from the legislature or judiciary.
He’s doing a nice job of presenting his budget proposal as positive, even giving it the attractive name of the “Big Beautiful Bill” despite the way it raises taxes and living expenses of poor and middleclass people while stripping many of them of Medicaid and benefits for their children in order to pay for additional tax cuts for the upper 1%.
And that inset piece in Necessary’s cartoon is realistic, since the downside of the legislation won’t be evident for several months, and then only if people are able to piece together how things went sideways.
The impact of Trump’s extreme tariffs on the cost of living are, however, becoming visible, and his decision to cut back the most outrageous examples, as Ariail suggets, may be presented as fixing the self-caused problem, but merchants are not apt to play along with the deception, even if they could afford to.
Walmart has declined to set prices below cost, and Trump’s response was furious, though he continues to say that China should eat part of the tariffs, valiantly insisting that the money being collected comes from Beijing and not from the pockets of American shoppers.
Still, as small, local businesses are forced to close and the large chains are forced to raise prices, there has to be a limit to how long Dear Leader can cruise on the fiction that his tariffs are not costing American consumers more than slight inconvenience.
Adding several trillion dollars to the deficit as the GOP’s proposed budget does, may be more than conservatives can ignore, even if, as Benson predicts, they’ll try.
Particularly if Dear Leader proposes to add $175 billion to his tab to pursue a pipe dream that, 40 years ago, made Ronald Reagan look foolish.
It’s true that Israel’s Iron Dome has protected it from many, though not all, low-powered surface-to-surface rocket attacks, though not ICBMs. It’s also true that Israel is the size of New Jersey, roughly 0.2% the size of the United States.
It’s like saying “My neighbor put her chihuahua in a soft crate that fit under the airplane seat, so that’s how I’m bringing my horse on vacation.”
Not everyone thinks it can work, and even those who do agree with Doonesbury that it couldn’t be perfect.
Better to prevent it ever happening than to keep blundering forward and hope you can stop it.
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