Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Incoherent times

KAL
Kal cuts through to the core yet again.

He uses a complex, multipanel approach here to mock the incoherence and inconsistency of GOP attacks with a clarity others have failed to achieve. And he's funny without cracking any actual jokes beyond the overall conceit, which, combined with the right art, is very funny indeed.

Maybe it's because he cut his teeth cartooning in Great Britain. See below.

Meanwhile, however, I wonder if the right wing is onto something. Maybe coherent, consistent arguments are out of synch with the times.

The right is clearly pandering to its own lunatic fringe: They just spent days at the annual event I heard a guy on NPR refer to as a "conservative Woodstock" praising Putin's leadership and cheering Sarah Palin as she called for us to resolve the Ukrainian crisis by at least threatening, if not actually launching, a nuclear strike on Russia, but then swung the oil tanker around on a pivot and elected Rand Paul their Prom King.

Paul possesses the Republican virtue of being able to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the poor, but he's certainly no interventionist. If they're so eager to draw us into yet another (unfunded) military adventure, why didn't they go for a militarist?

There is a type of consistency at work, but it consists only of "we hate Obama," a theme they flog with anything they can grab, including not just rage over disproven faux-scandals like Benghazi and the IRS or by trotting out fraudulent "victims" of Obamacare, but, for instance, by peddling the nonsensical contradiction that we don't need the ACA because poor people can get "free" treatment at hospitals, coupled with outrage over taxpayers contributing to ACA stipends.

Yes, tax money shouldn't go to pay for healthcare temporarily when we have a permanent system under which a great deal more tax money is used to pay for healthcare.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

But the left isn't all that coherent, either. They're still relying on the childlike notion that, had he wanted to, Obama could have simply changed everything the day after his (first!) inauguration: Closed Guantanamo, brought the troops home from both wars, thrown all the bankers and stockbrokers in jail and given jobs to everyone in America.

So, to them, Obama ought not to criticize Russian aggression in the Crimea because, after all, he invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (apparently, several years before becoming president on a promise to stop doing things like that), and has done nothing to undo those actions other than, y'know, pulling our troops out of Iraq and working to get them out of Afghanistan as well.

It's not just that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." It's that "the emotional is the enemy of the sensible."

DespairKal isn't offering a cure, mind you, but, at this stage of the game, maybe the most helpful thing a commentator can do is point out the lack of coherence in the conversation.

Though I suppose it's only fair to note that pointing out the shortcomings of "Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo" hasn't done much to diminish the ratings of that travesty.

Still, you can't simply draw cartoons day after day about how completely hopeless things have become.

Well, not if you want editors to put them in the newspaper and give you money.

 

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Alex
I just came across Alex a few days ago and have been enjoying it. It's a bit wonky and clearly aimed at (British) readers who understand business on a higher level than Dilbert fans. 

Perhaps they've figured out who buys their newspapers and reads the business section. (It's just a theory.)

In this arc, Alex has been attending his wife's convention and today's is particularly funny to me in part because I was once a member of the "Faculty Wives' Club" at a college where my wife was public information director, and partly because, in my reporting days, there were cocktail parties where business people would start to say something, then pause midstream as they realized I was standing there.

Sometimes they would continue, sometimes they'd stop, but their moment of "uh-oh" always got a burst of laughter from the onlookers.

I think Alex's strategm is not only very funny but presented in a very British vein, with the expectation that you will get it and he needn't over-explain the gag. Which is maybe the same approach that made me adore the original, British "The House of Cards" while the Kevin Spacey American "House of Cards" leaves me cold.

Which in turn probably means that I'll be in the minority on liking Alex so much. Ah, it's lonely at the top.

But funny.

Lonely, but funny, in a dry, lonely, funny sort of way.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

Pcp140310
(PC & Pixel)

Cragn140310
(Agnes)

Dueling "Mysteries of Parenthood" aside, this looks like it could be the start of an interesting arc in Agnes, given that we've never, to my knowledge, been told why she lives with her grandmother.

Perhaps Ashley is her mom:

Tip140310
(That is Priceless)

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Comments 6

  1. When I saw the title, I tripped to “Inchaote Times”. In retrospect, that seems more accurate.
    Did it not occur to Kal that part of the problem is not the inability to use power but rather it is the inability to select an appropriate target.
    We fund a plethora of intelligence agencies that are apparently engaged in Hoovering up all manner of personal, electronic data on U.S. Citizens. The operative irony being that these agencies couldn’t figure out that Russia was going to take a shot at the Crimea or that the Tsarnaev brothers were up to no good in Boston.
    We have an administration that operates in a manner that makes interpretive dance appear to be regulatory equivalent of the waltz; from unique perspectives on the coal industry, to attempts to put government censors…sorry investigators…into newsrooms, to using the IRS to punish political detractors. Simultaneously, this bunch seems unable to muster the resolve to accomplish much of anything on the world stage either via the State Department or the DoD.
    I wonder if Kal understands that it is a bad thing to have a government that is unrestrained when aimed at its citizens and anemic when engaged abroad?
    B/R,
    Dann

  2. Given that they criticize him for unrestrained use of executive orders which he does at a pace lower than any president in over a century, Dann, and then again, apparently, for not threatening nuclear war, I think incoherent is a perfectly good description.
    I can understand them being either honestly too thick to understand what happened in Syria or willing to put some spin upon public ignorance on that topic, but they can’t possibly believe the nonsense they spout about Benghazi and the IRS — if they were truly that stupid and naive, they wouldn’t be able to find their way to the office each morning.
    And there is a difference between “spin” and “lying.” The latter is called propaganda, as in “The Poles attacked our radio station” when in fact they did not.
    As for how Ukraine is being handled, they’re free to disagree, but their mooning over Putin is as absurd today as it was when W did it a decade ago. You don’t go all goo-goo-eyes over a man who murders reporters and invades other countries.
    The idea that we should threaten Putin with a missile strike puts the paranoid cowboy-shoot-out fantasies of the George Zimmerman crowd right up there with Dr. Strangelove.
    In any case, they are incoherent to not be able to see that Obama is tough when he is able to be tough and more diplomatic when diplomacy is the only practical approach.
    If they were as loyal to the national interest as they are to their own (or if those two things were in some measure congruent), they wouldn’t be throwing out these inconsistent, incoherent and basically dishonest attacks.
    The idea that we’d be okay with nuclear war as long as we didn’t have to feed poor children is, indeed, incoherent. And also contemptible.

  3. In my fantasy, we would have sunk the Black Sea Fleet, with conventional munitions, a week ago. Without the fleet, Putin doesn’t have a lot of use for Sevastopol, or the Crimea. Of course, while aerial bombardment has come a long way since Billy Mitchell’s time, so has air defense. 🙁

  4. I suspect that, even if you used conventional weapons, he’d be pissed.
    I’m starting to look at this thing and sort out the comments based on who actually remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis and who thinks the “Cold War” was just some media meme about funny little drills where you hid under your desk.
    I also remember when Nixon announced the Cambodian Incursion and we though, oh-oh, that could bring in the Chinese. Of course, it didn’t, but the Missile Crisis didn’t end up in a shooting war either.
    I’m really not anxious to return to the days when you watched the news and hoped that somebody out there was sane. In the words of Secretary of Defense Wermer, “Mutual Assured Destruction is no way to go through life, son.”

  5. Ya know….
    I’m not sure that there is an appreciation for the criticism that I am seeing towards the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
    The criticism is that he and his foreign policy officials have staked out an American position that is weak, apologetic, and severely reluctant to do much of anything to assert an American interest. It appears to be informed by an anti-colonialist (20th century not 18th century) perspective.
    And the result is that we have much less influence on the world stage than we did at the end of 2008.
    The criticism isn’t that Mr. Obama is specifically wrong on Putin at this moment in time. The criticism is that the long term trend of a defeatist foreign policy perspective is that we can’t even rattle our sabers effectively to head off these kinds of things before they get started.
    And as for the IRS, we have the current IRS commissioner saying that the actions of the the IRS with respect to the Tea Party groups was incorrect. We have Mr. Obama saying the same thing. The fact is that IRS agents targeted specific groups based on politics.
    Each to his own opinions, but we all have to live with the facts as they are.
    Regards,
    Dann

  6. Apparently not.
    The IRS has also gone after liberal groups for abusing their status, the difference being that the connivance of large blocs of conservatives to not simply use bogus tax-free status to shelter their political operations but to (foolishly and transparently) use the same code words in filing made it easy — though, as Obama and the IRS have noted, improper — to simply do a search using those knee-jerk terms.
    That’s the fact, Dann.
    They were wrong to search that way, they’ve said they were wrong, but it was a freaking search term, it wasn’t a conspiracy. And if Issa and his cronies would put away the torches and retire the Iron Maiden, they might get someone to explain it to them. But as long as they’re on a witch hunt, it would be suicidal to even answer their questions. I’d take the Fifth if someone that blatantly partisan was dangling a noose over my head, too. I’d be a damn fool not to.
    Here’s the other fact we have to live with as it is: Apparently, at long last, they have no sense of decency. And that’s not simply despicable and contemptible but very bad for our nation.

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