CSotD: Incoherent times
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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."
Kal 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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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

(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:
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