CSotD: Trapped within our borders
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Yes! Exactly! You're both right!
Okay, I'm not entirely sure Kevin Siers meant that, but they are. I think his intention is that it kind of sticks us in one place, and I won't argue with that, either.
Obama is right that repeating the follies that got us here won't get us out of here, and that ramping up bigotry only plays into the hands of the terrorists.
And ISIS is right that there are so many people in the West desperate to give bad ideas one more chance that all they have to do is keep up the attacks and they'll win.
And, assessing the continuing flood of "Just wait until someone other than me gets his hands on you!" cartoons, I'm right in thinking that, if you went to a cartoonists' convention and spiked the punch with Viagra, half of them would run out of inspiration.
I haven't seen such a ridiculous display of empty chest-beating and macho posturing since I quit going to hockey games where pathetic, pot-bellied buffoons in team jerseys pound the glass and scream for blood, knowing it won't be theirs.
Ann Telnaes made a rare trip back to static cartooning with this response.
I love her work and she's right on with this, which is a kind of harking back to one of my favorite cartoons that came out of 9/11 and ties right into the current plus-ca-change moment.
She declared the winner quickly. I wish she could have also stepped in and stopped the match.
Have we always been a nation of cowards? 'Cause we sure are now.
I got involved in a thread the other day that started innocently enough with someone saying how sad it is for people to tie their dog out while they go into a store.
I responded that going to the post office is one of the high points of my dog's day, and he loves the attention he gets outside the corner market as well.
Then it morphed into assurances that, if you tie your dog out while you check your mailbox, he'll be instantly whisked away to a testing lab or a dogfight training center, to which I responded that I wouldn't live in a place that filled me with such fear.
And was told that it was better to be safe than sorry.
Maybe. But I'd already be sorry if I had to live my life like that.
Unfortunately, when it comes to national policy, it's harder to get away from our growing atmosphere of paranoid cowardice, especially when, as Matt Bors notes, it is being whipped up by people for whom whipping up paranoid cowardice is a key part of their strategy.
ISIS is doing it on purpose. That's clear.
I have not, however, pinned down just where the lines of stupidity and dishonesty cross among our own class of power-hungry demagogues.
In any case, you don't have to read between the lines too much to realize that "I want my country back" means "The way it was before the Civil Rights Movement," and that demanding respect for Christianity really means "only Christianity belongs here, and not the kind in the New Testament."
Lalo Alcaraz is one of several picking up on the connection between refugees and the Christmas story, in which the Holy Family had to flee to Egypt, and, as a frequent commenter on Latino issues, he not only has standing but has the perfect graphic metaphor to add bite to the matter.
And Pat Bagley joins a chorus of cartoonists citing Emma Lazarus and our national myth of being the nation that welcomes immigrants, and also adds some bite with the "Oh no he ditn't" of tying in the drowned refugee toddler.
Oh yes he dit, and more power to him.
And I say that as a resident of the only one of that newly formed states-rights bastion, the United States of Chickenshit, whose governor is a Democrat.
She's running for the Senate against Kelly Ayotte, a very strong rising star in the GOP, and apparently thinks she can win by matching Ayotte in sabre-rattling and intolerance while alienating the people who put her in the governor's mansion to begin with.
Though it could be that these 24 governors are hatching a cunning plan to eliminate unemployment in their states, first by funding the construction of border posts on all incoming roads and then by hiring guards to staff them.
And I'm sure they wouldn't propose some kind of "Better Safe Than Sorry" plan that they weren't prepared to fully fund.
After all, they keep telling us that "Freedom isn't Free."
Well, enough of all that. I'm going to leave it up to God, and, like all people who call upon the Lord instead of rolling up their own sleeves, I'm very particular about the God to whom I leave it up to.
The one who made me in His image.
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