CSotD: Twitches and grunts
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There have been many, many jokes made about editorial cartoonists praying for a Trump victory because of the endless cartooning possibilities, but if I'd known Monday that Sarah Palin was going to endorse him yesterday, I'd have bought stock in a company that make India ink.
Cartoonists who hadn't put nib to board since before the Powerball drawing flew into action and there were several amusing takes in the flood that followed, but this David Rowe panel is the one that most successfully drew a combination of wince and laugh.
Thing is, it's easy enough to make fun of Caribou Barbie, the half-term governor, even without insulting working class people in the process. But the fact that she still draws an adoring crowd ought to cause some knocking on wood, because it's not clear her support will torpedo a candidacy this time around the way her presence on the ticket sent McCain to the cellar in 2008.
Thing is, 2008 was about McCain: Choosing her as his VP candidate not only called his judgment into question, but revealed that, behind that shallow "maverick" image, he was just another party tool.
Calling Trump's judgment into question is laughable: Nobody with any common sense thinks he has any.
His promises to enact obviously unconstitutional legislation, pursue unachieveable foreign policy goals and, in a boast he continues to make in his ads, get Mexico to build that wall, are so patently ridiculous that you'd have to be an imbecile to support him.
Yesterday, I noted that Hillary Clinton is drawing fire from both the rightwing Hillary Haters and cartoonists on the left who don't like her, either.
Trump has reached a level where he's doing the same thing in mirror-image: The liberal cartoonists who mocked him from the start are now being joined by horrified conservatives, as the sideshow moves to the center ring.
Kirk Walters is what you might call a Cynical Centrist, and this one pretty much nails the situation, as the GOP faces the possibility of having to reap what they have sown.
But Rowe is Australian, and so his vision of a red-white-and-blue zombie apocalypse takes on a different element. We haven't posed such a potentially destructive threat to the Aussies since we dropped Skylab on them back in 1979.
Australia used to be seen as the place the world couldn't get to, the place where, if worse came to worst, Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner could at least make out until the cloud of radiation arrived.
In today's hyperconnected world, there's little difference between living 10,000 miles away and being right next door: As Trudeau père famously put it, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
So I laugh because of Rowe's artistic style, and I wince from embarrassment that the Whole World is Watching to see which way the beast will twitch next.
And before moving on, let me acknowledge that, some 40 years before dropping Skylab on them, we were the source of cane toads, though the Aussies did, after all, decide on that themselves.
So I'm not so much apologizing as I am recommending that Netflix subscribers get a sense of Australian gallows humor by streaming this bizarre documentary, which manages to combine the real horror and yet face it with an enviable supply of dry wit and macabre but hilarious responses.
Keep those coping tools ready, there, cobbers, just in case.
Would you people please get a grip?
Just the other day, I accused Daily Kos of posting "creepy, loony" pop-ups, "pestering you to sign yet another petition, the funny thing being that, if you refresh the page, you find a different 'Daily Kos Action.' Not sure what they think the word 'daily' means."
Apparently, they now have a theory that the only way to fight a bad person with totally idiotic ideas is to be a good person with totally idiotic ideas.
It may be time for their friends to stage an intervention.
And speaking of obnoxious pests
Reply All nails it: If you think Daily Kos doesn't know when to back off, wait until you are old enough to have the AARP breathing down your neck.
And the thing is, you don't have to be very old, because the American Association of Retired People isn't about Retired People and, while the age of retirement is going up, AARP's age of recruitment is going down. Or, at least, they're becoming more aggressive about it.
They've long sent membership solicitations to people who didn't think they were old yet. Now they've got a series of commercials reassuring you that you don't have to settle into a rocker on the porch of the Old Folks Home at 50.
In case you thought you did. Which I'll bet you didn't.
I'm waiting for the commercial that shows a kid getting his high school diploma, while AARP's narrator reassures us that 19 is not, despite what you think, the end of life.
Mind you, I'm not against the group. The discounts they offer aren't anything you couldn't get by simply shopping smarter, or joining Costco or BJ's, but, if you have a woodstove, they'll save you a ton on your utilities by sending you enough junk mail from insurance companies to heat your home through the hardest winters.
And when you eventually do get old enough to feel it's time to retire (whether you can afford it or not), it'll be good to get their magazine each month and be reminded that, if you had any character at all, you'd be off scaling a mountain or skydiving or solving world hunger, because that's what old people do unless they are losers and quitters.
AARP is to the Gray Panthers as Virginia Slims were to Ms. Magazine.
I miss Maggie Kuhn. She got it. And shared it.
Now here's your moment of zen:
Be that guy. When you decide it's time.
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