CSotD: Outrunning the Bear
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First, an opening prayer, led not by Pope Francis but by Brother Leo, the gentle innocent in the strip. We'll continue this theme in our closing hymn, but, meanwhile, my apologies for addressing other themes this morning.
I wish I could be half the fool Brother Leo is.
In the meantime, I'll settle for being silly, and Mike Luckovich's take on Lauer made me laff.
I read a lot of the criticism of Matt Lauer's handling of the Commander in Chief Forum and was glad to see many others had picked up on my point about the absurdity of assigning someone trained to interview Pickle Queens to handle a hard-news gig.
And Luckovich's gag is a reminder that the "Boxers or briefs?" question in that MTV Rock the Vote forum produced the chatter the network wanted and, as a sideline, branded the MTV Generation as a bunch of airheads.
We've kind of woven that into the overall mission: Get the numbers, screw the outcome.
Meanwhile, Gary Johnson's well-publicized muff on the Aleppo question reminded me of that old joke about the two hikers running into a bear. One of them starts to run, and the other says, "You can't outrun a bear!" to which the first responds, "I don't have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you."
Neither Johnson, nor Trump, has to be smart and well-informed. They just have to be smarter and better informed than the average voter.
"OK. Got it. With regard to Syria, I do think it is a mess."
Well, okay, then. There ya go.
Lying Down With The Dog
One advantage of heading Fox News is that, when you utterly disgrace yourself and your employer, the damage is limited because the network mostly likely to work itself into a froth over such a thing doesn't.
But it does seem a bit over the top that, rather than Jabba the Ailes taking his golden parachute and slinking off into his lair, he has been brought into the Trump circle of advisers.
Trump is apparently correct that he could shoot somebody in Times Square and not lose any votes, but you have to wonder how far he's willing to go to prove the point.
Well, he probably can't lose votes with thinking women, on accounta he didn't have any, nor the other kind either, on accounta what part of that definition did you miss?
So maybe it doesn't matter, except in that "future of the country" sort of way.
Fox viewers seem undismayed by the scandal, though getting the top ratings isn't necessarily a huge victory if your competition is splitting a much larger piece of the pie several ways.
NPR had an excellent takedown on who knew what and who should have known what, but the bottom line remains this: Trump doesn't have to outrun the bear.
Juxtaposition of the Anniversary
(Jack Ohman, 2016)
(Ann Telnaes, 2002)
We're coming up on the 15th anniversary of the WTC attacks, and Jack Ohman notes how the event has become a kind of catch-all for patriotic gestures and political posturing.
It reminds me of the cartoon Ann Telnaes drew a year after the attacks. I asked her if it had been picked up by any newspapers and she responded that she knew it probably hadn't, with one possible exception, but that it needed to be drawn anyway.
I was particularly struck by it at the time because, as I've told many times but am gonna tell again, my boss, the circulation director, had called me into his office in the summer of 2002 to shake his head and read me a memo he'd just gotten from Corporate, wanting to know our plans to duplicate our single-copy sales from September 12, 2001.
"Well, we could rent a couple of planes …" I suggested, but, of course, we simply produced a "Let's Wallow" commemorative issue, which I don't think outsold the Sept 2, 2001 issue, but we did what we could.
There are real memories of that day and I respect them, but when you see all the 15th Anniversary Commemorations roll out, don't let them bullshit you.
I'm thinking of going into the archives and looking back at the response from cartoonists at the time, but I'm not sure I want to. It was hardly the profession's finest hour and I'm not sure how many weeping Statues of Liberty I can take.
Excuse me, now. I hear someone pounding at the door.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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