CSotD: Subtlety, clarity and the Great Unraveling
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Best way to start today's rundown is with David Horsey's cartoon and column.
The cartoon is solid: Getting rid of Flynn doesn't solve anything, the ship is beached, the captain is incompetent and, bless his eye for detail, the cannonballs have apparently rolled out of, rather than being fired from, the cannons.
And Lieutenant Conway may be next to the gangplank. I have a feeling the shedding of scapegoats has only just begun.
Meanwhile, the column is an excellent rundown of all that has gone wrong so far. If you are at all behind on the news, it's a good starting point for the current conversation.
The other contender for lead-off today was Prickly City, because it encapsulates the developing "What Have We Done?" mood, with a swipe at those who argued in favor of idealist gestures over pragmatism.
Scott Stantis is a conservative, though he never got on board with Trump or went partisan during the election. Still, it's more interesting at this point to watch the response from the right, because that from the left contains few surprises.
It's well past time to put the election behind us, in terms of who should have done what, but it is, indeed, infuriating to see people who argued against the lesser-of-two-evils approach suddenly become aware of the fact that the President gets to appoint Supreme Court justices.
And I haven't seen how President Stein plans to fulfill that role.
Or President Stay Home And Pout, for that matter.
I have heard some talk about how the outrageously inaccurate polls led some people to stay home because it was a done deal, or to cast a protest vote assuming there was no chance of Trump actually getting into office.
Well, there's no intelligence test for citizenship. We should probably stop playing shoulda-coulda-woulda and begin thinking about what's next.
And don't count on these three waterboys to help.
David Fitzsimmons doesn't even try for subtle implications but lays it out, and I'm not sure that's such a bad thing.
And I like Steve Sack's unsubtle approach, mostly because the bear is so huge and the necessary twists in the telescope consequently so major. The bruin's self-satisfied expression adds a great deal as well: He knows he's in no particular danger of being discovered.
Like Fitzsimmons, Mike Luckovich goes for clarity over cleverness.
I read a piece yesterday about the futility of answering Trumpsters by pointing out their hypocrisy and double-standards, the argument being that they don't give a damn and so it does no good.
I don't entirely disagree, but I think that applies more to the deplorables than to the swing voters, and you won't reach the deplorables anyway.
What won't work with the swing voters is insulting them, and so there is a benefit to clarity over cleverness.
There's also a benefit to appealing to patriotism, as Andy Marlette does. The more you focus on national interest, and the particulars of this specific situation, rather than attacking the conservatives as a movement, the better chance you have of luring people away from the dark side.
And, again, clarity.
I really like Clay Bennett's piece, which makes much the same argument as Marlette but I had to look twice to find the punchline.
Which is okay: I was already on-side.
But I have a feeling this does more to comfort than to convert, or, as Frederick Douglass said to W.E.B. Debois on Black History Month Day last week, "Fuck subtlety."
Kevin Siers uses nine panels to mingle subtlety and clarity in this piece: He doesn't simply come out and state his message, but even the densest, most partisan reader would have to see his point, that the upset in the White House was over the embarrassment and not the act itself.
By contrast, Nick Anderson assumes that driving Nixon from office is universally accepted as a Good Outcome and, again, I like it, but you don't have to convince me.
Between the 45 years or so that have passed, and the increasing partisanship that has followed, I don't know where Watergate stands in the public mind.
People may not be aware of how deeply criminal the events of that scandal were — particularly since it's been cheapened by adding -gate to every petty blowup since — or how much of it was a Democratic gotcha rather than a genuine investigation of gross illegality.
However, my response at the time to John Dean's testimony was "My, that's horrible," but I didn't think anything would stick.
It was only when Alexander Butterfield revealed the White House taping system that I thought there was a chance of maybe getting the crooks.
Now the conservative pushback — the 2017 version of "burn the tapes" — is that our intelligence community shouldn't have been monitoring Russian communications.
Bruce Plante suggests that Flynn may have been the only one in the world who didn't expect, and know, that of course they were, though, as we uncover more contacts between Trump supporters and the Kremlin, it echoes Deep Throat's contemptuous comment that this isn't just about little Donald Segretti.
And Alexander Butterfield's revelations were only stunning when people assumed a level of privacy nobody expects today.
Though god knows the loyalists are still out there, whether they are blind, stupid or paid to argue against all evidence and logic.
Tom Toles suggests a strategy for keeping bad news to a minimum, and he's not far off the mark: In yesterday's so-called news conference, Trump called on the Christian Broadcasting Company and Town Hall before walking off and refusing to take more questions.
He'd have gotten a tougher grilling from Sean and Kellyanne.
Not that there isn't still some room for humor:
Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder mocks Spicer's mangling of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's name, pointing out that, if he's not sure who the Canadians are, they sure know who he is, and not for a flattering reason.
The on-line responders defended Spicer by saying he simply misspoke.
He's a goddam spokesman, ferchrissake. It's like defending a runningback by saying he simply dropped the football.
He's a wonderful chef; so what if he keeps burning the food?
Never mind what Carlos Santana said about that dancer.
For this relief, Randy Bish, much thanks.
Scenes We'd Like To See
(A little sooner this time, please.)
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