CSotD: The Kobayashi Maru Presidency
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Let's start with Rob Rogers' cartoon, because it's as optimistic as we're going to get today.
The problem is that, in Hans Christian Andersen's story, once an innocent child said he could not see the Emperor's new clothes, everyone else was suddenly free to admit that they couldn't see it either and never had.
A nice fairy tale, but the reality is more convoluted.
Once a perception has been set, people adjust to it. A lot of people who were alive when World War II ended identify with the VJ Day celebrations in Times Square, even if they were thousands of miles away. You have to really pin them down to get the story of how they personally learned that the war was over.
For my own generation, there was a time at which, if everyone who claimed to have been at Woodstock had actually been there, the Eastern Seaboard would have tilted up and slid into the ocean from the weight of the crowd. But after the Iranian hostage crisis and the "What about us?" response from Vietnam vets, it turned out we'd all been over there serving.
It's not so much the actual fakers but the True Believers who matter.
People don't lie and say they were in Times Square — or, at least, not many — but the media images of the war have shaped their memories, such that they think of Victory Gardens even if they never planted one, or of tirelessly compiling Bundles for Britain though they might have only contributed an hour one day to the effort.
And memories of the Sixties likewise skew either to the counterculture or the war, regardless of how shallow anyone's involvement in either actually was.
I have no doubt that, if Trump finally oversteps to the point that Congress summons the cojones to call him out on it, a lot of people will, in future, remember that they never liked him and didn't vote for him and never believed a word he said, regardless of where they stood in November, 2016.
Though, as Tim Eagan suggests, we haven't reached that point and may never. The GOP has, to this point, seemed determined to defend their president regardless of his excesses, their party loyalty honed by eight years of opposing all Democratic proposals regardless of merit.
And even that's not as simple as it is often portrayed.
But nothing ever is, and the fact remains that more Republicans need to break ranks before the crisis can be addressed.
And it is a crisis; perhaps one without a solution.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Bill Day)
Jack Ohman shows more wit and nuance; Bill Day cuts to the chase.
Trump has, throughout his campaign and now throughout his presidency, said things that didn't simply turn out not to be accurate but were clearly untrue as they were falling out of his mouth.
A certain amount of spin is expected in politics and should be indulged, but such a stream of obvious falsehoods brings forth the ancient question "Is he a fool or a knave?"
Sometimes, caught in his false statements, Trump has said he was simply repeating what he was told, which calls into question his judgment in hiring but not necessarily his sanity.
However, his latest conspiracy theory, coupled with his earlier birther claims, suggest that he is either delusional or is willfully playing us for fools.
As Jeff Danziger portrays it, the idea that Obama issued a presidential order to tap his phones is ridiculous, and the accusation only works in the Nixonian sense of a burglary.
Which is also absurd, given that Trump has no proof to offer.
The Watergate burglars were caught in the act and the actual break-in was, for the most part, a "third rate burglary." It only mattered after investigators dug deeper and found what else it was attached to and how far up the ladder things went.
Trump doesn't even have a bug from his phones to show that anybody at all tapped them, much less a scintilla of proof tying it to the White House. He has only the unsupported beliefs of a lunatic-fringe talk-show host, amplified on Breibart.
It's as if Woodward and Bernstein had based their entire efforts on some political posturing from Abbie Hoffman or Jane Fonda. (Historical note: Even on the left, their remarks were taken with huge grains of salt.)
To answer, or not answer, the distress signal?
This is funny in Pros & Cons, but not in the least humorous in our context.
As the evidence piled up in Watergate, Nixon loyalists generally took one of two stances:
One was that it was all done by underlings and that the president had no knowledge of any illegal activities.
The other was "they all do it" and therefore holding him accountable was unfair.
The first position is irrelevant when the issue is the President's personal honesty and his capacity to serve. People may laugh at Kellyanne Conway or cringe at Steve Bannon, but neither of them has been claiming Obama was born in Kenya, that Ted Cruz's father was part of the JFK assassination or that Obama ordered illegal wiretaps.
The second is harder to assail. It's a level of dogmatic belief that defies debate, and there is a sizeable group of Trump loyalists across the country who will never, ever accept a challenge to his integrity.
As he himself said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters."
He'd lose some, probably most, but not all.
Which brings us to the Kobayashi Maru element: A choice between doing nothing to avert tragedy, or intervening at the risk of touching off a ruinous war.
Nixon loyalists were angry when he was forced to resign, and grumbled for years after. The Reagan Revolution was, in large part, fueled by their bitterness.
But they expressed that displeasure within the political realm.
A lot of time has passed since then:
A. Nixon Resigns
B. The Cincinnati Revolution — NRA goes from promoting gun safety to promoting an extremist view of the Second Amendment
C. The Fairness Doctrine is voted out by the FCC, giving talk radio permission to air partisan views without opposing commentary
D. By this point, a very long period of people stocking up on guns and listening to unrefuted fringe doctrine has passed
Your move, Captain
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