CSotD: Trump of a Hundred Days
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Mike Marland specializes in regional New Hampshire commentary, but got off a good 100 Days cartoon that sums up more than the presidency.
What's that phrase conservatives use to derail civil rights policies? "The soft bigotry of low expectations"?
Yeah, well, there ya go. We were so sure Trump wouldn't be able to keep any of his promises, and that he had no intentions of doing so anyway, that when he didn't and didn't, it left us with very little to be disappointed about and less to comment on.
Samuel Johnson famously responded to Boswell's having gone to a Quaker meeting where a woman spoke, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
Johnson, like Mencken, is quotable in large part because of intemperate remarks like that, but here we are, not expecting Trump to do anything well but surprised to find him doing anything at all.
Or, at least, we would be surprised if he did anything at all. Tom Toles suggests we withhold our wonder until then.
One accomplishment Trump has claimed is placing Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, but that has little do to with him and a lot to do with Mitch McConnell and his cabal, who defiantly held off confirming a justice until they saw the results of the elections.
Any Republican White House victory, as long as they sustained their Senate majority, would allow them to confirm whoever they wanted, and thank god it was someone the cabal proposed and not whatever demented incompetent Trump might have come up with.
Though I don't know how much remaining satisfaction there can be in "I told you so" for those of us who begged people to go to the polls and keep Trump and the GOP away from their goal of filling that seat (and likely the next).
When our last nincompoop figurehead proposed Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, his handlers were there to stop things, and many cartoonists broke ranks over it.
Even reliably conservative Henry Payne wasn't buying Dubya's pick, which brings to mind one positive accomplishment of Donald Trump, which is that he's helping separate the truly right-wing cartoonists from the honestly conservative ones, because only the lunatic fringe lapdogs are remaining faithful.
A good number of those who hated Obama for eight years are sharpening their pens for Trump as well, a rare, hopeful sign in a divided country.
Thank god, since there seems to be nobody on Capitol Hill reining in Trump, or, at least, keeping him tamped down for more than a day or two at a time
However, one problem with a president who cannot focus and has no ability to pursue a sustained policy is that the constant rain of spitballs emanating from both the Oval Office and his unsecured smartphone results in cartoonists dividing among attacks on this thing and that thing and that other thing.
This barrage of unfocused criticism threatens to become as incoherent as the man being criticized.
Fortunately, the degree to which his good, good friends in Congress accept his leadership seems pretty lukewarm at best, as demonstrated in his second failure to strip healthcare from the American people as well as the tepid reception of his tax proposals and the horror over his baiting of North Korea.
Leaving cartoonists free to employ ridicule as the amusing and perhaps more impactful alternative to picking apart each foolish policy proposal and ill-considered tweet.
In evidence of which I present Walt Handelsman's mini-cartoon:
And this from the Simpsons:
Speaking of Simpsons
Earlier this week, Michael Cavna wrote of an exhibit of courtroom sketches which will be at the Library of Congress into October, giving you plenty of time to get there.
He identifies courtroom sketches as a "fading art" and I would assume that the increasing access of cameras to courtrooms will cause tight-fisted publishers to withdraw funds for sending in an artist.
That's a loss, because, as seen in the above sketch of Simpson, a good artist can capture much more than what something looked like, combining that with what it felt like.
Here are details on the exhibition. If you find yourself within hailing distance of the Capitol in the next several months, you'd likely find this worthwhile.
And speaking of reining in blowhard incompetent management
I have several times compared Trump to other executives of his ilk who make ill-considered proposals for their brow-beaten minions to enact, and I've also wondered aloud at how many newspaper publishers even see the wretched compilation of semi-pornographic clickbait and outright fraudulent ads that litter their webpages.
Having sat through board meetings in which online revenues were reported with no discussion of the appalling, tasteless swill that produces them, I have a pretty good sense, too, of how entire chains (I'm lookin' at you, Gannett) have turned their websites into mazes of popups and pop-unders and barriers that, when you click on them, take you to the home page instead of the story you were looking for and now can't find at all.
So I'm kind of surprised there hasn't been more chatter about Google's reported plan to build a selective ad blocker into Chrome that will target the most annoying ads — the pop-ups, the autoplay video ads, etc. — while leaving responsible ads undisturbed.
The theory is that, by letting surfers avoid those infuriating interruptions, it will discourage people from installing more undiscerning ad blockers, so that content providers who comply with the "Better Ads Standards" can still make some honest income.
Content costs money, and there's nothing wrong with advertising helping provide that support.
Reining in the liars and porn merchants is a good idea, and particularly necessary when publishers have either no idea what they're putting out there or no pride in their product.
Loyal advice for Presidents and CEOs:
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