CSotD: Contempt
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Let's start with Nick Anderson's commentary on the Senate Healthcare Bill.
It's colorful and it cracked me up and Mitch McConnell running away with his pants on fire is not only funny but a nice alternative to the Brer Tortoise personna most cartoonists have adopted for him. (Perhaps the royalties from that are why Jon Stewart was able to retire, though it's not a depiction I object to.)
Watching the repeal bill as it was unveiled has been like watching one of those YouTube videos where everything seems normal and then you start thinking, "Oh, damn, he's not gonna make it past that …" and sure enough, the car flies off the road or the athlete crashes into the wall or whatever.
Difference being that, while people sometimes post videos of narrow escapes, they don't post things that don't at least go somewhat awry, and we couldn't guarantee that the Senate bill would, in fact, either hit the wall or fly off the road or come close enough to be amusing.
If this were legislation we needed, but poorly written, there'd be ambivalence in watching it fail, but the fact that not only is it poorly written and unnecessary but would actually make things worse takes away any guilt in laughing at one more example of Dear Leader getting nothing he promised across the finish line.
Yet.
They may come back after the holiday and try some more, but it's going to be hard to come up with a solution that has the decency some Republican Senators are asking for but is as heartless and cruel as those on the other fringe demand.
Though McConnell could always say, "If you let us destroy healthcare with this bill, we'll approve your bill to kill off all the endangered species" and get the support he needs.
I don't know how you get through to the True Believers on this sort of thing, but Rob Rogers has a sort of end-run in the form of his local cartoon, "Brewed on Grant," which regularly takes an intimate, affectionate local view of Picksburg and its people.
While several cartoonists seem to be harping on local issues to avoid the minefields of the national scene, Rogers takes a normally local piece and uses it to expand from potholes to more sweeping topics. It's a good move: I doubt many of his readers mistake him for a conservative, but they might more readily consider a point delivered in a familiar, folksy venue than one offered in the national format.
Meanwhile, I don't know what you do about a president who is so outrageously inconsistent, dishonest and self-dealing that — as Jack Ohman notes and only somewhat exaggerates — he has put an end to open coverage of his administration.
Fact-checking his outrageous lies about election margins and crowd sizes and who said what about what doesn't make a dent with his core deplorables.
And when I say "outrageous," I would include the revelation that Dear Leader has posted phony TIME Magazine covers of himself in his golf courses around the world.
Falsely claiming to have been on the cover of TIME doesn't provoke the outraged response of pretending to have been a Navy Seal in combat, but it's also not something you can do by mistake.
This isn't a case of misinterpreting numbers or misremembering a conversation. This is a completely fabricated lie.
Well, who cares?
That's not a rhetorical question. It's something we need to resolve, because, while the GOP previously found a goofy, personable stooge to lead around by the nose and into a disastrous war in Iraq, they've got a much more toxic figurehead on their hands this time and, while they may decide to hold their noses long enough to finish packing the Supreme Court, the rest of the nation really needs to wise up.
Juxtaposition of the Day, possibly the year
Danziger offers an imagined conversation to trace the utter illogic in the latest steaming heap of idiocy to be issued from Dear Leader, and Bagley simply traces the obvious, contemptible dishonesty.
I said "contemptible" when perhaps I meant "contemptuous," because the more relevant matter is not what contempt this should instill in us for him but, rather, the contempt he clearly has for us.
I'm not even going to dust off my Michael Corleone "don't insult my intelligence" pic for this.
Instead, I'll let Clay Jones take the baton, with a combination of this cartoon and the most excellent rant with which he accompanies it.
For awhile, we kept hoping for that "At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?" declaration, and it's pretty clear now that we're not going to see that moment of courage.
Nor would it work.
In Andersen's fable, when the little boy points out that the Emperor has no clothes, the crowd realizes they weren't imagining it. The trick that had kept them in thrall was the story that only those who were unfit for their jobs could not see the Emperor's fine clothing.
Which is to say, those who thought he was naked feared they were falling for fake news. That they were sheeple. That they had drunk the Kool-Aid. That they suffered from confirmation bias.
Well, "Obama made me do it" is a national intelligence test.
I hope we pass.
No predictions.
Finally:
"… or possibly in the White House."
Lola, besides unintentionally referencing Dear Leader, happens to coincide with my getting sucked into a shameful bit of fatuous, navel-gazing click-bait by, of all outlets, NPR, purporting to list the Worst Songs of All Times but which was simply a lot of no-context, fussy, self-absorbed snark about a mix of songs, some bad, some not, among which was this one.
I realize I'm a grumpy old man, but that doesn't release other people from the obligation to grow the f*** up.
Here's a cover of that song, and you aren't obligated to like this either:
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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