CSotD: Thursday Short Takes
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Michael de Adder wins today with this explanation of Trump policy, which combines childishness with randomness and you can't do a whole lot better than that.
Several cartoonists picked up on the phony Time cover. I like John Branch's take because it not only references the fraud but notes the hypocritical attitude of a president who can't go 24 hours without lying but then sets his flying monkeys on CNN when they admit to a poor job and retract the story, whereupon three people responsible for it resign.
Joel Pett is even more direct in noting the difference between how an honest operation handles a mistake and how such things play out in the hands of a dishonest administration.
It won't matter to the True Believers, of course. I've already seen comments about how the Time Magazine fraud is immaterial and we don't criticize Dear Leader, and that's scary. This isn't interpretation, or difference of opinion. Time Magazine never published that cover and it was placed in Trump properties alongside legitimate memorabilia and you can't get any more plainly fraudulent than that.
So the comeback is that Trump himself doesn't decorate his golf courses, does he? No, he doesn't.
Pull the cord on de Adder's Blame Generator and let's see whose fault it is, because, obviously, Dear Leader can't be responsible for everything done in his name.
After all, he's not Barack Obama.
Side note: While I was checking out Pett's cartoon, I saw a headline about an explosion at Murray State, in which a leaking gas tank took a pretty good hole out of a dormitory. From the Herald-Leader's coverage:
Murray State student Alex Brown, 20, said he was sitting in his house near campus when he heard a loud noise.
“It felt and sounded like someone drove a car into the side of the house,” Brown said. He said he ran outside to see what happened, thinking there might have been an earthquake.
Murray resident Taylor Black, 21, said he was driving near campus with music on and didn’t hear the explosion but saw a cloud of smoke.
“I just saw a bunch of smoke go up, so I ventured over to see what happened,” Black said.
Taylor Black's car must have air-conditioning, because, if his windows had been open, Alex Brown wouldn't have heard the explosion either.
Meanwhile, in the "Many a Truth Is Told In Jest" category, Clay Bennett's cartoon gets some backup from a study in Oregon that shows a 17 percent reduction in cardiac arrests among the middle-aged since the Affordable Care Act went into place. (The "middle-aged" distinction rules out those old enough to have Medicare, since their coverage didn't change, nor did their frequency of cardiac arrest.)
And, as the senior study author explains in that link, sudden cardiac arrest is lethal in 9 out of 10 patients.
Though, as noted here before, the GOP plan phases its cuts in slowly enough that we won't see people dropping dead in the street until after the 2020 elections.
By which time we'll be expert at pulling the string to see whose fault it all is.
And Fox News' latest hire will, by then, be a seasoned pro. Pat Bagley dispells our fear that the network was slipping into responsible coverage.
You have to wonder if he had the offer in hand before he decided to quit in the middle of his term.
Meanwhile, on the funny pages
The current arc in Rex Morgan has been going awhile, but started out as an unremarkable teen romance story in which the Morgans' babysitter, Kelly, was upset that her boyfriend was hanging out with another girl, though he protested there was nothing going on and he was only interested in her father's collection of vintage cars.
So far so what, right? Until it turns out that the reason there's nothing going on is, in part, because the girl is not only in her own established relationship, but it's not with a guy.
What I like about this development is how the mother not only takes the problem calmly but is amused that her daughter is so clueless. And, while the boyfriend doesn't seem to have known about it ahead of time, it doesn't seem to have rocked his world, either.
There is a boundary to respect in this, as there is in introducing racial minorities into a cast of characters: You need to respect the differences in people rather than paper them over with some kind of "It's A Small World After All" denial, but, at the same time, if their presence is normal, treat it as normal.
I like the way this is unfolding and will be watching with interest.
Meanwhile, though Zits often plays the same-old-same-old clueless parent-and-teen gags, when Borgman and Scott connect with one, they send it over the centerfield wall.
One of the best aspects of this strip is that Jeremy isn't just a clueless adolescent in the eyes of his parents, but one whose contemporaries also recognize him as, well, lacking a certain gravitas. This 2002 gag has stuck in my mind ever since, and I still chuckle over it when I see the glop being offered in lieu of coffee.
Thank god I'm running out of space
Today's Reply All could trigger a blog-length rant, so I'm adding it now when I've only got a bit of my self-imposed limit left.
At one place I worked, they started "Casual Fridays" and then had to issue a follow-up memo explaining that "casual" did not mean showing up looking like you were about to change the oil in your car.
And my few ventures into church lately suggest that Lizzie is not kidding.
We have rules because some people need rules.
Speaking of Church …
(We started with a Canadian, we'll end with Canadiens.
For those who speak no French, the voice of God
is directing him to befriend that fellow.)
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