CSotD: Speaking untruth to the powerless
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Amid several other cartoonists' attempts, Jeff Stahler gets the best perspective on the phony phone call issue.
This isn't a particularly profound cartoon, but attempts to place the claim in more profound contexts have fallen flat, I think because they've attempted to put the President's lies in a rational setting that goes beyond the self-preservation instincts of a child young enough to cling to "magical thinking."
The cartoon is funny, but there's nothing humorous about the phenomenon.
It's one thing to have a particular traumatic event that spins you into believing a falsehood: I've no doubt that OJ Simpson believes he did not commit those murders, that his brain has reprogrammed his memories in an act of self-preservation.
I've also run into people who assume everyone lies and so they also build up their experiences. I had a friend in high school whose tall tales and absurd pickup lines were a legend and a running joke, but I don't think he believed them himself, and, if you'd pinned him down, he'd have admitted he was bullshitting.
We didn't challenge him because it was more fun to just let him run off while we nodded and tried to keep a straight face.
And, of course, there's garden variety lying where you simply deny or assert something and hope people believe you.
I don't see any of that in the President's repeated, ridiculous, easily disproven fabrications, and I suppose I should be frightened to believe that he is as convinced of his constant stream of fantasies as OJ is of his one, big, necessary one.
But I'm kind of numb, to tell the truth. As I've said before, I don't think he's likely to cross the 25th Amendment threshold, simply because his lies don't appear to impact his ability to govern so much as they help him justify his decisions.
Then again, it doesn't really matter if Bill Clinton honestly believed that his contact with Monica Lewinsky did not qualify as "having sex" because they didn't have sexual intercourse or he was deliberately parsing definitions or was simply lying about what they'd been up to.
He was not impeached for acts of consensual sex with an adult, but for lying about it under oath. And it didn't matter if he believed what he said or not. What mattered was that his enemies didn't have enough votes to convict him.
So, again, jury selection will be held November 6, 2018, and — regardless of what Robert Mueller uncovers in the meantime — we'll know by November 7 if President Trump's actions rise to the level necessary to remove him from office.
Meanwhile, if Donald Trump tells you it's raining, you would be wise to look out the window.
And it's not just him promoting such dismal failure, as Gary Varvel points out.
Personally, I didn't want the GOP to mess with health care and I don't want them to mess with taxation, but I'm still astonished at their inability to get anything done plus, as Varvel suggests, their inability to confront their own incapacity.
There's some sort of comedy potential for a gag in which the purported victim has to instruct an incompetent mugger on how to carry out the robbery, and I'm not going to try to help the GOP destroy healthcare or further plunder the poor and middle class.
But it's hard to look on without offering advice as they blunder through their wretched, futile efforts.
I feel like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, impatiently watching Bullwinkle pull lions, tigers and rhinos, anything but rabbits, out of that top hat.
Again? But that trick never works!
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two cartoonists make related but distinct points about unemployment and jobs.
Margulies is more generic, in that the threat to blue-collar jobs is automation, while Rogers is more specific in targeting the White House's attack on immigrants.
I've seen several examples of how computerization and automation are changing jobs, and, specifically, how older skilled workers had to relearn their jobs:
My father-in-law was a tool-and-die man who was fascinated by the technology he had to learn, though it meant transitioning from hand-tooling pieces to programming a computer to do it.
And I knew hot-lead guys at the newspaper who had to learn computer typesetting and layout. They were similarly interested in the technology, though they admitted missing the hands-on aspects of the old ways, even if their arms were scarred from little droplets of molten lead.
I've also toured plastics factories where workers were inputting data into molding machines, but this seemed more clerical than skilled, and pulling plastic forks out of a hopper before it overflows doesn't seem like fabrication so much as clean-up.
Still, the fact remains that the jobs being taken by recent immigrants with limited language skills and education are pretty much open because Americans don't want to do them, or, at least, don't want to do them for the wages being offered.
And Matt Davies attacks the racism at the heart of the White House immigration "reform," which became more pronounced in the absurd dust-up between Steven Miller and Jim Acosta, neither of whom covered himself in glory but only one of whom represented the United States government.
Several commentators — cartoonists and others — have pointed out various ancestors of White House folks who would not have been admitted under the proposed guidelines, though I think it's argumentative to include spouses in the tally, since the reforms do allow for wives and children of acceptable applicants to tag along, though aged parents are apparently excluded.
However, like attacking colleges for recruiting practices the Supreme Court has blessed, attempting to find yet another back-door way to keep minorities out of the country is not likely to get through an increasingly woke Congress anyway.
Though I do like the notion that Making America Great Again involves behaving like the bad guys in a Mel Brooks movie.
(Starring Slim Pickens as General Mike Kelly)
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