CSotD: It’s all just one big Juxtaposition now
Skip to comments
As noted before, I love it when the elements of the Juxtaposition of the Day happen to fall together on my feed, in this case, Mike Peters and Mike Smith over at Comics Kingdom.
There are two elements at play here, the overall being the chance of Dear Leader starting a war, which is very much on the table though one does hope that, at that point, cooler heads would step in and do whatever it takes to restrain him.
Which brings in the second element: Nothing is his fault, at which point Peters and Smith diverge a bit. Smith notes the way party members in general but VP Pence in particular enable and coddle the irresponsible fellow, while Peters plays on his sociopathic narcissism.
We've had presidents with personal eccentricities in the past, the poster boy being LBJ, who conducted meetings while seated on the toilet in his office bathroom with the door open, took reporters on hair-raising trips speeding across the Texas plains in his car and doing other folksy stuff like lifting his beagles off their front feet by their ears to hear them howl and showing off the incision from a gall bladder operation, a gesture David Levine turned into a classic commentary on Vietnam.
But Levine's cartoon was a stretch, as was a poster that combined the beagle incident with Proverbs 26:17: "He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears."
That is, LBJ's quirks were unrelated to his political activities and, had the press been more intrusive at other times in history, we'd likely find lots of similar and similarly irrelevant oddities among our chief executives.
Trump is different, because they do impact his official duties and are, therefore, relevant. If his narcissism isn't disabling enough to trip the 25th Amendment, it's certainly a central enough feature of his personality to not simply drift into his policies but to define them.
It's one thing to enable Johnson's crudity by sitting in a meeting pretending there's nothing strange about someone taking a crap while you're taking notes.
It's another to sit by while the President tells obvious, blatant, self-aggrandizing lies and then get up in front of the microphones and justify them to a skeptical press made up of people who were not born yesterday.
And every time you think he's finally tipped the balance, every time you think he has told a screaming, nonsensical, indefensible, undeniable whopper of a lie, you find that … nothing happens.
A few Republicans may fall silent, a few conservative cartoonists may suddenly decide to draw teenagers with saggy pants staring at their cell phones, but nobody stands up and shouts that the Emperor is naked, except his "enemies."
And although his fan base, his Deplorables, may rail against those who kneel at the anthem, and insist that veterans must be not simply respected but revered, and complain that questioning police actions is disrespecting the flag, Trump was right when he said nothing he could do would make them turn from him:
They're perfectly willing to let him insult a prisoner of war, mock the family of a dead soldier and offer thoughtless, cruel words of cold comfort to a grieving widow.
And, while I continue to insist that taking a student deferment was not "draft-dodging," his claim of heel spurs was far more of an example of draft-dodging than any letter Bill Clinton wrote, yet the same people who hated Clinton for failure to serve are strangely silent about Trump's nonservice record.
They hate elitists, that is, but they have no problem with a rich kid whose family doctor would write a letter saying he had antlers if it would keep him out of Vietnam.
The answer to "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" is "Shut up, libtard."
However, this latest contretemps has at least outraged those capable of being outraged.
There's a variant "exact quote" floating around which appears to be unsourced, though someone says it came from Fox News. I couldn't find it on their site, but Fox did report this: "Asked about the proof the president claimed to have, Sanders said there are no recordings of the phone call", which makes anybody's quote less than exact.
Doesn't matter. However he actually phrased it, it was a goddam insensitive thing to say at that time to that woman, and, whatever he meant to tell her, he offended her and her family.
Everything else is irrelevant.
And at that point, a decent, sane person backs down, apologizes, says he didn't mean to offend and we move on.
A decent, sane person does not insist that everyone is lying about him, and that the media is inventing things out of thin air.
Because that does, in fact, suggest that the 25th Amendment may be teetering on the edge of relevance.
Well, whatever.
The self-centered nincompoop certainly inspired a lot of cartoonists, resulting in a multiple Juxtaposition that I'm sure will only grow in the coming days.
And will likely have no impact on the Deplorables, but, then, maybe, just maybe, will help persuade a few GOP enablers to rethink their sycophancy.
Not sure what he could have said anyway, but he could have behaved with decency. Or maybe he couldn't, and that is the actual point here.
Comments 2
Comments are closed.