CSotD: Forgetting How To Bow
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Timing, Part One
L'il Donnie cracks me up on a regular basis, and, as an editorial cartoonist, Mike Norton has the advantage of reacting with speed.
I'm hoping, in the course of this week's Association of American Editorial Cartoonists' convention, to get a firmer grasp on deadlines and other timing issues editorial cartoonist face.
However, the announcement Friday that Mueller has obtained his first indictment made it damn hard for anyone to get something out before today's expected revelation of who's indicted and for what.
Print was surely too late: Sunday editorial sections were likely already being pre-printed as the news broke.
And there was only that sliver of a hint of news, so what could you say?
Still, if you wait to pull the trigger, too often you end up with pablum. Good for L'il Donnie, and I hope a lot of readers get to see it as I did, before the actual announcement is made.
And, while nobody expects L'il Donnie himself to be named, the strip doesn't quite suggest that … more a sense of things tightening.
Meanwhile, conservative editorial pages have a wide choice of "But … Hillary!" cartoons, and that final fit of deflection will, I am quite sure, remain relevant regardless of what the Big Reveal turns out to be.
Timing, Part Two
Meanwhile, over at Tank McNamara, Bill Hinds surely didn't do today's strip anticipating that the owner of his hometown team would touch off a controversy that boiled over this weekend.
For those who missed it, there was a meeting of NFL owners and players on the 17th, trying to come up with a solution to the ongoing protests during the anthem, which consist of players taking a knee to demand improvements in how minority people are treated by police and the courts.
Some owners want the protests to simply stop, but there's a large contingent, including the commissioner, that would like to accomplish that by creating some kind of major outreach on the part of the league and players to bring police and minority communities together.
In the course of the negotiations, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said, "We can't have the inmates running the prison," a phrase often used to mean that employees at some point have to follow management's rules but which, given the topic, turned into its own crisis.
McNair quickly apologized and met with his team, but the Texans still staged a large kneel-down during the anthem yesterday to answer the gaffe.
Where things go for the Texans is something that will have to play out, but the fact is, as Hinds suggests in his cartoon, nobody is listening anyway.
The players, and most of the owners, know what is happening.
The rightwing, including Dear Leader, are casting it as a rejection of the anthem and the flag, and their outcry deliberately ignores the original issue.
Which, by the way, happens to have significant history not just in Houston but within the Houston Texans lockerroom, as I noted even before this blog ever began. (Go read that)
Nobody is listening, including the people who are reporting on it. For instance, this NBC Sports coverage includes how players protested after Trump called them sons-of-bitches and recommended they be fired, but fails to note that the owners joined them in standing up to Trump's insults and threats.
Perhaps that can be dismissed as incompetence, but it sure sounds like supporting the wardens and dissing the prisoners.
And it's not just the football protests.
Today's Pardon My Planet coincides, though the reference is hardly direct, with a ghastly example of intentional fake-news malpractice: A church in Virginia has decided to move two plaques, one saluting Robert E Lee, the other saluting Washington out of the altar area.
It was headlined here as removing Washington, only later mentioning Lee, and ignoring both the balance the parish sought by moving both plaques, and the fact that they were only being moved, not removed.
Then the story is illustrated, not with the plaques, but with a statue of Washington that is some 450 miles away in Boston.
As the fellow at the bar says, "Neither side is listening. They're just playing a game of PC oneupmanship."
Putin's troll factory could hardly do a better job.
(They really have been given numbers!)
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