CSotD: Good News, Bad News, Silly Stuff
Skip to comments
The Good News first: As seen in this cartoon by Australian cartoonist Glen Le Lievre, Eaten Fish, the young Iranian cartoonist imprisoned in an Australian detention camp, has been freed and taken to an undisclosed safe city in Northern Europe.
I wrote about Eaten Fish in this February posting about press freedom and responsibility.
A lot of people were writing about Eaten Fish, which is part of what helped get him freed, and while many of my friends in cartooning will disagree with what else I said in that post, we can all agree that (A) what was happening to that young man was beyond belief and beneath contempt, and that (B) it's good he's out.
So that's a muted triumph for the free press — muted because he has been badly damaged and because it's not clear his cartooning had any bearing on the indefensible brutality to which the Australian government allowed him to be subjected.
But it is good news anyway and I'm glad the kid is out and I hope he recovers.
The Bad News is that advocates of a free press face a troubling development, as Jeff Danziger points out, in that Fox News has answered the question, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" and their answer is, "No, and what are you damned libtards going to do about it?"
It's one thing to be conservative, but tearing down the justice system is not a conservative value, and Fox's leadership in promoting the notion of a corrupt investigation of the Russian connection is simply not good journalism.
It's not even 'fake news." It's simply acting as the mouthpiece for Trump in his attempt to thwart an inquiry that an honest man would welcome.
And once the Sinclair Broadcast Group gets clearance to take over the Tribune's TV stations, there will, between these two craven lickspittles, be a substantial portion of America awash in Orwellian propaganda.
I posted this link twice yesterday, but here it is again and if you think people will watch Fox and Sinclair and dismiss it as only a matter of opinion or as obvious pro-Trump loyalism, you are seriously misreading the situation.
I don't have an answer except, as I recommended yesterday, to stop trying to convert the Deplorables and put that effort into energizing the moderates.
Incidentally, the comments accruing under rightwing editorial cartoons that promote the anti-FBI, anti-Mueller viewpoint are encouraging. Moderates are beginning to speak up and push back.
But, as also noted before, those who own the press are the ones who really have press freedom.
And so it's come to this:
Tom Tomorrow announces that he will not be producing a year-end wrap-up because, well, there's just too much crap to fit into the format.
Emphasis on "crap," because, while he blames quantity in this cartoon, I suspect also that the net effect of piling one depressing regression into darkness upon another would make it hard to enjoy the result.
And the quantity of depressing crap is indeed daunting. The New York Times rose to a challenge by pro-Trump readers to compare the lies told by Trump (red) with the lies told by Obama (blue). This graph is the result.
We applied the same conservative standard to Obama and Trump, counting only demonstrably and substantially false statements. The result: Trump is unlike any other modern president. He seems virtually indifferent to reality, often saying whatever helps him make the case he’s trying to make.
In his first 10 months in office, he has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump.
There is more in their article, but the chart alone tells the story.
A lot of history is riding on what decent people do between now and November 6, and they'll have to do it in the face of a powerful, well-financed machine.
This group is kind of interesting. One if by land, two if by sea and all that good All-American stuff.
Okay, let's lighten up a bit. We need laffs now more than ever.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The Juxtaposition here is a little strained, given that the second cartoon is only by implication a reference to "Frosty the Snowman," but, if you accept that, we have two cartoons about modern takes on songs that are not Christmas carols but simply old-fashioned songs about winter.
I like RWO because the horse is modernized into a neurotic 21st century schizoid man, far from the actual horse who would be delighted to race through the snow pulling a light, fast sleigh.
Real horses hate pulling about as much as Labrador retrievers hate fetching. But we're turning all our dogs into neurotic modernists, so why not the horses, too?
As for the snowman, I've been remembering back when we could easily find coal for snowman eyes and noses and mouths, and enough to put buttons on his jacket, too.
That was because, long after people converted to oil or gas, enough coal had been delivered over the years to the chute into their basements — by trucks or, in this nostalgic JR Williams panel, by overworked little boys — that you could still find spare pieces scattered around the foundations of houses.
Today, you either use rocks or — sigh — buy plastic snowman kits at the store.
Though once more early adapters have had to switch to more durable gear, our kids will likely be able to find solar panels around the foundations of those homes, too.
And speaking of long-outdated references, Pardon My Planet bases its pun on the famous slogan Thomas Watson had in IBM workplaces, back before workplace inspiration involved pictures of kittens and sunsets.
And suggestions that you be a good team member and a hard worker.
No modern employer encourages anyone to think.
At work or anywhere.
Comments 6
Comments are closed.