CSotD: The Crowd of Unknowing
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Several cartoonists were able to get their pens moving in time to pick up on the end of the shutdown, but I particularly like Clay Bennett's take because of its sweeping, enigmatic tone.
He's treading on dangerous ground, because it's easy for anyone to take a gratuitous Will Rogers slam at government being useless.
In fact, we've gotten to where we are today by having a demagogue rally the dumbasses who delight in accusing Congress of being useless and dishonest and blahblahblah, those barstool geniuses who know everything except what Congressional district they live in and how a bill becomes a law and minor things like that.
We are dysfunctional, however, and it's fair to say so.
Still, I admire Bennett's restraint: Some observers are getting way out ahead on this resumption and reading their own issues into it.
Mark Streeter lays out those intertwining issues: Having nailed down a few things — including CHIPS funding — the great unaddressed issue is DACA, and the compromise for Democrats was in trusting the GOP to bring the matter up for a vote, though adding a time bomb in case of deception, while the real force behind the shutdown was the utter lack of leadership from the Executive Branch.
It's not helpful that rightwingers are lying about DACA, or that the President's re-election committee (Re-election already?) put out a hateful ad that conflates DACA recipients with the mythical brown-skinned murderers that keep Trump's racist supporters awake at night.
And when you see cartoonists, commentators and even elected representatives repeating the confusion between shadowy illegals and the highly regulated, highly screened Dreamers, you do have to wonder if they are simply too lazy to learn the facts or genuinely dishonest and making an actual effort to confuse voters.
But that's a bit like checking a driver's blood-alcohol level after he's slammed into someone.
It doesn't change anything.
As for the lack of coherent leadership, Michael deAdder captures it readily: As some Congressional leaders have had the courage to say, it's very hard to legislate policy when the President is incapable of deciding what he wants and then sticking to it.
Something that has emerged in the last 24 hours or so is that, whatever the shortcomings of Michael Wolff's book, Howard Kurtz — whose loyalty to conservative causes made him leap from CNN to Fox — has a book coming out that echoes the chaos Wolff described.
As that Washington Post article says
Kurtz … writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.
Nor is the team holding together well: We now hear rumors that Trump is tired of being guided by John Kelly and wants to replace his chief of staff with someone more compliant.
I think Nate Beeler, who generally steers to the right, has the most apt take on what is going on inside the White House.
When you elect a TV star for president, you get a TV star, not a politician, and, to repeat, Ronald Reagan was an actor but, by the time he got to the White House, he had already served multiple terms as head of the Screen Actors Guild and as governor of California.
In this case, it reminds me of a long-ago TV Guide article that addressed rumors of issues at "Wonder Woman," in which a studio source exonerated the male lead without naming names by simply noting that it wasn't Lyle Waggoner who was throwing his hairbrush across the set.
We know who the prima donna is on this show.
And, as Jeff Danziger suggests, the scramble to get out from under his legacy is going to be competitive. For General Kelly, maybe a public sacking wouldn't be the worst ending to the farce.
But farce it is, and Danziger's Great Scorekeeper is marking down how they played the game.
As is Tom Tomorrow.
I'm on record as saying that the chaos and dysfunction in the current administration is such that "bland restatement" cartoons are no longer effective, but here's one that barely nudges the needle of satiric exaggeration in order to make a solid point.
Is there nothing this man can do that his retainers will not cover for? And, while Tom Tomorrow calls him "Grovellin Mike" and depicts him as being doubtful and ashamed of going along with things, Ann Telnaes offers no such kindly interpretation: When Pence denies that Trump had sex with a porn star and bought her silence, Telnaes demands to know how he could possible know that?
This is not "loyalty" but "complicity," and, coming from a man so strait-laced that he won't be alone with a woman, it is a shameless act of pure, inexcusable dishonesty.
Here is where Mike Pence's form of Christianity and that under which I grew up diverge: We both were taught that Jesus forgives sins, but we Catholics were tied into repentance and reform.
For us, the best death would be to be hit by a bus while leaving the church after making confession, though, if no priest were near, you could get by with a sincere act of contrition before death.
Many Protestant sects have a more sweeping view, in which sins are forgiven as long as you accept the Lord and live a reasonably righteous life.
But there is a corrupt corner of Protestantism in which forgiveness is so constant and ongoing that it doesn't matter what you do. This not only allows for bigotry, miserliness and other things forbidden in the Gospels, but for Pence's confident declaration about facts that he has no way to verify and plenty of reason to doubt.
He'd better hope that those who preach the Gospel of Prosperity are right, and that the unemployed, homeless bum who spoke of helping a pagan victim of a mugging had everything wrong.
Looks like that ol' shoe fits real good:
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