CSotD: Ship of Fools
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There are several sinking ship cartoons out there, but I particularly like Tim Eagan's take because of the captain's blissful ignorance, accented by the fact that we find, in the second panel, that he is dangling at 90 degrees, which emphasizes his serious disregard of reality.
Constant readers will, however, wince in anticipation of yet one more lecture on the topic of "Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship," because they know it's one of my bêtes noires.
The metaphor is not about rats who would try to swim to safety once the ship is sinking, but, rather, to a sailors' superstition that rats could anticipate when a ship was about to set out on a doomed voyage and would leave the ship while it was still in port.
As it happens, despite having read "Mutiny on the Bounty" as well as Bligh's journal of the trip as well as "Two Years Before the Mast," which I strongly endorse, my introduction to the metaphor came from this Russell Brockbank cartoon that ran in Punch in 1951 and must have been in some later collection around my house, since I wasn't sitting up, much less reading magazines, at that age.
I'm a little disappointed that it isn't political and that Brockbank wasn't targeting any particular new leader, but there it is and let me ask you to list the number of Republicans who anticipated the way this doomed voyage was going to turn out and stepped away before it launched.
Or, for that matter, the number who would man the metaphorical pumps now and vote for impeachment, should they get the chance?
Yeah, that's the same number I got, which makes me chuckle at today's Prickly City, because 2016 really was a complete bilateral two-party cluster and I realize I'm saying that on International Women's Day but I'd have preferred that this particular first be a Shirley Chisholm or a Geraldine Ferraro and let's not fight that one again, but picking someone who was already extremely controversial and deeply hated by a significant number of people and then, in the process, pissing off a substantial portion of the people who still liked her was not a winning strategy.
Never mind. I'm still pissed that they didn't nominate Muskie, and some of you weren't even born for that debacle.
Nor was I born when Will Rogers said, "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
Which perhaps makes it an eternal truth.
Still, it would be nice to see the Loyal Opposition get its act together, because they're being handed things on a platter if they can just avoid stepping on themselves.
Because, holy cow, this reality show is headed nowhere but down, and Dan Wasserman at least gets a laff out of it.
Though the Canadians themselves aren't laughing, as Gary Clement indicates. Trudeau père famously compared living next to the US with sleeping with an elephant and noting every twitch, but when the elephant begins jumping on the bed it's particularly hard to get much rest.
Well, we're going to exclude Canada from the tariffs. No, we're not. Yes, we are. We're going to exclude all our allies. No, there will be no exceptions.
And, as Kevin Siers points out, that's hardly the only place where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and it's kind of surprising that the back end doesn't know what's going on at the front end considering that the front end seem to be stuck firmly up the back end.
It's not the crime, it's the cover-up and, in this case, Li'l Donnie covers up by pretending he wasn't there, which doesn't call forth the wisdom of Will Rogers so much as the advice of Sybil Fawlty: "If you're going to grope a girl, have the gallantry to stay in the room with her while you're doing it."
My question being, if it never happened, why would you need a non-disclosure agreement? What is she not disclosing? And if I claim that I had sex with Donald Trump in a restroom at the Port Authority Building, will his lawyer pay me $130,000 not to tell anyone I did?
Because, for $130,000, there are all sorts of things that never happened that I would promise not to say ever did.
Though my price for things that did happen would be higher and that's why Jared can't get his security clearance which raises the question, if Daddy were not president, would he have one?
Signe Wilkinson has the real question, which boils down to WTF? and I guess Trump is right that, when you're a star, you can get away with it, but I thought those other people were stars.
Now, granted, Trump is hardly the first president to have proved unfaithful to his wife, and not even the first to be outed while in office, but let's not forget that the other one was impeached for pretending to think that "having sex" was limited to "having actual intercourse."
You won't find "fibbing about your sex life" in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, which states only that "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
Nothing about blow jobs. But, wait, what's that second one? Bribery? Is that incoming bribery or outgoing bribery? And does it distinguish between bribing someone to stuff a ballot box and bribing someone to shut up about your affair, if both are done in order to aid your election?
And does it matter as long as your own party holds both houses?
And as long as the rats are more intent on their own safety than they ever were on saving the ship?
Wrong flag but the same motivation and expert leadership:
(And we can pray for the same outcome. Yes, it sucks to be a greedy rat.)
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