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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Wednesday Short Takes

Published: May 2, 2018 1 minute 10 comments

Cjones05052018
When I can do a mix, I usually start with the funny stuff and then do politics, but somehow they're becoming indistinguishable. Clay Jones has a most excellent rant to go with this cartoon, which is basically that Trump would rather talk to Fox & Friends than Mueller, but he can destroy himself in either venue.

There are no perjury traps. There’s just perjury. You couldn’t ask Trump for his favorite snow cone flavor without him lying.

And, that’s the thing. Donald Trump is a walking, bleeding case of a bunch of perjuries. They’re afraid of him talking to the FBI, the Justice Department, and Mueller? Donald Trump can’t talk to Fox & Friends without destroying his presidency.

The good thing for Trump is that Fox & Friends are actually Fox & Flunkies. They practically hung up on Trump so he’d stop talking and cutting his own throat.

Which struck me as particularly funny because I had just read this very serious piece on the same topic in the Washington Post, but fell out of my chair at this unintentionally hilarious passage.

Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and Trump advocate, said Tuesday that it would be dangerous and unwise for the president to agree to an interview.

“The strategy is to throw him softballs so that he will go on and on with his answers,” he said. “Instead of sharp questions designed to elicit yes or no, they make him feel very comfortable and let him ramble.”

In that setting, Dershowitz said, prosecutors could catch Trump in a misstatement.

You can't tell the comedians from the reporters without a scorecard.

 

Or the politicians, for that matter …

Netanyahu-Iran-nuke-intel
Which brings us to Netanyahu, and Dave Granlund comments on the Big Reveal to which every signatory to the Iran Deal responded, "Yeah, we knew that. We factored it into the treaty."

But don't dismiss Netanyahu as just Bullwinkle reaching into the wrong hat: He's actually riffing on that old joke about the two guys encountering a hungry lion, where one says "You can't outrun a lion!" and the other one says, "I don't have to. I just have to outrun you!"

Netanyahu doesn't have to come up with any genuine intelligence on the topic of the Iran deal.

He simply has to time it so that he's the last person Trump hears from before making his decision.

And use PowerPoint so there are a lot of pictures and very short sentences.

 

Which leads us to this question:

7207_020518_colour_web_ML
Even with my business-reporter background, Alex tends to delve too deeply into the specifics of legal technicalities in the UK for a Yank to get all the gags.

But here's an example of a type of cartoon I like that consists of people saying outright what they would, in reality, cover up with a storm of bafflegab.

So my question is, do you have to be versed in business strategies to think this is incredibly funny? I'm passing it along on the theory that you don't.

Though I suppose it's funnier if you've sat through a few meetings with people who know how to manufacture dingbats but are only pretending to understand what their tech people and marketers tell them.

Sir Stewart is universal and, like Trump, a lot funnier in the abstract than when your future is linked to his decision making.

 

Okay, one more political gag

Prc180501

Prc180502

Here are the two most recent gags in a Prickly City story arc that began this week, and, again, I probably laffed harder because I'd not only just read this Atlantic piece basically begging Hunny Bunny to shut up and let the Democratic Party start fresh, but then encountered the outraged comments from her on-line loyalists.

Much of the conversation on this topic is carried on by bots and trolls, but there's a genuine streak of "If you don't like Hillary, you are a misogynist," which is – to avoid genderization – cattleshit.

I don't know how many women I've voted for over the years because that's not how I measure candidates, but I've currently got two Senators and a Rep who are women and for whom I voted, and my first ballot back in 1972 went to Pat Schroeder.

My support has gone to a whole lot of women in the intervening years, including this one, who became prominent despite her husband, not because of him, which would be my preference if I voted by gender.

Besides Schroeder, I voted for McGovern in 1972, but I actually wanted Schroeder, while I only voted for McGovern because he wasn't Richard Nixon. And I've voted for Hillary Clinton twice on that latter basis, once in her first Senate race and then again in 2016.

Wore the same clothespin both times. Economy!

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

Retail(Retail)

Bt180502(Betty)

Cooper is enjoying his first day off since he was given extra duties helping close down a Grumbels at another mall, and has just discovered what those of us who work at home already knew: Daytime TV is … well, it's what Betty suggests that it is, though she's not limiting her opinion to a particular Day Part.

My TV is on a credenza next to my desk, less than three feet away, and I have no temptation to watch during the day, in part because I'm a workaholic, but also because it really is depressing crap.

Though, thinking back, Daytime TV has always been subpar. The only time I watched much of it was when I was home with little kids, and then it was Sesame Street, Electric Company and Blinky's Fun Club, after which I'll admit I filled with Hollywood Squares and Match Game until the Dialing for Dollars Movie came on. 

KWGN had an outstanding movie package in those days, with a lot of absolute classics.

But Netflix doesn't call to see if you are watching, which reduces the unbearable suspense.

Nah, Betty's right.

 

Thanks, Edison!

Edison
I always enjoy Edison Lee, but today he left me with a pleasant earworm, which I happily share:

 

 

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Comments 10

  1. The problem with the Prickly City take is that it’s Scott Santis who can’t get over Hillary. Hillary is not running again. But she does have a large following, many people like her even if you don’t, and she is under no obligation to “go away” just because those who dislike her want her to.
    Romney actually IS running. Where are the demands that HE “go away”?
    Well, you know what? I don’t like him, but he’s under no obligation to go away, either.

  2. Read the Atlantic piece. A lot of former presidential candidates have a second public life, but not as “former presidential candidates.”
    Romney is running for Senator. She could do that. Or she could write another book about villages raising children. She has many options, particularly if she looks forward rather than backward.
    And the way you start is with the phrase, “Oh, let’s not go over that again …”

  3. Tsk, tsk. Only Democrats insist that their less than successful candidates “go away.”

  4. What Ignatz said. No, she’s not running again. And yes, there was some sexism in opposition to her. Not with everybody of course, just as not everybody who voted against President Obama did so because of racism. But that does not mean it was not a factor..

  5. Paul, I didn’t see GHWB or Dole or McCain writing books about why they weren’t elected. McCain went back to the Senate, the other two quietly went away. You can’t insist that people do what they are already doing.
    And I’m sure sexism was a factor in the H.Clinton campaign — as Pat Schroeder about that, or Gerry Ferraro. Granted, Lurleen Wallace and Evita Peron managed to overcome it.
    However — and this will horrify the rightwingers — I think the best gags Wolf made the other night were directed at the Democrats, and sitting around reworking 2016 is going to cost them another one, at least unless they use a mirror to find the problems.

  6. I’ll grant that Hillary’s latest book was badly conceived. (Heck, I already did – http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/163599/ ). It was Nixonian, minus the promise not to have him to kick around any more.
    I was observing that unsuccessful GOP candidates such as Nixon and Reagan could get a second chance, if a losing Democrat is lucky, he/she gets the consolation prize of being named Secretary of State (Muskie, Clinton, Kerry), but is sorely resented if he/she tries for the top job again.

  7. After the election people were crying for months about the fact that Hillary disappeared from the spotlight. And now that she’s come back back, they’re realizing what I was saying then… there’s nothing she can really do, things need to be rebuilt, and that’s a job for someone less tainted. All being out in front does now is get in the way of other people trying to step up.
    So I wouldn’t even look at it as a left-right difference in tossing her. She was a turd of a candidate… she had a lot of baggage. I would have hated to be responsible for running her campaign and trying to sell her. She can help in making the new message, but someone else needs to be the face (much like the Bee Gees after the death of Disco… they still wrote successful songs, but other people had to sing them, as they couldn’t reinvent themselves, they got too associated with Disco to do that).
    I still get a kick when the Trump people try to say that he must be good because he beat out so many top political opponents for the job… personally, I wouldn’t be so proud of being the turd that floated to the top of that bowl. It was everything that countries like Russia and China have every wanted… they’ve been telling their people that they don’t need a more liberal democracy, because that doesn’t work any better. Trump winning was the icing on that cake.

  8. I tuned in to Blinky’s Fun Club from time to time, to keep current in mocking it. I used him for column fodder on the school paper in eighth grade, and after high school, he was one of the villains in a comic book I drew (and redrew, because by the time I finished an “issue,” my drawing style would have changed, so I’d go back…) called “The Creature From Channel Two.” He was happy to do goon work and fight my hero, Jimmy Cool, but you could tell by his reactions to Tom Shannon riding him that he was going to turn on his master mind (provided I had ever finished the story for good—I got as far as meeting all the ‘reruns’ at the commissary: they were clones who did shows like Gilligan’s Island, McHale’s Navy, and the Addams Family).

  9. Blinky was a god in my house, but, then, my kids were younger than you and I was older.
    But Shannon was who had insisted on that movie package and Dialing for Dollars introduced me to a raft of classic films — not just Bogey but things like “It Happened One Night” and he also awakened me to sidekicks like Alan Hale and Una O’Connor.
    What was particularly fun was that, when I was in about sixth grade back East, he was Tommy Shannon at WKBW Buffalo, and so my introduction to a lot of Top 40 Bobby Rydell sorts of music. And he wrote “Wild Weekend” as his theme — it was released as an instrumental single, but you can hear the lyrics on this aircheck:
    https://youtu.be/EUkH7_GSD9A

  10. My favorite Tom Shannon moment was when his dog was in the studio, quietly cooling it on the floor by Tom’s desk. Tom was saying something, then stopped in mid-sentence. There was some sort of sound in the studio—laughter from behind the camera? The camera pulled back to include the dog in the shot. The dog was looking simply dog-like, and (if anything) pleased with himself. Tom incredulously said to the dog, “What do they feed you?” Yup, there was definitely laughter behind the camera.
    Dogs gonna dog.

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