CSotD: Punxsutawney Don peeks out of his bunker

RJ Matson offers a great take on “Blind Justice.”

Blind Justice is an ideal that we’ve never achieved. The idea of a system in which everyone who comes before it gets equal treatment, in which Justice does not see who is on either side, is something to strive for even if we know in our hearts that it will never happen.

I’ve been a witness in trials, I’ve covered them as a reporter and I’ve served on a jury, and I have seen how status, educational attainment and financial resources tilt those golden scales.

It’s not unreasonable to hope for justice, and it does happen. But it’s foolish to expect it, because you will often be disappointed.

However, Matson is right: This is a particularly low ebb, and her facial expression is a brilliant combination of incredulity and horror that truly sums up the moment.

 

Though, as David Fitzsimmons points out, it is a “moment” with 400 years of history and background.

One of the reasons we haven’t solved the problem is that it’s like the ancient Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant: Each of us has grasped a different part of the beast and is convinced we know what it is like.

Each of us is right: The elephant is indeed like a rope, and it’s like a wall, and it’s like a tree trunk, and it’s like a fan and it’s like all those things, but it’s not any of them, and none of us see the true nature of the elephant.

And so some of us say it’s deliberate and some of us swear we have no part of it and some of us claim scientific differences and some of us recognize our inability to control it and we’re all correct and yet it’s still there, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

We’ve even got people who take apart the human genome and thereby insist that there’s really no such thing as “race,” while meanwhile the elephant is standing on their foot.

In some versions of the parable, the blind men begin to argue and even come to blows over who is right, not realizing that they are all both right about the part they have experienced and wrong about the nature of the elephant itself.

It doesn’t improve our quest for vision to have not just no leadership but a leader who is actively toxic, cowardly and dishonest.

 

Scott Stantis mocks him for having retreated to an underground bunker when demonstrators gathered outside the Whited Sepulchre.

Granted, he was hustled down there by the Secret Service, but two factors have to be taken into consideration.

The first is that he’s in charge of them, they’re not in charge of him. He could just as easily have ordered them to back away while he stepped out onto the portico and addressed the crowd.

The second factor is that, in his Tweets and commentary before he was whisked away, he expressed concern not for the health of the nation but for his own personal safety.

As noted here before, LBJ heard the chants outside his residence and was heartbroken, and Nixon snuck out in the middle of the night to sit and talk with protesters and try to find out what they were like.

Of course, LBJ had been awarded a Silver Star in WWII, and Nixon, while he remained in the rear echelon throughout the war, was not a draft-dodger who had one of his Daddy’s tenants write him up a fake diagnosis.

But Trump did emerge from the White House finally, having had the police clear away the nasty people in the streets so that he could set up a photo op at an Episcopal Church where, until tear gas and rubber bullets drove them away, parishioners and clergy had been ministering to demonstrators with water and granola bars.

It drew a furious response from the bishop of the diocese as well as clergy around the country, as well as people who may or may not themselves be Episcopalians or churched at all.

In the end, Dear Leader’s momentary emergence appears to have been less a photo op than a cartoon op:

(Ann Telnaes)

(Steve Brodner)

 

(Nick Anderson)

I chuckled at Ann showing him holding the Bible upside down until I looked at the actual photo and realized she hadn’t invented the gag:

He comes with his own punchlines.

In fact, the entire event was so asinine in both concept and delivery that three of the best cartoonists in the business could only add little fillips of mockery.

 

Jack Ohman managed to knock out a pretty good one on the overall “How’d your week go?” topic, though he got this one up and posted before Punxsutawney Don emerged from his burrow and was frightened by his own shadow.

Which I think means we’re getting six more weeks of rioting.

Morten Morland seems correct in his depiction: Dear Leader is just as self-satisfied and proud in the midst of disaster as he was before the whole thing had blown up in his face.

 

And while we were watching the groundhog …

Joe Biden went out onto the streets of his native Wilmington to talk to protesters. Apparently there were no rubber bullets, no tear gas, no stun grenades and, well, not a whole lot of coverage, either.

On accounta Joe Biden is boring.

 

A small ray of hope

Here’s a cartoon from 2006 by Cory Thomas, which I’ve used a couple of times, most notably that year, when Fred Weary, an offensive lineman for the Houston Texans was stopped, harassed and Tasered for the crime of Driving While Black.

I wrote about it when it happened because, while his teammates and everyone else who knew him as a quiet good guy was outraged, the whole story just sounded too damned familiar.

Only all charges were dropped and I covered that, too.

Houston is not perfect, but they’re making an effort down there, and now, some 14 years after Weary’s incident, their police chief was interviewed on CNN.

It’s worth a listen.