“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.
… Have you no sense of decency?” — Joseph Welch
I’m not quite old enough to remember when Joseph Welch brought a halt to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror in 1954, but I’m old enough to remember the days before what happened in Buffalo yesterday was simply part of the normal American landscape.
There will be more cartoons as commentators catch up with the news, but Dr. MacLeod lays the issue squarely on the table, and, if there were a Welch/McCarthy moment coming, it would have come some time ago.
As it is, pious statements about “thoughts and prayers” are mocked by the left, and yet the GOP continues to issue them, if not in the same empty words, in the same empty manner.
Elise Stefanik, a top ranking GOP member of the House, was very saddened and offers her prayers, but other New Yorkers recall last fall, when the Albany Times Union called her out for campaigning on the Great Replacement Theory cited in the manifesto of the young gunman who murdered ten of her fellow New Yorkers.
And even before the shootings, Buffalo News cartoonist Adam Zyglis was identifying the true “groomers” who instill hatred and division in the next generation, providing them with high-sounding justification for their sociopathic beliefs and, as it turns out yet again, actions.
Rep. Stefanik having recently employed the lunatic term “pedo grifters,” which a staffer then tried to walk back in a call with an angry constituent:
First off, this is her personal Twitter. Just have to note that. And number two, “pedo” is not short for “pedophile,” it is “pedo” as in “children.” “Pedo” is, if you look it up on Google it’s-
Yeah, well, while you make excuses for her, your boss is doubling down on her program of hate and division:
She’s a real inspiration.
At least, she’s part of the movement that inspired Payton Gendron.
As to rghtwing lies about the formula shortage, even Michael Ramirez (Creators), who is certainly no libtard, acknowledges that a major contributor is Republican rewriting of trade agreements that have limited imports from Canada.
While we wait for cartoonists to catch up, Zyglis has run a few repeats on his Twitter site, reminding us that there’s really nothing new to say about it.
There really isn’t, though a few days before the Buffalo shootings, Ted Littleford made this commentary, comparing America’s attitude towards guns with its attitude towards pregnancy.
And I’m glad he didn’t pin this specifically on the GOP, because active Republican Party members are not a majority, but Americans who support them are close enough to a majority that writing off their hatred as a non-representative freak show is naive and dangerous.
As Patrick Chappatte observes from the high ground of Switzerland, Americans are not exactly providing a lot of moral leadership in the world at the moment.
(Funny/Not Funny: Chappatte reports that Instagram blocked this cartoon for going against their community standards.)
Of course, Chappatte also posted this cartoon last week, seemingly more confident in the American electorate than I am at the moment.
People keep circulating that Maya Angelou quote, “When people show you who they are the first time believe them.” But hatemongers and fearmongers like Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene and even pedophiles like Matt Gaetz and pedophile enablers like Jim Jordan get re-elected time and again.
A primary candidate for Secretary of State in Colorado is under investigation for tampering with voting machines and a man in jail awaiting trial for killing his wife just won a local GOP primary in Indiana.
They show us who they are, and we believe them, and then we vote for them.
Point is, good people turned out to protest abortion restrictions yesterday, but will they turn out again in November?
I know 10 people in Buffalo who won’t be voting in November, and, by the way, one of them was a good guy with a gun, but his bullet hit the murderer’s flak jacket and he was killed by return fire.
Sigh.
Let’s close on a more positive note:
With a hat tip to Bado, here is a powerful illustration by Norwegian cartoonist Siri Dokken, for a story about Ukrainian families split when the mother flees with the children while the father stays behind to fight.
I’d often thought of the fear those mothers and kids must have felt, wondering if they’d ever see him alive, but Dokken’s picture captures his emptiness in being left behind.
I almost wish I hadn’t run the story through a translator and found that the writer is objecting to the men’s lack of a choice.
(Here’s the WashPo article she references)
I suppose she’s right, but, given our current unwillingness to behave like one nation, Ukraine’s unity of purpose seems positive.
Like archy, I’m able to combine envy with incomprehension:
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wireswhy do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no senseplenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselvesand before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevitybut at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself