CSotD: In Which I Lose a Year

I woke up this morning feeling really refreshed, but couldn’t tell why until I began going through the political cartoons and realized I’d somehow slept through the past year and missed the mid-term elections entirely. As Steve Breen (Creators) and others have noted, it’s time to start up the 2024 presidential campaign!

I’m disappointed, since the 2022 mid-terms were really important. I hope they turned out okay and I assume that, if we’re having an election in 2024, it means that either the Republicans didn’t gain too much of an advantage or else that SCOTUS turned down their bid to put election results in the hands of state legislators rather than voters.

But onward and upward. The 2024 presidential campaign has begun and, as Breen indicates, the Democrats have nominated the ancient, wretched, aged and very old Joe Biden.

 

He’s so old …. (How old is he?) … that Rob Rogers (Counterpoint) has him off at the home playing shuffleboard, because, y’know, he’s really old and, as noted here, kind of  incompetent.

 

And Jill isn’t much younger, Andy Marlette (Creators) points out. She’s so stupid that she thinks Latinos are not one homogeneous voting bloc, that there is a great deal of diversity within the Spanish-speaking community and that people in San Antonio eat breakfast tacos, which is racist and horrible.

I haven’t figured out why.

 

Lalo Alcaraz (AMS) chalks it up to partisan mudslinging, but what does he know about Latino culture, eh?

To switch off the sarcasm for a moment, here’s what I do know: First, I have eaten a fair number of breakfast tacos in Denver and what you buy on the street there tastes pretty good. But I’ve never been to San Antonio, and I have learned that, not only is Mexican food different than Cuban food, but it’s pretty diverse within itself, what with Tex/Mex and New Mexican and Californian, plus quite a variety in Mexico itself.

I also know that, when I had my serial stories for kids translated into Spanish by someone in Brownsville, they also worked well for newspapers in Colorado and California, but not so well in Florida, where the local Spanish is more Caribbean and different enough to matter.

Which I already knew because Maria and Luis had done a bit about it on Sesame Street years earlier.

And I recall a conversation over a pool game with a couple of construction workers who explained that they were Tejanos and not Chicanos, in part because of where they came from and in part because, to them, “chicano” was an internal bit of slang roughly equivalent to “dude,” so that gabachos referring to Spanish-speaking people as Chicanos was like white people referring to African-Americans as “Brothers.”

But it’s still a perfectly acceptable term in Colorado.

Where I swear to god Spanish-speaking people eat breakfast tacos.

I’ve seen them do it.

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Michael Ramirez – Creators)

 

(Darrin Bell — KFS)

So, anyway, I still don’t know why we’re suddenly talking about 2024 now, but apparently we are. I also don’t know where Ramirez got his approval rating, but I checked this morning and Five-Thirty-Eight pegs Biden’s approval rating at 38.6%, which is very low but still isn’t where Ramirez has it. I suspect some cherry-picking.

Bell — who has been very hard on Biden lately — seems closer to my expectations, in that a lot of Democrats want Biden to step aside but, if faced with a choice between him and Trump or Desantis or whoever the GOP dredges up, would vote for him.

I’m hoping that bleeds over into the 2022 mid-terms and that the “the enemy of my enemy is still not my friend” attitude being exhibited on line is either coming out of the Petrograd troll factories or is simply the ravings of a small subset of nincompoops.

As Bell suggests, I suspect the majority of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents will weigh their choices with a goal not of winning internal arguments but of winning the elections.

 

Though David Horsey makes a compelling case that there sure seems to be a reluctance to give Biden credit for much of anything.

Someone on Twitter noted that, now that gas prices are falling (40 cents per gallon here), the Fox crew that blamed Biden for rising gas prices — without explaining how he had influenced similar price increases around the world — are declaring that the prices are falling too fast and that we’re all gonna die. Or something.

Ah well. It’s not that no good deed goes unpunished. It’s that most of them go unremarked entirely, including on the left side of the aisle where approving of anything seems to be a symptom of being a suck-up.

As Voltaire didn’t say, “Protect me from my friends; my enemies I can handle.”

 

Elsewhere in the News

And if the Biden 2024 commentary makes me feel like I must have slept through a year, the release of video from the Uvalde massacre makes me feel the opposite. It’s not that Gary Markstein (Creators) is wrong, but there wasn’t much in the video that we didn’t already know.

The police response was too slow — which was acknowledged by authorities immediately — and the release of information has also been too slow, which the press has rightfully pointed out.

So Markstein is right, but those who accused “the Uvalde Police” of cowardice are badly misreading things. Though we still don’t know how it happened, the bizarre delay had to do with a totally uncoordinated response in which nobody seemed to know who was in charge.

Things might have gone better if it had, indeed, been “the Uvalde Police” at the scene instead of a mish-mash of regional departments, and we still don’t know why there wasn’t a plan that everyone knew and could follow.

Specifically, we’ve known for weeks that the officers inside the school talked of moving in but were waiting for orders that never came.

The real questions remain unaddressed.

 

Though Ted Littleford wraps up the real issue, which is that the Supreme Court has left it within Congress’s power to restrict access to weapons of war that have no legitimate civilian purpose.

If you want to call out anyone for cowardice, start in Washington, not Uvalde.