Might as well start with a laugh, or as close as we can get to one. RJ Matson steps back from attempting to inspire horror over the lack of ethics on the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice’s refusal to take it seriously.
Maybe mockery is more effective than head-on criticism. It has been said that, if someone had snuck up behind Hitler at one of his early speeches and yanked down his pants, the crowd would have guffawed, he’d have lost all influence, and we’d have avoided both the Holocaust and World War II.
Well, it’s worth a try. We need to get SCOTUS back on the beam, and if analyzing their corruption isn’t moving things, perhaps ridiculing them might.
But the notion that Hitler was one particular man seems naive. If he had become a laughingstock, someone else would have arisen.
Nick Anderson points out the moral depravity of those who proclaim themselves Christian but demonstrate no sense of the teachings of the man they claim to follow.
Christ praised a hated Samaritan for behaving in a more godly manner than those who were supposedly among the elect. The self-proclaimed elect ignore that lesson.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who has championed the inclusion of religion in public life — has been elected by the people of Texas, 77 percent of whom claim to be Christian.
If his abject cruelty to migrants is not enough to raise doubts and turn them against him, there’s no reason to think pulling down his pants would produce any better results.
Nor is Abbott the issue. Trump adviser Stephen Miller reportedly suggested drone strikes to blow up migrant boats while they were still in international waters, and, given the reforms Trump is promising should he gain a second term, throwing babies in the river seems almost restrained.
As Rick McKee (Counterpoint) suggests, it’s not a matter of voters analyzing Trump’s proposals, or those of Abbott or those of DeSantis.
It’s also not a matter of looking at the (alleged) crimes the convicted, accused and indicted man has committed.
Even if you were to accept that the MAGA faithful truly are under assault from migrants and transsexuals and Jews and minorities, he has managed to create a fantasy world in which they don’t look for a more righteous savior but take the accusations against him as false, regardless of proof, and as accusations against themselves.
If DeSantis’s campaign is not catching on, perhaps it’s because he has failed to make people identify with him to that extent.
DeSantis is DeSantis, but Trump is us.
And I don’t know who Ted Cruz is, but here he is in a
Juxtaposition of the Day
In case you missed it, the Barbie movie has a scene in which Barbie travels from fantasy to reality around the world, and Vietnam got upset because her trail, traced in dots, seems to replicate China’s claimed border in the South China Sea, which they dispute.
Under normal circumstances, that would provoke a shrug, an apology from the studio for the misunderstanding and a loss of ticket sales in Ho Chi Minh City. But these aren’t normal circumstances, and so Cruz has taken it up as a cause, siding with the Vietnamese against China, not so much in the territorial dispute as in the cinematic one.
Wexler mocks him with a reminder of when he deserted his freezing constituents for sun-baked Cancun, but Zyglis offers a more grim response to this absurd distraction from real issues.
It is yet another example of the GOP accusing others of grooming through culture while themselves brainwashing through law, including both banning books that don’t cleave to accepted themes and rewriting history to ignore some facts and simply lying about others and do click this link because it’s a stunner.
I suppose if it were only Donald Trump or only Ron DeSantis or only Ted Cruz, we could pull down his pants and be done with it.
But you can’t pull down all the pants of the millions of people who believe in them and who follow the crooked path they blaze.
The results of this decentralized, non-geographic Civil War show up in all sorts of places, with Jimmy Margulies (KFS) pointing out how a single senator has turned his objection to a medical benefit into a full-bore attack on America’s military.
It’s important to note, BTW, that, while Tuberville is holding up military promotions of senior officers with the excuse of being pro-life, the military does not pay for elective abortions. Under the Hatch Act, they cannot.
Rather, they pay expenses for military members who must travel to receive medical treatment, but they pay only for the travel, not for the treatment, and this benefit is touted by the military as critical to recruiting, such that Tuberville’s hissy fit manages to damage the armed forces at both the top and bottom levels.
Which perhaps in some way helps explain why conservatives are adamant about continuing to keep the names of traitors on our military bases. Even the Confederacy yanked down Braxton Bragg’s pants, but he remains a hero in the eyes of unreconstructed rebels.
I’d love to explain it, but it doesn’t make any sense.
So let’s have another
Juxtaposition of the Day
This pair may seem unconnected, unless you recall a proposal I made some time ago.
As deAdder notes, murders that would be front page news in other countries are tucked inside American papers, or mentioned late in broadcasts, because they’ve become common and inconsequential.
Meanwhile, as Pett notes, newscasters continue to update us on the stock market, though it is primarily a playground for the elite with only residual impact on the average American.
My proposal was that, instead of ending each newscast by reporting on the rise and fall of the stock market, newscasters end with the current shootings, both woundings and deaths, and the percentage of increase or decrease each day.
Of course, I’m kidding. Very few people pay any attention to the statistics of the market and I’m sure they’d be just as uninterested in shooting stats.
Excellent cartoons and commentary as usual but bonus points for ending the piece with the Byrds’ “Chimes of Freedom.” Now find a way to end an article with the group’s astounding version of “Bells of Rhymney.”
I’m with Mr. Umphred on today’s column. Excellent as usual. Let me suggest a song as well: Steppenwolf’s “Ostrich”.
I often wonder how the world would look if the Native Americans had deported the European migrants or destroyed their ships. Maybe they should have put razor wire along the East Coast?
Or if the Haitian Revolution had inspired the enslaved people in North America to action as much as it had terrified the enslavers in the American South to increase cruelty. Or if John Brown had become a hero of his own time instead of a martyr long after his heroic sacrifice. I am not mocking you, AJ; you just got me thinking. I, too, would have started with the Native Americans, whose nobility, in their dealings with their immigrants, was matched in equal and opposite ignobility from their earliest treaties to their current treatment today. It is too bad such factual history is feared as wokeness when internalizing such truths has so much potential for creating citizens deserving of a democratic government. Thanks for making me ponder, AJ.
I would like to know why there isn’t an oversight person/committee over the Supreme Court? Why can’t a member be fired if there’s evidence against him/her? On the crazies that seem rampant in the southern states; the terror they have any one other than themselves is just unenlightenment. Evolve out stupidity!
Your idea of ending news casts with casualties from the fire arms flood might not be new. I remember during the Vietnam war the news casts had running or daily totals of those casualties.
So that might be a precedent.