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CSotD: My first rerun in 14 years – Please read it!

“Comic Strip of the Day” has posted every morning since February 6, 2010, and I’ve never done a “Best Of.” So offering a repeat after 5,263 fresh postings ought to seem significant.

The best explanation of why I’m posting a rerun has to do with the rush to replace Joe Biden, and is explained in yesterday’s comment by Joy Reid:

There is more effort being spent on being first than on being right, and it’s not just a chase for clicks but a chase for being anointed as wise and thoughtful.

But, as Mark Jacob said, the true end result may not be clear to everyone:

 I worry that when it comes time for the fascists to frog-march journalists out of the newsroom at gunpoint, the journalists will compete for the exclusive rights to cover it.

I’m becoming numb to, if not accepting of, the notion that whatever happens is going to happen, but it does inspire me to repeat what I said in the wake of the 2020 election, when those who elected Biden hoped he would clean up the mess while those who planned to keep him from doing so were already starting their attacks on his age and capacity.

(At a time, I would note, when he was younger than Trump is now.)

Here’s what I posted on November 9, 2020, four days after the election.

I stand by it today.

CSotD: What do we do now?

Morten Morland (London Times) provides a pretty good picture of what Joe Biden is facing. Between things that never happened and things that never should have happened, this isn’t going to be a matter of quietly continuing but of a massive cleanup.

The good news is that, having been a vice-president who was genuinely consulted and kept in the loop, Biden has a pretty good idea of how things work. There’s also the possibility that, instead of throwing away all the briefing books they’d been left by the Obama administration, Trump’s staff squirrelled them away somewhere unread.

And perhaps will even permit access to them.

Still, he’s been left with a mess, and part of getting back into things like the Paris Accords, the World Health Organization and the Iran Treaty will depend on what simply involved issuing an executive order and stomping out of the room and what tantrums will take actual Senate action to undo.

But the world seems eager to welcome us back, or at least to be rid of Trump, as seen in this

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Anupoju Apparao — Brazil via India Cartoons)

(Jorge Sanchez Armas — Peru via India Cartoons)

We’ve lost a lot of credibility in the world, but perhaps, if we demonstrate a real cleansing, they might even be impressed with our resiliency, though I suppose it may be overly optimistic to expect anything more than a cautious, arms-length acceptance until we’ve genuinely proven ourselves.

Monte Wolverton may be a bit overly optimistic in his take, but I think he’s reading the tea leaves right, if we ratchet his enthusiasm back a bit to simply mean that we get a second chance.

Besides, it would be not simply naive to think that things will snap back into place but against our own history to think that that would make everything perfect.

For instance, the trade war with China and other protectionist acts have damaged our economic standing to the point where, while we are far from a lesser power, we no longer stride into the room as a giant.

Being an equal will take some getting used to.

Nor, despite Ed Hall‘s optimism, should the tumult of the past four years lure us into a haze of nostalgia.

Hall’s absolutely correct that Trump’s embrace — and even hiring — of white supremacists, plus his racist attacks on rapists and murderers from shithole countries, allowed some real scum to climb out from under that rock. But his absence will not make them disappear.

I saw a clip on social media of a young African-American woman who pointed out that, before Trump, she was marching in the streets to protest the death of Trayvon Martin, after all.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we had George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to make plain what had previously been sugar-coated and explained away with what Yeats called “polite, meaningless words,” in the sad, furious poem that demanded people stop being polite and meaningless in the face of crisis.

Cleaning up after Trump is only part of the challenge and, if you can get past the paywall, you can read an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on what comes next for progressives, now that a combination of oratorical restraint and massive shoe leather have restored the White House.

The alternative to being demonized as socialists cannot be to find yourself patted on the head and dismissed by the Democratic hierarchy, she insists.

These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.

However, we’re not there yet.

Dave Whamond echoes the words of Gerald Ford and the sins of Richard Nixon, as well as reports that the disgraced president wandered the White House halls at night, talking to the portraits of his predecessors.

A quiet Gerald Ford-style interlude could be a good thing, but one must question, in retrospect, whether his attempt to restore order by pardoning Nixon didn’t simply embolden the hard-core scofflaws and power freaks who continued to defend, and emulate, the Chief.

Bearing in mind that, while many of his crew did time for their crimes, Gordon Liddy, the least repentant of them all, became a conservative talk show host, paving the way for Oliver North and other felons to be embraced as patriots and heroes.

Moreover, Dear Leader is not fading into obscurity or even accepting the plain, obvious outcome of the election, as seen in this gloriously depressing piece by Ann Telnaes (Washington Post):

The punchline being, of course, that the final stage is supposed to be “acceptance,” and we’re unlikely to see that happy outcome.

Word on the street says sentiment even within his own circle is that Dear Leader should accept the election and show some class, with only his hardcore loyalists urging him to fight on.

The latter apparently not including the reluctant FLOTUS he dragged out of Manhattan.

Still, despite Biden’s excellent debate and town hall performances as well as his gracious and articulate speech accepting the outcome, Steve Kelley (Creators) and other rightwingers continue to replay the Trump campaign’s partyline attack on his mental capabilities.

And Gary Varvel (Creators) doubles down on the “feeble old man” insults, adding and perpetuating partisan, paranoid claims that the media and social platforms were prejudiced against conservatives.

Depicting Zuckerberg is a particularly egregious act of ignoring both his actions and a Republican investigation, but the effort will help perpetuate “alternative facts” in which truth is hostage to partisan loyalties.

We’ll see who ends up in jail, who ends up with a show on Fox, and who gets both.

Meanwhile, here’s where we’re at now:

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Comments 9

  1. Mike Tiefenbacher

    The fourth at least offered respite against the persistant aggravation of TV experts I had a lot of admiration pre-debate going the “Yes, but…” route after they’re told of the various reasons replacements they want to see substituted are impossible, as if their dismay somehow overcomes plain logic. I’d like them to ‘splain why we should be putting any faith at all in today’s polling, which has repeatedly been far from matching the actual results of multiple recent primaries and most Congressional races of 2022–or are they all so amnesiac as to not recall the inevitability of the “Red wave”? And, if they can’t, they obviously wouldn’t remember back to 1988 when Mike Dukakis, an earnest guy and faithful Democrat but not in any sense a tank driver, was up by 17% on July 27th, yet lost by eight points in the actual election–when polling was far more “accurate” than it is today. And the margin of error in Wednesday’s polls makes any conclusions about where America stands on Biden dubious at best…possibly down six, but also possibly down the same 1% he was polling before the debate. “Yes, but…” is coming out of the mouths of many people who should really know better.

  2. Randy R.

    Thanks for re-posting this. It’s amazing that nothing in this country has changed in the past four years, in that this post indeed remains (sadly) relevant and people are still willing to vote for this man-child who is nothing but a narcissistic agent of chaos (not change). The worst part is that this detestable petulant individual made it okay and acceptable to be openly racist and worse, and it is a Pandora’s box that we may not be able to close anytime soon. It’s an exhausting fight against stupidity and shrewd opportunists, but one that sadly must be fought.

  3. Tom Gillespie

    Thanks for the reminder; I hope that I can again have the sort of hope I had in late 2020. I remember it took me a few looks before seeing my favorite bit of Morland’s work: the action going on just outside the leftmost window.

  4. JB

    You’ve certainly presented a stunning and timely flashback today. Seen against the stark glare of late developments, it’s shocking how naive – even quaint – some of the perceptions in these panels now appear. No matter how savvy and sophisticated we believed we were at the time, I don’t know if any of us were truly prepared for the unthinkable chicanery and egregious, wholesale dismantling of once-sacred systems we’re currently experiencing.

    Maybe I’m STILL ridiculously idealistic and naive, but I fervently believe that the majority of America’s people, although punch-drunk from the impacts of recent events, is now sufficiently outraged – and hopefully still sane enough – to reject this blatant, sinister attack on their society and democracy and will, in November, unarguably repudiate the existential threat posed by Doris and his irredeemably amoral, unprincipled cronies.

    **The fine detail in that Morland panel alone provided an hour of study for me today. Sobering.

  5. AJ

    I dunno. At this point does it even matter who wins? SCOTUS has already declared that any president is effectively a God-King whom the law cannot touch.

    Sure, the focus now is on Trump/Biden, but what happens after?

    1. David R

      Not any president, just the ones that the Supreme Court says that there “official duties” include lawbreaking. They are the arbiters of what is official and what isn’t.

    2. Mike Peterson

      Well, if Biden wins, we can hope to fix things. If Trump wins, the worst will become the reality. Read Project 2025 and tell us whether you can see some kind of threat in there.But I’m willing to discuss it: Show me the times when knuckling under to a bully turned out to be the right answer.

  6. Rich Furman

    I know you’re not a huge fan of Josh Fruhlinger, but he said something on the fourth oh July that I can’t help but think describes the sample set of most of these “polls” we keep reading about: How do I know he’s dumb? Because he clearly doesn’t know who’s calling him in panel one and doesn’t want to talk to them but answers the phone anyway. It’s 2024, buddy! You can just send it straight to voicemail, except you never set up your voicemail, so the person calling you can’t even leave a voicemail!

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