Clay Bennett (CTFP) seems more surprised by Dick Cheney’s decision than I was, which is to say I wasn’t surprised by his decision but by the fact that he made his intentions public. However, it is, after all, one of a surprising number of such endorsements beginning to emerge.
If I were a traditional, old school Republican, I’d be very worried about the future of my party. It’s a party with a proud tradition and a roster of great Americans.
In the days of Watergate, there were hardline partisans who stood by Nixon to the bitter end, but there were many more who swallowed hard and accepted the findings of investigators.
This time around, however, the party refused to even sit on the committee investigating the events of January 6, and those members who did — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — have since been banished.
In the months leading up to the 2024 elections, we’ve seen a number of people who worked in the Trump White House cross party lines to endorse the Harris/Walz ticket. This is beyond a quiet determination to privately vote for the Democratic candidate and is, rather, an open declaration against their own party’s nominee. (Mike Pence has not endorsed Harris, but says he won’t vote for Trump.)
The surprise is in their willingness to go public with their intentions, but if the party is to have a future, its traditional members are going to have to step up. The Whig Party splintered in the lead-up to the Civil War, and that may be the fate of the Republicans as well.
Perhaps we should all be less concerned with the prospect of a Whig-style fracture, however, and more concerned with preventing another civil war.
And while I don’t mind that the whole world is watching, I’d rather they didn’t participate, as noted in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Jones and Bramhall take different courses in discussing the revelation that Russia has been pouring millions into a disinformation campaign in this country.
Jones has fun with Putin’s sarcastic endorsement of Harris, a joke in the wake of the Justice Department’s revelations that, as noted here yesterday, at least one cartoonist took seriously. Since I was fooled by a fraud in the same posting, I can’t land on Varvel too hard, but the fact remains that Putin was kidding.
Bramhall takes a more serious approach, because, first of all, it’s hard to comprehend that the influencers receiving these bribes didn’t question them. Tenet Media, which was (allegedly) shelling out the Russian money has abruptly shut down, and it had been reported that they were aware of the source of funding, though we’ll have to wait for confirmation on that.
But how can anyone receive $400,000 a month and not suspect a problem, particularly since the DOJ says one of them was told to circulate Tucker Carlson’s Russian supermarket video and didn’t want to, but decided to, well, follow orders? Orders from whom?
The influencers are claiming to be the victims in all this, but, in my mind, it’s one thing to be suckered by a Putin joke (or, yes, a Betty Bowers joke) and quite another to be fooled into thinking the Tooth Fairy has left $400,000 under your pillow.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out, but let’s not forget that “the great Alphonse Capone” was undone by accountants.
The Arlington Cemetery issue is not going away, and Dave Whamond drew this parody of a B. Kliban cartoon that is, for obvious reasons, a favorite among cartoonists:
Kliban’s gag was purposeful nonsense, but Whamond twists it to fit the sincere egotism that led Trump to exploit dead Americans in defiance of cemetery regulations, including the assault on a cemetery employee by his entourage.
Trump now claims the confrontation never happened, though earlier he had promised to release a video showing what did happen, which perhaps got lost along with the reformed medical coverage plan he also promised to release. I blame Louis DeJoy.
But Trump did, at least, explain his plan to make child care more affordable for working parents:
Philip Bump did an analysis of this stream-of-consciousness response and traced how Trump may have been processing the moment. However, knowing how he got there is not a reassurance that the old fellow has the mental sharpness to run the nation.
Verbal gobbledegook aside, and despite his “honors” degree from Wharton, he clearly has no idea how tariffs work and who pays them.
Speaking of which, if Chip Bok (Creators) wants to criticize Harris’s proposal to tax unrealized gains, he should learn how capital gains work in the first place. Under current law, when you sell your stock, you pay taxes on any gain in value.
And that’s true even if you’re not, as her proposal says, worth $100 million already. She’d have to win the White House and both houses of Congress to get this through, but we should at least know what it means before deciding what we think of it.
I’m disinclined to run more school shooting cartoons, because they’re mostly all the same. But JD Crowe cites a Brian Kemp boast from Twitter in 2021 that should indeed haunt him today: When the Giffords Law Center gave Georgia an F for its gun laws, he defiantly declared:
I’ll wear this “F” as a badge of honor. Our 2nd Amendment is sacred, and I’ll never back down from defending Georgians’ constitutional rights.
However, it’s not what he said four years ago that matters. What matters is what he does now to prevent more unnecessary deaths.
That’s as much a challenge for Georgia voters as it is for Kemp himself.
Joe Heller sends us out on a light note, but he’s tapping into something I’ve heard several people say. In particular, I’ve heard people regret that they made a donation to a political campaign because of the flood of cell phone spam it unleashed.
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when politicians had to hire boiler rooms full of people to make annoying phone calls. Now a single flick of a finger can target an entire sucker list.
Ain’t progress wonderful?
Now here’s an appearance by James Darren that somehow missed most of the obituaries:
Kieth Knight also did a parody with “Captain Bonespurs” as Kliban’s cartoonist.
You know, it occurs to me that, in all the time I’ve been reading your column and all the time before that since I’ve been interested in political cartoons, I have yet to come across a single honest cartoon from the right that isn’t an outright lie, a distortion of the facts, disingenuous in some shape or form, bullying or plain old repulsive propaganda.
There’s a selectivity to that. I don’t often feature cartoons that indulge in spin, but save my criticism for either lies or simply getting it wrong. Perhaps one difference is that I tend to ignore left-wing extremism because they don’t seem to have much influence.
I donated to the Democrats and then was able to unsubscribe from their 5-8x per days request for donation. To my surprise, it actually worked. I haven’t heard a peep in many weeks. By the way, I think you can unsubscribe from the Dems even if you don’t donate.
Also in Georgia: Ahmed Arbury could not be reached for comment.