CSotD: Forbidden Topics
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I’m surprised more cartoonists haven’t spoken up about the revelations of Joe Biden’s fade and his party’s (apparent) attempts to keep it from becoming public knowledge.
Near as I can tell, the controversy is not over the accuracy of Tapper and Thompson’s book but over whether it’s a topic we should be addressing, given the crisis the Trump administration has thrust us into.
There’s a reason Toro’s cartoon has become an instant classic. Benson is correct that a great number of Democrats are closing their eyes and ignoring the issue. As she draws it, Biden’s condition is not the albatross, but the cover-up is. I’d suggest that it’s not because it happened but because they are refusing to confront that it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
When Biden ran, I was all in favor of a Jerry Ford one-and-done cleanup. I didn’t expect him to go for a second term and, given his age, didn’t want him to. Granted, Ford ran for a full term in 1976, but he was 64 years old, not 81. I assumed that Biden knew how old he was, and that he shared my I doubts that he had four more years in him.
If he didn’t know it, somebody should have told him — the party leaders or Jill — well before the 2024 campaign began. By the time that disastrous debate revealed his fading abilities, it was too late for someone else to mount a credible candidacy and I said so at the time.
If he’d stayed in, he’d have likely lost, given his cratering approval ratings and his incapacity for campaigning, but the Democrats lost anyway. If he hadn’t run at all, they might have had a lively primary and a fully-fledged race.
Which brings us to the critical fact: The albatross is not Biden but the pattern that produced his second run. When he won, it was after a full campaign that started with a primary featuring him, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg, which allowed a full airing of positions and proposals. Then he not only won but beat the incumbent.
However, when Hillary Clinton ran, her nomination was a coronation with no credible competition. As with Biden’s second go-round, the Democratic leadership assumed they had a candidate and didn’t encourage any discussion.
That’s the albatross. If you’re going to abandon the primaries and go back to the smoke-filled room, you’ve got to have sharp elbows and sharper knives, and you’ve got to come up with a better candidate than a woman already hated by a large number of people or a man whose time you know has passed.
That’s the lesson that the Democrats need to learn from history. Or else the rest of us will just stand by and watch it happen over and over again.
And then there’s this:
Here’s another opportunity to take off the blindfold and face the unpleasantry, and not only have the world’s governments largely ignored the horrors, but too many commentators in this country — both political cartoonists and the editors who choose cartoons — have avoided the nasty letters they’d get for criticizing the ghastly status quo in Gaza.
The whole world is watching, but who’s speaking up?
Katauskas and other Australians have made their opinions known, Harry Burton pipes up from Ireland, and dissenting voices have been heard from the UK.
Belgian cartoonist du Bus has also made his feelings known. The caption reads “At last we’ll have peace.”
A perusal of Cartoon Movement demonstrates that the world’s cartoonists have been far from silent, even if their governments don’t share their sense of crisis.
But the Yanks — who still hold some leadership position in the world — have been largely silent. Joel Pett’s piece acknowledges the horror, but he’s had little company in doing so, and his commentary seems as much about Trump passing by Israel as it is about the situation itself.
Deering, too, speaks to the surrounding situation while tacitly acknowledging the central point without directly addressing it.
His cartoon may explain why so many are silent on the topic, and I’ll admit to not wanting the attention of extremists whose own blindfolds keep them from seeing how many Jewish students have been in those college demonstrations and how many Israeli Jews are firmly against their government’s actions.
It doesn’t mean they support Hamas and it doesn’t mean they don’t want the remaining hostages released. And it certainly doesn’t mean that they are “antisemitic.”
Have some people said stupid things? Of course. Just as some people did during demonstrations against the Vietnam War, when you could have 1,000 people peacefully, responsibly calling for peace and one loudmouth waving a North Vietnamese flag.
And as I’ve said many times, if you have 1,000 people singing “Give Peace a Chance” and one clown dressed as Uncle Sam with a plastic machine gun, I know whose photo will be in the paper the next day.
I also know from having had friends from the Catholic ghettoes of Ulster that Le Lievre is right: The harder you push, the more moderates you push into radicalism. It was true in Vietnam and true in Ulster, so why wouldn’t it be true in Gaza?
In the last Gaza elections in 2006, Hamas only won 44% of the vote and didn’t register a majority in any district. But 100% of Gazans, including many far too young to vote or to have political opinions, are being punished.
Well, nits make lice, as Cromwell’s men are said to have cried at Drogheda, and as Chivington reportedly told his men at Sand Creek, and as has been said to justify cruelty to children for ages.
And so if children escape the bombings but are starving in Gaza, what of it? Their parents, or neighbors, or somebody their neighbors know, may be Hamas. If you feed them and they grow up, they may also become Hamas.
Danziger suggests it’s the philosophy behind ICE, though, so far, less deadly.
At least less deadly if kids can find cancer treatments in the countries to which we exile them.
(Randomly chosen cover version)
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