CSotD: The Good, The Bad and The Bigly
Skip to comments
Another of those where-do-we-start days, but fortunately Tom the Dancing Bug has not only provided the big picture, but has done so in explain-it-as-if-I-were-in-kindergarten fashion.
If we wanted, we could just run in circles offering theories and insights for everything here until the cows come home, or, more appropriately, until the chickens come home to roost, because they surely will.
The serious part is the administration’s assault upon the Constitution. Much of it, for many of us, remains something that’s happening to those people over there, which gives us the luxury of sitting back with an occasional tsk-tsk while we wait for things to straighten themselves out.
Which reminds me of Shop on Main Street, a classic movie from Czechoslovakia’s film renaissance, in which a not-terribly-bright fellow is appointed Aryan controller of a sweet old Jewish woman’s shop. She’s nearly deaf and thinks he works for her, so they get along nicely until the day comes that the Nazis are rounding up the Jews and he has to explain things to her and face his own role in the horror.
Similarly, we’re seeing individual cases around the country where the people being rounded up are not those strangers over there but our neighbors right here, and it’s encouraging to see how neighborhoods and small communities have stood up when the war crimes were unfolding right under their noses.
But that does make sacrificial lambs of the people being dragged away by the masked, heavily armed secret police.
We said, a few years ago, that if you’d ever wondered what you’d have done in Germany of the early 30’s, you were doing it now. It was true then, and obviously what we were doing was not sufficient.
However, I feel there’s more resistance building now, though I guess we’ll find out.
The lower courts seem willing to assert law and to state when it is being violated. I wish, however, that I felt more confident in the Roberts Court, because we can’t live forever on stinging, eloquent dissents from Sonia Sotomayor.
The problem, as others have observed, is that our government was established more or less on the honor system, assuming that people of good intent would obey the rules and that citizens would only elect people of good intent.
But here’s where we’re at: I was looking for confirmation of a story about a tourist seized on the street and hustled off by masked thugs while her 12-year-old daughter was left behind, but couldn’t find it in the pile of stories that pop up if you Google for “tourist arrested by ICE.”
That’s how common these outrages have become.
We’ve still got enough First Amendment left that we’re hearing about these brutal seizures. But with CBS about to bend the knee, ABC having already done so, and the Washington Post and LA Times adopting loyalist coverage policies, we shouldn’t take anything for granted.
There is some very dark comic relief available, since Pete Hegseth has addressed the rightwing fad for macho macho men by having a makeup studio installed in the Pentagon.
But the need is plain: He has to look handsome while he’s heading up the outrage at the heart of this
Juxtaposition of the Day
The Navy is removing the name of Harvey Milk from a ship, and that naval veteran and openly gay murder victim is not the only civil rights icon being erased from the seas: The plan is to also remove the names of Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Lucy Stone, Cesar Chavez and Medgar Evers from naval vessels.
I like Bramhall’s suggestion, particularly since Milk and Tubman were honored for their military service in the Korean and Civil wars respectively, only to have their names erased by a draft-dodger. But perhaps Rogers’ suggestion is better, since it references all those people about to be disappeared from history.
Molina has a more pointed suggestion, based on Hegseth’s apparent inability, or unwillingness, to maintain military security standards, either on his phone or in terms of sharing classified information with friends and family members.
Clay Jones points to the naming/renaming controversy as an insulting distraction for more weighty subjects, as the Senate prepares to deal with a major piece of legislation that is, itself, larded with odd little irrelevancies with significant implications.
Fortunately for its opponents, even the spending parts of this spending bill have attracted negative attention, and the whole thing may turn out to be one more example of the nearly-nothing this Congress has accomplished. The Republicans want it to pass, but they’re divided between hard right and MAGA right, and, given the narrow margins in both houses, it doesn’t take many rebels to upset the apple cart.
You don’t have to visit Congress to discover discord and dysfunction. It is, perhaps, not surprising that a Hollywood-style bromance would end with a Hollywood-style break-up, and Trump and Musk have already said enough to prove that adolescent melodrama isn’t trivial when the stakes are high.
Those of us in the Peanut Gallery are watching to see if Trump really does cancel the Space X contracts, and to see if his name really does appear in the pedophile records of Jeffery Epstein. It’s like that classic definition of ambivalence: Watching your mother-in-law go over the cliff in your new Cadillac.
Ambivalence seems like all we’ve got left. Morland captures the mood in the meeting between Dear Leader and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, mostly small-talk in which Trump sympathized with him about the results of D-Day while Merz assured him that the Germans were glad to have seen Hitler defeated.
Chappatte took a more global view of the meeting, suggesting that Trump’s America First policies, and his crackdown on people in his own country, give him little time or energy for being the dominant nation in the free world.
Despite the flaming incompetence being unleashed by RFK Jr’s crew of incompetents, including a guiding report based on nonexistent medical studies, we can at least look in on one of their meetings to see how the MAHA movement flavors Dear Leader’s dealings with world leaders:
Comments 16
Comments are closed.