CSotD: Cold as ICE
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Back in the days when I really did a “Comic Strip of the Day,” and only needed one, I had a policy that I would only hold daily strips for 24 hours but could hold a Sunday for six days, following the Audit Bureau of Circulation rules that said a daily paper is “dead” the next morning but a Sunday can be counted until the next Sunday edition appears.
Now that I try to run themed compositions, I’m more lax in letting a cartoon hang around in my files until it fits in with a group.
I explain all this because Ramirez ran this cartoon today, Sunday, July 13, and I wonder how long he had it in mind. It’s nearly six months since Joe Biden left office, and he’s seemed pretty quiet since then. There’s been some response to Tapper’s book, but Biden certainly isn’t running for office.
So Ramirez’s cartoon raises this question: “Who cares?”
Right now, today, we’ve got a guy in office who is so lazy that he didn’t bother to prepare before meeting with the president of Liberia, and so expressed surprise that the fellow speaks English, which is that country’s official language.
Not that anyone who finished the eighth grade should have to look it up, since everybody else learned in history class that Liberia was founded by Americans to resettle emancipated slaves.
I suppose that if Dear Leader heard that its capital is Monrovia, he’d assume they had been honoring Marilyn, but, even then, it would suggest a familiarity with the English language.
His being a lazy ignoramus extends into much more serious areas. The other day, he was asked about Pete Hegseth failing to ship approved weapons to Ukraine and his answer was that he didn’t know anything about it.
Supposedly, he’s deep in talks about ending the war there, but seems to do so by taking sides with Ukraine on even days and with Russia on odd days, and paying attention to what the Defense Department is up to on no days at all.
He thinks his job is to issue fatwas against Rosie O’Donnell, tour Ron DeSantis’s concentration camp in Florida and see that ICE has all the resources and permissions that they need to wage war against brown people.
Pardon me if I’m not focusing on whether Joe Biden should still be president.
Pardon me, too, if I think a man of fading powers surrounded by a large and capable staff of competent, well-intentioned professionals sure seemed preferable to a would-be dictator surrounded by unqualified toadies, which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
I suggested the other day that Trump’s appointments seem like proposals for a sequel to Idiocracy, but, if they were, it would be a very lame attempt.
Perhaps the Republicans and the Federalist Society should have hired Mary Vernieu, the casting director for Idiocracy, because their efforts to create an ensemble have fallen desperately flat.
Both cartoonists take advantage of the gifts they’ve been given:
Walters accurately compares the DOJ leadership to the delusional OJ Simpson, who may have actually believed he didn’t do it, just as they may actually believe there’s not only no client list (which may be true) but also that there’s no way to identify the grown-up faces that surely appear in all those videos of underage girls being assaulted.
Meanwhile, Kristi the Gnome has proven incapable of doing her job. Jones does a masterful takedown of her shortcomings, but beyond the hilarity of her vacuous incapability is the recently-revealed fact that Texans calling for help in the wake of the flood couldn’t find any.
Whatever her personal shortcomings as a serious person, she may have more deaths on her hands than just that poor dog. And that poor, largely forgotten goat.
Whatever unintentional harm may have come to those people in Texas whose calls for help went unanswered, there is deliberate harm being visited upon civilians in California where, as Horsey puts it, we’ve returned to the outrages of a military occupation that sparked the American Revolution.
The Boston Massacre, in which British troops fired into a crowd of civilians, came about as a result of insults and rocks hurled by the protesters, but it appears to have been a somewhat spontaneous confrontation.
The situation in Los Angeles seems different, in that King Donald has specifically authorized ICE agents to defend themselves however necessary against protesters.
Granted, his order didn’t specify that they were permitted to shoot anybody, but he explored that possibility in his first term, when he was, fortunately, surrounded by reasonable people who restrained his worst instincts.
While the death of a farmworker during the recent ICE raid of a marijuana farm appears to have been accidental, the confrontational, hostile attitude now being encouraged seems destined to create more tragedy.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Having started today by criticizing Ramirez, I’ll end with one he certainly got right. Shari Redstone shamed herself, and, as Margulies suggests, betrayed a network with a long-established reputation for solid, responsible journalism carried out in the public interest.
But it helped her make $2 billion, and what else matters these days?
We cannot assume that the Free Press enshrined in our Constitution will adequately police an administration prone to soliciting and accepting bribes, when the plutocrats are so willing to play along.
Several people have said that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, that, in order to speak your mind, you needed to have the necessary equipment to publish your opinions.
That has become a shaky premise, first with xerography that encouraged samizdat behind the Iron Curtain, and now with the flourishing of electronic media. And just in time, as CBS has joined ABC in bending the knee and kissing the hindquarters with a multi-million dollar payoff to Dear Leader.
Those networks appear to be joining the Washington Post and LA Times in pledging their loyalty at a time when America is, once more, being divided between Loyalists and Patriots.
Patriotic journalists are leaving the Tory media and forming Substacks, but can anyone guarantee the continued existence of the Internet?
First they came for the immigrants …
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