CSotD: The Jester and the Fools
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There is an old, unproven concept that, if at one of his early mass rallies someone had snuck up behind Hitler and yanked his pants down, it would have so destroyed his strong-man mystique that he never would have come to power and World War II would have been avoided.
But by the time he was drawing the kind of crowds the premise suggests, his guards would have grabbed his assailant and his loyal throngs would have seen it as one of example of why we need a strong man in power.
No doubt they’d have ascribed the assault as a plot against the people’s hero, and, rather than wearing a bandage on his ear, Hitler would have started wearing suspenders as a reminder of the dangers he faced on behalf of his people.
Today, and in real life, Gavin Newsom’s satirical mockery is being seen by MAGA loyalists as a childish, foolish, pointless attack on Dear Leader that merely demonstrates the desperation of the Deep State or Democrats or maybe they’re the same thing.
However, even if you can’t manage to afflict the comfortable, there’s a lot to be said for comforting the afflicted, and for those who don’t go along with the puffed-up, all-caps middle-school screeds on Truth Social, it’s fun to see Newsom poke a hole in the balloon and let out some of the hot air.
The point of his efforts is less to discourage the loyalists than to buoy up the spirits of the resistance, and a bit of pointed humor seems to be accomplishing that a lot better than letters of concern from Congressional leaders.
It is necessary but insufficient. That is, it won’t do the job by itself, but jabs at the mighty remind people that it’s possible to stand up.
Bennett comments here on Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), who is resisting pressure to meet with his constituents.
First of all, as Tip O’Neil said, all politics is local, and when legislators turn their backs on their own people, it represents a chink in the armor that is seen in Tennessee and felt in Washington.
The point is not that Fleischmann declines to speak with his constituents, but that he is one of several legislators who has either refused to hold town halls or has tried, only to be inundated with complaints and with heckling.
That sort of trend is encouraged by things like Newsom’s bold mockery and the massive crowds seen at coverage of the Bernie & AOC traveling circus, and by driving past throngs of friends and neighbors who have turned out at No Kings rallies in towns across the country.
But it’s not as if only one side was employing spin.
There are always rumors floating around, though they gain bite in a divided nation.
I don’t recall any tales of Deep State conspiracies when Sara Jane Moore took a pot shot at President Ford. She was written off as a random nutjob.
But when Tom Crooks made a futile attempt on Trump’s life, the rumor mill geared up to suggest a conspiracy in which a kid who was such a lousy shot that he couldn’t make his high-school rifle team was recruited for the task.
In such a harshly divided, somewhat paranoid world, Elvis being alive is a silly urban legend, but Trump being dead is presented by Varvel as a deep-rooted political conspiracy spread by the Democratic Party.
And there’s more, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Dear Leader has declared Chicago to be the “murder capital of the world” and a crime-ridden hell-hole that desperately needs a federal invasion of armored cars and masked thugs to restore order.
It’s encouraging that, even as the announcement was being made, fact checkers were pointing out that, as in Washington, DC, crime is down in Chicago. The only serious increases have been in property crimes, which may reflect the economy more than the efficacy of local and state authorities.
It’s not a secret, nor do you have to be an expert to check it out. How long it takes to discover the facts depends on how fast you can type “chicago crime rate” into Google News. The answers pop right out.
You do have to know the difference between raw numbers and rates. Chicago is a city of 2.7 million and so should be expected to have more murders than, say, Memphis, population 610,919.
But going by murder rate, Chicago has only 17.5 murders per 100,000 people, while Memphis stands at 40.6 murders per 100,000. Less than a quarter the population, more than twice the murder rate.
Newsweek has a list of 22 cities with a higher murder rate than Chicago, but it doesn’t matter if you didn’t want to know, or if you take Dear Leader’s word as truth.
Nor do statistics matter, if you accept that the Mayor of Chicago and Governor of Illinois are working to keep crime down in order to resist Dear Leader’s heartfelt concern.
It may be paranoid to note that DC, Illinois, California and Maryland, targets of Dear Leader’s loving concern, are Blue States, while Tennessee is Red, but, as they say, even paranoid people have some real enemies.
It’s also not paranoid to point out that Dear Leader doesn’t know what trade imbalances mean or how tariffs work, and to speculate that he might not know the difference between raw numbers and rates.
But we do know his uncle never met the Unabomber, that he was not an outstanding athlete in high school and that he did not graduate from college with honors.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 30,573 times …
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
The good news, such as it is, is that people appear to be wising up to RFK Jr and his views of health and medicine.
If Newsom’s mockery makes Trump more vulnerable to questioning, it seems even more likely that children becoming seriously ill would take the shine off Trump’s Cabinet of Grotesqueries faster than any outrages from Bondi, Hegseth or Noem.
I suppose we’ll see. I hope your kids aren’t the guinea pigs in this experiment.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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