CSotD: Words That Must Be Spoken
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“Don’t call me Shirley” is a funny line, but our current situation is far from it. Still, it’s an irresistible response when, day after day, we keep saying “Surely you can’t be serious.”
He is serious. And it’s okay to call him “Shirley” because it’s no more ludicrous than calling him “Mr. President.”
What began as an odd moment in our history has expanded into a disaster and, quite possibly, the last moment in our history and the beginning of the story of some other nation.
As for Weyant’s cartoon, there’s little joke in that, either. Trump has gone from questioning the integrity of our voting systems to attempting to violently overturn the results to, now, seeking to impede things to keep voting from happening, except in the empty mockery of a dictatorship’s fixed-outcome counterfeit performance.
To understand the latest clue in this ongoing process, Google the Gleiwitz Incident, a 1939 false-flag operation in which German soldiers in Polish army uniforms staged an attack on a radio station, planting corpses to seem like Polish invaders killed in the attack.
Then consider a fatal attack on a small boat in international waters, in which 11 people are killed and the incident is declared a victory over drug smugglers.
There’s no evidence of drugs and no evidence that anyone attempted to stop, much less search, the boat. And, obviously, no trial and no verdict.
Even if they were carrying drugs, Rand Paul — hardly a raving liberal — said, blowing them up on the spot is not how we do things.
We arrest people. So it is difficult and it’s hard, because obviously they’re bad people, so people want something bad to happen to them. But typically, even the worst people in our country, if we accuse somebody of a terrible crime, they still get a trial. They get a lawyer. They get their day in court.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, explained why we don’t follow the law.
The United States has long – for many, many years – established intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drug boats, and we did that. And it doesn’t work. Interdiction doesn’t work because these drug cartels – what they do is they know they’re going to lose two percent of their cargo. They bake it into their economics. What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.
This is nonsense. Having covered multiple drug busts on the northern border, I assure you that the mules who carry the narcotics are even more expendable than whatever quantity of drugs is confiscated.
But I don’t know how important that German radio station was, either. I just know what happened next.
It’s no surprise that the toughest guy in the room is a draft dodger. By that I mean he took the same four student deferments most of us took in college, but then, instead of signing up for the National Guard or joining a service unlikely to see combat or taking advantage of other legitimate means to avoid rice paddies, he submitted a phony letter to gain a dishonest deferment.
Now he wants to be the Commander in Chief not of the Defense Department, but of the Department of War.
In the words of Curly Howard, “Oooh! A tough guy, eh?”
And he expects your sons and daughters to provide the actual meat for his brave butchery.
If you feel comparing this incident to the Gleiwitz Incident is over the top, consider, instead, the alleged attacks on the USS Maddox and Turner Joy in 1964, which was definitely absolutely positively not going to lead to a wider war, but simply to an appropriate, proportional response, which Congress approved.
Although the Senate was not unanimous.
Well, whatever.
We’re already in the process of sacrificing children:
A “hoax” is anything that makes Dear Leader look bad. It has nothing to do with “true” or “false” except that we’re in a governmental system in which anything the President wants is true and anything he doesn’t want is false, and he’s retooled the Justice Department not to see that the law is obeyed but to make sure his wishes are.
For example, the courts have forbidden him to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but he wants to anyway, the law and the Constitution be damned. I would be surprised if the courts prevailed in this matter and you should be, too.
I wouldn’t bet the ranch on how it turns out, but we’re betting the whole country.
Meanwhile, he wishes the Epstein business would just go away.
I’m not convinced it’s as stark a situation as Molina portrays, but it’s certainly true that we’ve heard a lot more from the alleged perps than we have from the alleged victims.
That seems to be changing, as the victims are no longer waiting to be asked to speak but are insisting on being heard.
It’s similar to the argument that the media should show the bodies of children murdered with assault-style weapons: It might be effective but it would also be horrifying.
The question is whether it is more horrifying than letting it happen again. And again. And again.
For sexual abuse, this is the Sandy Hook moment, the horrifying extreme event that makes people say “Never again!”
How’d that turn out?
Juxtaposition of Further Reading
Two different cartoons about the same thing, by two different cartoonists, each of whom has a SubStack in which they discuss their work.
Jones is, as always, passionate in his reasoning, while Anderson employs the scalpel rather than the sledgehammer in his. Read them both.
Sometimes you need the hammer, sometimes you need the scalpel.
Sometimes you need them both.
Pat Byrnes explores the number of things Trump voters should have recognized in his campaign, and perhaps they did.
But the rightwing had also summoned and inflamed a lynch mob targeting purported pedophiles in non-existent pizza parlor basements.
I had a neighbor once who got two big dogs and beat them to make them into ferocious guard dogs. Which worked: One night he started hitting his wife, and those dogs sprang into action.
They chewed him up right into the hospital.
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