CSotD: Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
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This is another “Where to begin?” day, but, fortunately, I had this cartoon ready yesterday but ran out of room, so we’ll start where we left off, or would have, the point being that there were any number of places we could have gotten off the crazy train, but didn’t, and now it’s going fast enough that just stepping away isn’t going to work.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Mr. Garbreana, who was my junior high social studies teacher, because the deeper we sink into the Big Muddy, the more often I think that he sure taught us a lot about how government works, or at least a whole lot more than a whole lot of other people were apparently taught in school.
There’s no reason for Sorensen to have to draw this cartoon, because it’s something everybody should have learned in seventh or eighth grade. It’s good that she reminds us, but it’s bad that we require being reminded.
I suppose that’s why we make the distinction between patriotism and nationalism in the first place, though. If everyone understood it, it wouldn’t be necessary to define it.
And it’s hardly the only part of How Government Works that we don’t seem to have all learned in junior high after all.
So now Dear Leader wants to rename the Defense Department and bring back the old name War Department, and Day suggests another job title he probably doesn’t want to change but would like to assume.
I guess nobody taught him that the reason Truman had Congress change the name from War to Defense was to be clear that we didn’t want to start fights but were prepared to finish them.
However, if you plan to go back to America’s 19th Century legacy of imperialist expansionism, I guess you might as well throw in a little Truth in Advertising.
Granted you could launch wars against Canada or Mexico or Venezuela or Denmark without having to warn them up front, just as you can establish yourself as a dictator and keep the innocuous title “president.”
Anyway, here’s something else I know: I worked at a paper where the editorial department fancied themselves marketers, which annoyed those of us who actually were marketers, but was generally harmless until the nitwits decided it would be cool to have the city rename our stretch of street after the paper.
It would give us an easy mailing address that would also promote the newspaper!
The city was willing, but our circ manager was not, pointing out that we would have to discard and replace everything with our old address on it, which was not just business cards and stationery but every sort of form used in production, advertising and so forth.
Then, besides those expenses, we’d have to reapply for our mailing permits, which would be a major hassle plus would also cost something.
It amounted to a very expensive ego trip, and even in the mid-90s, money in newspapering wasn’t so plentiful that it could be wasted on editorial hubris.
Similarly, we find ourselves in a country that can’t justify the expense of feeding our poor or giving them medical care, but we can throw away money on signs and stationery and business cards and god knows what else to prop up the tender ego of a man whose tiny little hands, according to Stormy Daniels, aren’t the sole source of his compulsion for macho posturing.
Speaking of our nation’s health care, Huck melds Trump’s absurd renaming proposal with the appearance of RFK Jr in front of Congress, which came across less as something out of 1984 and more like something out of Catch-22 or maybe a Borat movie.
It was astonishing to see his combination of no knowledge and no manners playing out on C-SPAN as Senators struggled to get him to answer sensibly. They’d have done as well questioning President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, who at least possesses some redeeming charisma.
It would be even nicer if we didn’t have an entire state deciding to go along with the 17th Century medical advice our Secretary of Health and Human Services Death is handing out, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two cartoons with a very similar message, but I’m more comfortable with Alcaraz pointing out that the whole world is watching with a combination of horror and disgust than I am with Matson’s vision, because I don’t think the rest of the US does see Florida’s decision to kill its children as a bad idea.
Children will most assuredly die, and not just the unfortunate little tykes whose gullible parents fall for RFK Jr’s superstitious idiocy, because having unvaccinated children in classrooms will expose vaccinated kids to a larger viral load than their preventive care can overcome.
All this in a state where, if a health insurance executive is responsible for the largest fraud in American history, they elect him governor and then send him to the Senate.
Never mind Jen Sorensen or my junior high social studies teacher. This is a reminder of the Old Professor.
Or at least for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who (as we reported) said we currently appear to be running on Calvinball rules, or, more specifically, no rules at all.
For example, if you throw a sandwich at a police officer, you are charged with a felony, but if you encourage your fellow rioters to attack police with bear spray and bash them with flag poles, you get hired by the government.
And if you engage in open, violent revolution in an attempt to overthrow the legal government of the United States, we’ll bury you at Arlington with military honors.
We didn’t always do things that way. A famed veteran of several major battles, whose daring led his fellow patriots to the decisive victory at Saratoga that proved the turning point in our Revolution, is remembered there only for the leg he lost in his heroic charge.
The monument does not bear his name, since, like the woman who died in the assault on the Capitol, he had turned against his nation.
It was a long time ago, in a very different country.
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