CSotD: Provoking Penalties, Scoring Own-Goals
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Several reversals to cover today, so we’ll start with one Steve Kelley probably wishes he could have back.
The cartoon is based on an incident in Thursday night’s Philadelphia/Dallas game in which Eagles player Jalen Carter was ejected for spitting on Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, which Kelley transformed into an accusation that leftists are spitting on America.
It was a weak effort to begin with, since it assumes, first of all, that readers had been watching the game, and, even if they were, I don’t know that Philadelphia or its NFL franchise is a very good symbol of liberalism.
It’s true that Philly went for Harris in 2024, but Pennsylvania overall went for Trump, and Philly is generally thought of as a blue collar town, while Eagles fans are famous for having booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs.
If it had been the San Francisco 49ers or the Seattle Seahawks, the leftist accusation might have worked, but it just isn’t a good metaphor.
While most sports writers speculated about whether Carter would be suspended, everyone agrees that Dak Prescott spat first, and intentionally provoking someone into getting a penalty while getting away scot-free yourself is considered clever in sports.
That’s true in politics as well, but I doubt Kelley is suggesting that Uncle Sam spat first.
On the other hand, the past week was full of more substantive examples of totally unnecessary penalties.
Juxtaposition of the Day
It’s understandable that Prescott might have provoked Carter into a penalty, just as Travis Kelce perhaps attempted to provoke Teair Tart into slapping him, but it’s very unclear how Mike Johnson was driven to announce that Donald Trump had, in fact, been hanging around with Epstein as an undercover informant for the FBI.
But once everyone had a good laugh at Johnson’s expense, somebody clued him in that cows don’t sleep standing up, that you can’t buy 50 feet of shoreline at the hardware store and that Donald J. Trump is not really a double-naught spy.
That may be the week’s most ridiculous regrettable move, but it’s not the most damaging
Dear Leader may not be a double-naught spy, but he can’t duck the accusation that he seems weak in the whole “Art of the Deal” department.
Davey notes that his massive and possibly illegal tariffs have seriously disrupted American competitiveness and damaged its place in the world.
The latest twist was that Trump’s imposing a 50% tariff on India for buying Russian oil has driven Modi into the arms of both Russia and China. Trump says this is no big deal and they’re still friends, but he seems to hold a minority position on that.
Chappatte is not alone in feeling that the summit meeting in Beijing was largely united by a combined dislike of Trump, and while BRICS was formed before the latest round of tariff announcements, there’s little doubt that the topic came up over dinner.
The Beijing meeting was not a BRICS summit, but a gathering to celebrate the 80th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan in WWII, bringing in Russia, India and North Korea for a military parade that, as Koterba suggests, well outdid Trump’s ill-attended birthday bash.
Both Koterba and Mariani show Trump watching from home, though Koterba’s viewpoint focuses more on his being left out while Mariani depicts him as actively jealous.
Either way, while it’s no surprise to see Xi and Kim buddy-buddy, it’s less of a tradition to see Putin and Xi enjoying each other’s company, though it’s been decades since China had an active border dust-up with the old USSR.
Meanwhile, Modi’s presence seems like a Trump own-goal, given that China and India exchanged gunfire over their border as recently as five years ago.
The approach of cartoonists is as interesting as the meeting itself, with Keyes showing Trump as feeling left out, hurt by the lack of an invitation to stand among the world’s tyrants.
De Adder takes a different approach, which fits the happy-talk explanations coming out of the White House as Trump declares it all no big deal and considers himself still a member of the club, though he may be the only one who feels that way.
Kal is more specific in showing the alienation happening, and depicts Kim among those enjoying a chance to take a shot at Dear Leader.
While North Korea’s economy is a disaster and Russia’s is struggling, they’re still valuable allies for China, for geopolitical reasons but also because of Russia’s oil and gas deposits.
At the same time, strengthening BRICS unity is a bad move for the US. While the US has the world’s highest GDP, China is #2 and India is #4, and the more the US is alienated from those and other BRICS countries, the more the impact of Trump’s eccentric, illogical tariff system promises to damage our economy and our world standing.
The focal point in van Leeuwen’s piece is Xi sticking his tongue out at the isolated outsider, and Xi was not just having a celebration but actively trolling a world leader who is, as the caption suggests, no longer prominent in the New World Order.
You aren’t required to agree, but you’d do well to take good care of your phone, since one anti-tariff plan was to shift phone production from China to India. That no longer offers any advantage.
Trump first said we’d start building them here, then modified it to say we’d start assembling them here, and he’s been fairly silent on specifics for a while now.
Using tariffs to drive industry back to the United States is theoretically attractive, but it assumes that we’re willing to live under the restrictions of a global trade war for several years until the infrastructure and bureaucracies catch up with the dreams.
And here’s a tip: When you persuade another country to expand its operations here, don’t send your Gestapo in to arrest their subcontractors.
Observers get tired of saying, “What if you saw it happening in another country?”
And “What goes around comes around.”
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