CSotD: Is It Rock Bottom Yet?
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This Mike Smith piece ran two weeks ago. I don’t like to hang on to a cartoon that long, but, while I liked it, it seemed a bit hysterical, two weeks ago.
But last night Trump’s pet court once again reversed a lower court’s ruling and allowed Dear Leader to cancel either $4 billion or $5 billion in foreign aid that Congress had voted for.
Apparently, it’s actually $4.9 billion, but various headline writers have rounded that down to $4 billion, which isn’t how we did it in my day but wotthehell.
In any case, while I’ve long since quit saving a seat for my guardian angel and have known for some time that cavemen and dinosaurs didn’t coexist, I still believed in checks and balances. Maybe we’re hitting the point Hannah Arendt warned of, where we have become so puzzled over what is true and what is false that we can be fooled by anything.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The classical Statue of Justice is blindfolded to indicate impartiality, that, in Dylan’s words, “the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,” but it doesn’t seem we’re living up to that ideal.
Bennett’s take is more specific than Bramhall’s, making the attorney general the source of justice, or, at the moment, injustice. But while Bondi has seemed cruel, vindictive and harsh in her pronouncements about people who do things like throw sandwiches at the secret police, and began her term by promising to investigate disloyalty to Dear Leader, she’s not driving the bus.
If Bondi suddenly resigned, I’m quite sure an interchangeable part would be found to keep the wheels of justice turning in the prescribed direction, because Bramhall has it right: Justice is anonymous, Trump is its director.
This emphasis on unquestioning loyalty has not gone unobserved internationally, and, from Australia, Golding comments on the atmosphere of fear it is imposing.
It’s not just a feeling: Hegseth has summoned all brass hats to a meeting which, a source explained to CNN, is “meant to be a show of force of what the new military now looks like under the president.”
He’s planning to release his boffo speech about the warrior ethos, but you can get a peek ahead of time by going back to this entry from last week and re-reading the Catch-22 excerpt about loyalty oaths.
Better yet, read Catch-22 in its entirety. When I read it at 19, I thought it was about war. When I read it again in my 40s, I thought it was about corporate life.
Now I think it’s about everything.
We all chuckled when Dear Leader sang the praises of “the late, great Alphonse Capone,” because while he’s definitely late, few people view him as having been great, except that he directed a very successful, brutal criminal enterprise.
Granted, the analogy has surfaced from time to time, mostly when he was delivering speeches that sounded a lot like “… it would be a shame if something was to happen to it.”
But while Deering continues the mockery, he frames it as a commentary on Trump’s corrupt view of his political opponents as “enemies,” a usage lazy media has picked up on, just as they parroted the term “Alligator Alcatraz.”
If I were still editing, I would discourage my reporters from using partisan buzzwords and slogans in news stories.
When Deering carries the analogy forward, it doesn’t seem cute and funny, but he is neither the one who brought up “the late great Alphonse Capone,” nor is he the one who made it clear that those who disagree with Dear Leader are enemies to be targeted.
Jones goes the other direction: While Deering uses Trump’s own words to suggest his criminal instincts, Jones uses Dear Leader’s orders to investigate the missing strawberries UN escalator as an example of his paranoid world view.
In both cases, holding the president up for ridicule and contempt could get some people off the fence, which is how politics work: You appeal to your allies to keep their spirits up, and to the uncommitted to motivate them to take a role, but the true believers can’t be reached, and aiming your message at them is a waste of time and effort.
An early indicator of the failing tariff plan is apparent in our farmlands, and particularly among soybean growers.
Duginski offers an overview, but one problem is that we’ve got a lot of city folks who keep posting maps showing how densely populated cities are and how sparsely populated rural America is, and complaining that irrelevant America is represented in the Senate equally with important America despite the imbalance in numbers.
Thus the problems of soybean farmers are seen as a niche issue, and as something happening in Pixley or Hooterville, not in a part of our nation that matters.
It’s crucial, however, to see it not as an oddity but as the leading edge of economic distress that will not be confined to the countryside for long.
The other day, Dear Leader said farmers were “for a little while going to be hurt, until it kicks in, the tariffs kick in to their benefit,” adding that “ultimately, the farmers are going to be making a fortune.”
A sign that, while he doesn’t understand tariffs or trade imbalances, he also has no idea how farming works. Nor is he letting it slow him down.
Fell’s businessman refers to farm subsidies as “socialism,” which is true, in that subsidies are intended to keep farms in business for the overall benefit to society. But it’s been happening since the Depression, along with the FDIC, Social Security and Rural Electrification.
Hardcore libertarians also consider public schools and paved streets an example of socialism, while selfish people condemn any programs that don’t benefit them personally. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to float the falsehood that tariffs are new money coming from other countries.
Kearney serves rural newspapers in communities where support for Trump has been strong, but where people seem to be wising up.
Best hope for now is that discontented farmers, like the soybean trade, will be the leading edge warning of our future.
And that we’ll listen.
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