CSotD: Land of (Intentional) Confusion
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It’s not this simple.
As Bennett suggests, both sides are getting talking points out of the government shutdown. However, it’s unclear how much each side benefits or is damaged by the situation, in part because of the rhetoric being tossed around and in part because it hasn’t gone on long enough for its effects to be obvious; even the government employees not getting paid would have to be living paycheck-to-paycheck to already be feeling the impact.
However, as a focal point for our ongoing political crisis, it is raising temperatures and making polite conversations harder.
Speaker Johnson seems to be in no hurry to seal the breach, and has been making appearances to spout polite, dubious statements that seem completely divorced from anything that is actually going on.
If there is any serious attempt to put things back together, it’s not coming from the Department of My Way Or The Highway.
Not that we needed the shutdown to get us at each other’s throats. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial, after his widow preached Christian forgiveness, the President declared that he hates his enemies, by which he means his political opponents.
It took some effort to paint Kirk as a champion of free speech, open discussion and Christian values, but Dear Leader wasn’t about to risk losing focus on his internal war on dissent and disagreement.
Was it a purposeful move to halt the threat of an outbreak of Christian decency, or yet another example of his ham-handed inability to stick to the script?
Does it matter?
Huck accuses the President of using overheated, hostile rhetoric to stir up potential troublemakers among his loyalists, and he certainly got a response from the hateful punks who went to the Ryder Cup tournament to harass foreign golfers and their families. And those furriners were white folks who speak English.
Then the NFL announced that the halftime show at the Super Bowl would feature a brown American who intends to perform in Spanish, a language spoken by 45 million other American citizens, including many whose families were here before the US had expanded to encompass their homelands.
Still, it was enough to spark Marjorie Taylor Green to propose making English the national language, though she didn’t mention making white the national skin tone.
And Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (seen here at a 1957 anti-integration rally in Little Rock), who has no Latinos on his team, said it is likely to touch off a player boycott, ignoring for the moment the fact that his team currently has an equal chance of competing in the Super Bowl and the Miss America Pageant.
However, touching off bigoted rhetoric is not the worst of it, and Jones is not the only observer to suspect a connection between Trump’s hard-edged attacks on a judge who ruled against him and the fact that her home subsequently erupted in an explosive fireball.
If you can tolerate vulgarity, you may want to read the essay that goes with this cartoon, in which he points out the utter imbalance between rightwing and leftwing violence.
I’m less persuaded by Bagley’s piece. He’s correct to fault the rightwingers for ignoring the large number of armed, militant loonies amongst them, but Woody Guthrie, who had that motto on his guitar, died in 1967, and Pete Seeger, who put it on his banjo, died in 2014.
The health of the folksinging movement is up for debate, but anyone who has been to a liberal protest has heard, among the good and fine things said, some total moonbat nonsense.
I remember going to an anti-Klan rally in the 70s that was taken over by communists chanting — I’m not making this up — “Death to the Klan, and the Shah of Iran.” And a decade earlier, we finally got straight, middle-of-the-road students to show up for a peace rally, only to have some cuckoobird get up waving a plastic pistol and talking about “our brothers in Cuba” and “our brothers in North Vietnam.”
The problem not being free speech but, rather, the way loudmouths overwhelm moderates. It’s not the Mothers For Peace who set fires in Kenosha or Portland, but you wouldn’t realize what a small percentage the loonies represent, when their actions are being used to justify clamping down.
Which makes it pointless to urge people to protest peacefully and not give the administration an excuse to send in military occupation: Somebody is sure to ignore the advice and set off a reaction.
And if nobody does, Oregon’s Republican Party is willing to put together lies instead. It seems that Dear Leader may have seen video from the riots in Portland five years ago and thinks they are happening now, triggering his nonsensical claims about “war-torn Portland.”
So the party cobbled together photos from disturbances in South America as if they were happening in Portland, but, my goo’ness, somebody’d better call Marjorie Taylor Green, because (as seen here) Portland cops carry shields emblazoned with “Policia” instead of “Police.”
Viewing an old video and thinking it’s current can be a mistake, though an intelligent leader would confirm it before sending in the troops. But putting out bogus photographs dug up for the purpose is lying, plain and simple.
Luckovich did get a laugh out of things, bearing in mind that the Toddler-in-Chief watched Escape from Alcatraz and promptly ordered the old prison rebuilt.
But it’s a pretty grim laugh, given that his unleashed whims are aimed at destroying the Constitution and his babysitters at Project 2025 are eager to help.
You might think that one or two unhinged disasters would sober everybody up, but Deering indicates a stronger possibility that it’s being viewed with delight by some people with influence on policy.
Miller was interviewed on CNN and said
When in our history have we tolerated unlawful riotous assemblies night after night around FBI buildings, or ATF buildings, or DEA buildings? This is the textbook definition of domestic terrorism.
And he’s right, because this never happened. We thought it did. We had videos and testimony. We even had trials and due process and convictions.
But then Dear Leader pardoned everyone, so, obviously, it never happened.
Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.
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