CSotD: Clarifications
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Donald Trump is not a lame duck. No offense to Wexler, who is just passing along the current meaning of the term, but the original meaning mattered.
The term comes from before 1933, when newly elected officials didn’t take office until March. That left a four month period that featured legislators who had no mandate and were already slated for replacement.
That’s not the same as a person who is not seeking a further term. Donald Trump was elected to be president until 2028, and the fact that he’s term-limited from running again doesn’t change the fact that — like it or not — he’s properly in office today.
You might assume that, because he won’t be running again, he can propose whatever laws he wants, regardless of what voters want, without damaging his future prospects.
But the idea that each second-term president is off the leash doesn’t square with logic or history. Even if a retiring politician tried to introduce major shifts, they’d have to sell them to other officials whose ambitions weren’t about to end.
Example: LBJ became a lame duck under this new meaning when he announced his decision not to run again, and he began working to resolve much of what we’d done in Vietnam. That would have been a nice lame-duck gesture, only Nixon plotted to make sure none of Johnson’s efforts paid off.
Can’t get much more lame than that.
Here’s a head-scratcher from Kelley, in which Hemingway is contemplating the news but obviously still hung up on Brett Ashley in his fictional persona as Jake Barnes, because he’s talking about how nice it would have been if they’d been lovers.
Aside from mixing authors with their characters, I don’t know that either Barnes or Hemingway were all that gung-ho about peace. Hemingway raced to the war well before Yanks were involved, and The Sun Also Rises isn’t his only book about soldiering and ambulance driving and suchlike.
But the misspelling of his name reminded me of Cheaper By the Dozen, in which Frank Gilbreth put Morse code messages on the bathroom wall so the kids could learn code while they were otherwise idle. The one Lillian objected to was “Two maggots were fighting in dead Ernest.”
Sometimes you can just be a little too Ernest.
OTOH, there’s nothing wrong with getting all literary and intellectual on us, if it makes a point, and Wilcox plays on the familiar Schrodinger problem. I’ll confess to knowing a whole lot more about Hemingway than I do about Schrodinger, but I like the notion of considering all the potential we imagined hidden in that box vs what we’ve seen revealed of it so far.
I don’t know if it’s quantum physics or metaphysics but at the moment what we seem to have is a dead parrot, and looking at all the cartoons on the topic this morning makes me wish I’d bought stock in a company that makes black ink. Between the cartoonists and DOJ themselves, there sure has been a flood of the stuff.
I don’t know how well McKee’s effort would work in print, but I like it in electronic format, because simply showing blacked-out space doesn’t bring in the suspicion of conspiratorial editing, but McKee includes that, plus the issue of self-delusion.
Both Wilcox and McKee focus on our expectations rather than on the reality we’ve been given. But reality seems over-rated these days.
Reality is flexible, and so kids in Texas are being taught that “free speech” means being allowed to say the things you should be allowed to say, and that Governor Abbott will tell you what those things are. Abbott has decided that all Texas schools should have Turning Point clubs.
He tried to require posting of the 10 Commandments, but the courts shot it down, so he found another way to mold young minds in the proper fashion.
How long will it be before Texas schools are required to hold a Two Minutes Hate assembly each morning?
Here’s a Tough Timing Award for Dana Summers, who announced his contempt for law enforcement just as they solved the Brown shooting case.
Somebody’s been watching too much Prime Time TV if he expects the police to wrap up every case in 44 minutes. In the real world, solving a case in five days is good police work.
Mindless, bigoted, ignorant hate is alive and well, and how long will it be before we require trans people to wear stars on their jackets and give up their bicycles?
I heard a discussion of how Trump uses the word “hoax,” which seems to mean anything he doesn’t like. I think salad is probably a hoax in his world, but right now his henchmen are busy proving that all the evidence Jack Smith uncovered is also a hoax.
It’s not hard to convince the rubes that transexuality is a hoax, because we’ve only recently begun to deal with it. But that’s like watching old movies and television shows and concluding that there were no Black people in America until the 1960s.
The fact that they weren’t included in the narrative doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
We have plenty of stories of soldiers wounded in battle and revealed to have been women, and the white-bread-and-mayonnaise explanation was that they were very brave and decided blah blah blah. No, you dumbass, they were trans.
Was Mary Edwards Walker trans? It only matters because if she was, she wasn’t the only one. And what she most certainly was was a person who refused to accept the limits placed on her because of her sex and because of other people’s expectations.
But here’s how she looks on the quarter. Apparently, we’re willing to admit to her heroism, but only if she curls her hair.
Her sexuality matters because trans people have always been around. They just didn’t know how to explain themselves, maybe even to themselves. But they do today, and it would be nice if young people had historic role models like Mary Walker, who said “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes.”
You don’t have to be trans to find her attitude inspiring.
(Happy Last Day of Autumn)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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