CSotD: Coffee Break’s Over
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UPDATE: Things in Caracas changed quickly since this was written, but that hasn’t changed anything here. I assume cartoonists will leap to their drawing boards and we’ll catch up tomorrow.
Another New Year’s cartoon as we get back to business, and Turner offers a menu of places where we could use a little hope in the coming year, though he deems it unlikely. That may not be the most positive attitude, but this may not be a good time to be “positive” if positive means pretending it’s all going to work itself out.
I’m putting some hope in the observation that people are questioning things, but those questions have to be translated into activity.
F’rinstance, this was a perfectly good cartoon last night, but I woke up this morning to find that War with Venezuela has nothing to worry about, because Iran so far is only a flirtation, though what’s happening in Venezuela is a CIA activity, not a genuine act of war.
What’s the difference, besides nobody having bothered to get congressional approval? Did we get congressional approval for the CIA to engineer regime change in Iran in 1953? Why should we expect Trump to seek approval to overthrow their current government?
Not that it wouldn’t be popular: As Davey says, lot of Iranians are fed up with the mullahs. But it’s more complex than what you see in the streets of Tehran, because rural Iranians are far more conservative than their urban compatriots, and even without CIA intervention, things could go back and forth there almost indefinitely.
It’s not without hope: There was a point about two decades ago when Iran’s legislature seemed representative, with both conservative and progressive members, the latter of whom included women. And then the Supreme Council put limits on who could serve and here we are, but it’s hard to see how external force could be more positive than a genuinely internal uprising.
Meanwhile, our dance card seems filled without adding Iran or Venezuela, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Schrank mocks Putin’s pretense of being the aggrieved party in this war, an attitude not all that unexpected, but more effective when he appeals to someone with no background in international relations, no sense of history and the childish belief that counterfactual bombast is a sign of manly strength.
The result, as Navana sees it, is action in a morally indefensible direction, exhibited not only in the outrageous bullying of Zelensky in the Oval Office but in farcical declarations that Ukraine started the war.
This is consistent. Even in his first, relatively contained administration, Trump was already working to abandon our support of NATO.
As has been said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
We’re also adopting, Duginski points out, farcical positions on climate change that anyone who examines the evidence will realize cover a loyalty to the petroleum industry. There is virtually no scientific doubt about climate change, with a level of unanimity similar to agreement than the planet is round, and so the best way to oppose reality is to shut down NCAR. It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old putting his hands over his ears and shouting “LALALALALALA I can’t hear you!”
And then throwing a tantrum, kicking over all the wind turbines and bombing the nation with the largest oil reserves.
Margulies is dead-on about the connection between our desire for cheap gasoline and our government’s willingness to go back to the days of blatant imperialism and grab whatever we want around the globe. And while I wish his editor at KFS would correct his consistent misspelling of Venezuela, I guess it’s okay as long as it’s spelled correctly on the resulting headstones in Arlington.
I think before we go adventuring in Venezuela, Nigeria and Iran, we should bring back the draft, for both sexes and without exemptions. Let’s see how people feel about imperialism when it isn’t someone else’s kids making the sacrifices.
And speaking of our kids:
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Branch has it right: The perversion we should be worrying about is politicians who exhibit an unhealthy fascination with other people’s genitalia. There’s nothing “perverse” about acknowledging your sexual identity, and the idea that people make a conscious choice to be transexual or homosexual is both ignorant and hateful.
You can’t wish gender-minorities away, despite the efforts to do so that Fell marks, nor is it any more moral to turn them into objects of hate and scorn. Movements against trans kids are no different than movements against racial minorities, an argument, alas, that seems a case of spitting into the wind, given our government’s stated intention of deporting 100,000,000 “third world” people.
Meanwhile, Benson’s idea that schools should report children to their parents for having questions about their sexuality is rooted in a fanciful vision of family life taken from watching Ozzie and Harriet or the Donna Reed Show, an idealized harmonious universe in which nobody is gay or lesbian or transexual or pregnant, and the parents are all universally wise and well-grounded.
In the real world, there are families in which children don’t dare raise certain issues. I remember hearing from a father who complained that do-gooders won’t let you raise your children properly, but I happened to know one of his daughter’s teachers, who confided to me that his proper raising of her included grabbing her by the throat and slamming her head against the wall.
These idealists should spend a little time talking to school counselors or to people who answer the phones at rape crisis centers.
And not just talking to them, but listening to them.
But not to worry. CBS News has been remade under the steady guidance of Bari Weiss, whose hand on the tiller only seems a wee bit unsteady.
But the network is moving forward. They love America, and new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil rejects news organizations that have put “too much weight in the analysis of academics, or elites, and not enough on you.”
Dokoupil goes on to say “I have felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn’t reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life.”
Love means never having to tell people anything they didn’t want to hear.
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