CSotD: Beyond Reason
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Other cartoonists have suggested a “What would you say?” scenario over how Americans would be outraged if another country were to seize our president the way we grabbed Maduro, but Prickly City, as a strip, has the real estate to ask the question and propose a possible answer.
And, as a strip, it has the ability to smile and say “Only kidding!” but, then again, things are getting well-beyond serious.
Trump has quit making vague predictions and issued a blatant threat of war over his twin obsessions with the Nobel Peace Prize and obtaining Greenland, and Charlie Sykes isn’t “only kidding” when he speaks of a mad king.
It’s not all innocent foolery. Disrupting NATO and the EU with his threats may not be evidence of a somewhat paranoid rumor about him being a Russian asset, but as Blower and others have pointed out, his aggressive obsessions align well with Putin’s long-term goals.
You don’t have to be worried about Putin to be panicked over Dear Leader’s proud announcement that he won’t be constrained by international law or treaties, and that the only limit he recognizes is “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
As Jones points out, we’ve seen enough of his own morality to be scared to death of that standard, while his own mind leads us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
We’ve seen how little he understands tariffs and trade imbalances, heard how he didn’t know what had happened at Pearl Harbor and listened to his odd theories about how we need Greenland because of its position, while Russia is just across the Bering Strait from Alaska. And we know members of his former staff have called him a moron.
It would be fair to name five random nations and ask him to find them on a blank outline map.
But there are plenty in the administration and in Congress who know exactly what we’re dealing with but don’t think they’re responsible for doing anything about it.
Martyn Turner manages to get a laugh out of Trump’s bizarre set of priorities, in which he ignores an obvious, unquestioned threat and, instead, invents unnecessary, pointless but deadly issues in its place. Hardly surprising, given the Irish appetite for dark humor, but hardly reassuring, either, because this is not just some nutcase with a podcast but a genuinely powerful world leader.
In the words of Homer Simpson, it’s funny ’cause it’s true.
Why doesn’t Congress step in? We might just as well ask why they haven’t stepped in earlier? Is it, as Brown says, cowardice? Or is it self-interest? Is a seat in Congress so valuable that it’s worth clinging to regardless of what you have to agree to in order to stay there?
A bit of both: There are plenty of people in both houses who are afraid of losing their seats. But we should not forget how they got there: They may be Dear Leader’s favorite pets, but they still had to be elected by we, the people.
Which reminds me of back in 1970, when Harrold Carswell was nominated for the Supreme Court and the point was made that he was mediocre. Sen. Roman Hruska famously responded, “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers, and they are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”
The difference being that Hruska’s idiotic defense was mocked and Carswell was never confirmed. (See comments) We seem to have lost the common sense that once guided our government and our voting.
Or maybe we never had either common sense or a whole lot of courage. Sorensen goes back in time to point out how we have arrived at this spot through a concerted effort to avoid doing anything that might seem at all dynamic.
Certainly, to dial back further, Lyndon Johnson showed courage and perspective when he announced that he was halting the bombing of North Vietnam, calling for peace talks and declining to run for an additional term as president. I remember that night: The news interrupted a coffeehouse evening, so I got to hear it among an absolutely stunned crowd of people who could barely believe the report.
But of course the war didn’t end and it turned out to be roughly the midpoint of American — and presumably Vietnamese — deaths, thanks to Richard Nixon’s undermining of the peace process as he ushered in the cowardice Brown cites and reaffirmed the do-nothing temporizing Sorensen describes.
Well, Nixon won that election, so I guess it worked, and you should have seen what he did when he ran for re-election. Apparently that sort of brow-beating, story-planting and rat-****ing is effective.
The view is clear from Colombia, as Zuleta accuses Dear Leader of putting the torch to honest coverage as he kidnaps Liberty in front of the entire world.
To repeat an oft-made historical point, Watergate happened without the support of Fox News or of toxic talk-radio backup, and perhaps that’s why Nixon was forced to resign and a raft of corrective legislation was introduced to make sure nothing like that could happen again.
Later, we got unfettered talk radio and Fox News, both Gordon Liddy and Oliver North became popular heroes and most of that legislation was voted back out of existence.
Now it isn’t just Fox and Newsmax and OAN fighting for the rightwing audience. Bish offered this prediction in December when CBS was acquired by a Trump-friendly billionaire’s company, and he wasn’t the only commentator to worry over the appointment of an inexperienced but cooperative blogger to run the news division.
We’ve since seen the actual transformation of the network, and Parker Molloy has a must-read breakdown of how Bari Weiss delayed a report on the CECOT gulag because the Trump administration declined to comment on it, while rushing to air an unconfirmed story about Renee Good’s killer having internal injuries, based on anonymous administration gossip.
Meanwhile, the Epstein Files are required by law to be released … let’s see … December 19.
Well, 12,285 down and only two million to go. Pretty good, considering.
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