CSotD: Dark Laughter Instead of Tears
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I woke up in the mood for a Humpday this morning, until I started going through the cartoons and realized there were more laughs in the rest of the paper. Granted, it’s dark humor, but dark humor is how you get through dark times, as the cultures of many repressed peoples attest.
I got a laff, for instance, out of Horsey’s portrayal of an absurd conqueror on a ridiculous horse. And knowing what a thin-skinned fellow Fearless Leader is, it really made me wish he read things, because this kind of ridicule would have destroyed LBJ or Nixon, who were literate.
Anyway, we laugh because the alternatives are to cry or to cower. I don’t know that Fearless Leader ever laughs, but perhaps he never gets the joke.
Part of the humor, of course, is how much he doesn’t get, like that thing about Washington seizing British airports. Which is why this is kinda funny: Apparently, someone referred to the war as not a war but an incursion, only Fearless Leader heard it as “excursion” and he’s been using the term ever since. As Merriam Webster notes, an “excursion” is “a usually brief pleasure trip.”
Like a round of golf, or a trip to invade another country under the despised islamophobic flag of the Crusaders, at a cost of billions of dollars. Or was that an incursion, “a hostile entrance into a territory”?
It’s kind of like a mistake Ralph Kramden would make, except that nobody got killed on The Honeymooners.
Mind you, only a few people have gotten killed in this excursion, and, as Anderson points out, the Department of Greasy Kid Stuff produced a video that mixed real footage from Iran with footage from real cool video games, in order to make the important point that death is cool and fun and exciting.
It’s like that poem says, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” And, anyway, do not weep, maiden, for war is kind!
And besides, it gives us a chance to patch up our relations with other countries.
Brodner points out that Dear Leader has undone a crucial link in our support for Ukraine by ending the sanctions on Russian oil, which has been one of their chief losses of income since the invasion. And if you look at the muzzle and the ears on that orange beast, you’ll see it’s not a proud stallion but a jackass. It’s either ridiculous or terrifying. Your choice!
It’s not just that Trump has restored Russia’s oil revenues. We’re in a ridiculous morass of doubletalk and double-dealing in which we’re asking our good friends in Ukraine to provide us with accurate, inexpensive anti-drone equipment and technology while at the same time not only giving their invader his wallet back but doing so as he assists our enemy in targeting our own vulnerable military bases.
Which Trump says Putin denied, and that was good enough for him. Which is funny, unless you are Ukrainian, or American, or allied with either.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Besides making wacky videos to promote the war, Hegseth is providing comic relief now that Kosplay Kristi has departed for her new, important, invisible job. And as reported yesterday, he began his comedy tour by banning photographers, which was quickly leaked as having been a reaction to pictures that made him look like a stupid, posturing nitwit, as Ted Baxter with guns and with a headful of greasy kids’ stuff.
Wuerker responds by reminding us that truth is an affirmative defense to libel, and that Pete Hegseth seems, whether photographed or drawn by an artist, like Ted Baxter with guns and with a headful of greasy kids’ stuff.
Jones takes a different tack, with direct ridicule, based, he explains, on Hegseth’s overspending on luxury items that, among other delicacies, include crab meat, but which he announces as if it referred to crab lice.
Which is kinda vulgar, but vulgarity is now permitted:
Thank you for you attention to the President of the United States using the term “scumbags,” which refers to condoms, mostly when filled and discarded. And one might also argue that saying it is “a great honor” to order people killed is somewhat vulgar as well.
But you have to consider it in context:
Yesterday, masked thugs created a disturbance in Burlington, Vermont, one of the mellower places in the United States, breaking into a house to arrest a family of the wrong man they thought they’d been chasing, and assailing with tear gas and bang grenades the crowd of peaceful citizens who gathered there.
The chaotic raid drew criticism and condemnation from local police and the state’s Republican governor, though none of them used the term “scumbags” to describe the undisciplined bullies working under federal authority.
The wrongfully seized people, apparently charged with having brown skin and black hair and speaking with accents, remain in custody, though Vermont authorities have sought court orders forbidding them to be taken out of state and confined to the places that, for the past 125 years, have been called “concentration camps” but now have nicer names, though the accommodations are not as elegant as South Africa or Manzanar.
Golding suggests that this moment in time, with markets tumbling and cost-of-living rising, is a poor time to be a “wealth manager.”
But Luckovich points out that it’s an ill wind that blows no good, and Dear Leader’s cratering of the economy fits well with his intentions to limit voting.
And he’ll need some help in suppressing the vote, given that both the states and the courts seem to insist on following an old document in which it says voting and elections are supposed to be the exclusive job of the individual states, not the federal government.
Not that Dear Leader is wasting his time in office preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States. He has more important duties than that!
And those duties are complicated. For instance, he has to explain the difference between a war and an excursion, and the difference between something that is about to end and something that will go on more or less forever.
Or at least until the excursion comes to a reasonable and satisfactory conclusion.
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