CSotD: Just Another Maniacal Monday
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Weyant keeps it simple and gets it right. I’ve used the term “The whole world is watching” often, in the shame-building sense in which demonstrators chanted it at the Democratic Convention in 1968 when the Chicago police were beating the crap out of them on national television.
Weyant suggests it by drawing the World as the police officer looking on in stunned amazement at the total wreck, the major difference being that the driver this time seems incapable of feeling shame.
We’ll see who shows up for the World Cup games this summer. The whole world has been watching, and not everyone feels safe in coming to the United States.
But we’ll get more solid answers in November, because hopes of reform hang on the midterms. The results of various special elections, plus polling, suggest that there will be change coming, but it may require generating the kind of undeniable mandate seen in Hungary.
Telnaes suggests that Orban’s time had come, and that his resounding rejection was a prelude to a similar rejection of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu.
I share her wish if not her optimism. But messaging matters: These things don’t “just happen” and Orban’s defeat was brought about by an opposition that emphasized the corruption in his party and its impact on average citizens.
As Constant Readers know, I’ve been critical to the point of ranting over Trump’s attacks on the Pope and the Catholic Church, and, like Golding, I’d like him and his MAGA allies to give it a rest. On the other hand, as the saying goes, ”Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
For that matter, perhaps it’s equally smart to forgive the nonsense of our allies if it’s working in our favor.
This goes back at least to Trump’s photo op in which he held up a Bible and people who had never been to church began laughing that it was upside down because they didn’t know bookmark ribbons hang that way.
Or further back, as people too young to know better think anyone taking a II-S deferment to finish college was a “draft dodger” rather than reserving that term for fakers with phony doctors’ excuses.
Meanwhile, a foolish joke about JD Vance and a sofa was quickly revealed as a hoax, but nobody cared and the jokes keep coming.
Now Hegseth repeats a rewritten bit of prayerful flyboy doggerel, and everyone is howling that he thought he was citing scripture. They’re wrong, but if people want to go into the booths in November thinking otherwise, why stop them?
It works both ways, of course, and Walters trots out an oldie-but-goodie, suggesting that the Iranians have purposefully put children in the path of bombs. This is a two-way accusation, because anti-Trumpists insist we bombed the school on purpose, instead of through a ghastly and preventable mistake.
Hey, whatever floats your boat.
Or whatever sinks your boat. Ramirez offers a cartoon that might well be titled “Tell me you don’t understand asymmetric war …”
He’s right, of course, that we have bigger ships and bigger guns and more of them than the Iranians. We also had bigger ships and bigger guns and more of them than the North Vietnamese, and than the Taliban, and you can trace that one back further, because the French had more armaments than the Algerian rebels, just as they fell to Ho Chi Minh, just as the Russians got shredded in Afghanistan.
But boy-oh-boy, if we ever go back to the kind of war where uniformed men line up across fields and shoot at each other, we’re gonna be unbeatable.
Ratt sees a parallel that I don’t.
He’s right in that we’re getting sucked into a war we can’t win, but for entirely different reasons and under significantly different circumstances.
The Domino Theory turned out to be inoperable, but we walked into that meatgrinder with our eyes wide open, purposely defying international agreements to hold elections in Vietnam and let the people decide, and feeding Congress a series of dubious claims culminating with the alleged attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin.
And a handful of Congressmen warned us, but the rest voted for war.
By contrast, we blundered into this mess at the whim of one man, with the help of a political party that automatically rubber-stamps anything he wants.
Though I suppose there’s a parallel in that LBJ pledged not to “send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” and Trump said Harris would lead us to war but that he was the Peace President.
And we rejected Humphrey and elected Nixon because he promised to end the war, but ended up owning half the names on that wall.
Can we at least see that Dear Leader is more loyal to his pal in Moscow than he is to our pal in Kyiv? The lifting of sanctions on Russia not only eased the oil and natural gas problem in Europe but solved a serious financial issue for Ukraine’s invader.
Putin has thanked us by providing Iran with intelligence to help target American bases in the Middle East.
The on-again, off-again war is entirely Iran’s fault, Varvel tells us, and if every newspaper in America ran cartoons from each side of the aisle, this claim would be part of a national debate. However, editors make choices, and it’s a rare newspaper that alternates viewpoints regularly.
There’s a world out there in which Ukraine started the war with Russia and in which Iran began the war with us, just as there’s a world in which Trump tore up a treaty that was working and in which Putin is an imperialist.
In November, we’ll vote based on however we see things.
And if people rise up and try to overturn that vote through violence, we will forgive them and have a TV judge overturn their convictions.
It’s not enough to simply commute their sentences and let them out early; we need to make it so that the juries were wrong and nobody was ever guilty of anything except maybe loving their country a little too much.
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