CSotD: Second Thoughts on Tired Topics
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Nothing grabs public attention like poop, and there have been a whole lot of cartoons showing Uncle Sam or Liberty or Donald J. on the toilet. The source of all this is interesting, because it’s a parasite rather than a bacterial outbreak, and I heard an interesting conversation about it on 1A, but it seems like something to know about and be aware of and not fixate on.
Not that I’ve forgotten “Scab sandwich, pus on top, monkey brains and camel hump …” but I don’t sing it much anymore and most of what I’ve seen has been roughly on that level, and so I had no intention of commenting on the toilet jokes.
An exception for Zyglis, who makes an actual point. I’m not sure we’d have caught it anyway, even if Bobby Jr. hadn’t destroyed our testing protocols, because the parasite only has to be on one leaf in your Bag O’ Salad, but he makes the overall point with the raw milk gag.
And the overall point includes, for instance, Trump calling for a review of a manual about climate change judges use to assess potential damage, because, as he wrote on Truth Social, “Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate.”
And with all those capital letters, you know he wasn’t kidding!
A bout of the runs isn’t the worst thing we’re getting from this anti-science administration.
I’ve also seen more cartoons of Trump vomiting than I thought I needed or planned to comment upon, but Blitt tempers his image by providing a list, and also by indicating that Dear Leader isn’t in the least incommoded (pun intended) by his continual output. He is, indeed, a man with a lot of complaints about what everybody else is doing.
And I thought I’d done all the testosterone commentary necessary yesterday, but Berge gets additional coverage because he addresses it within his standing as a gay cartoonist doing work for LGBTQ+ publications, which makes his statement on macho imagery similar to the way Richard Pryor was able to say things about the Black community that a white comedian could not.
His commentary on the topic is worth reading, and while I wouldn’t have said it myself, I’m glad he did.
Bennett gets the “Less is More Award” for a simple statement about a deadly lie. Trump did, indeed, campaign on a pledge to keep us out of unnecessary wars. He even put himself up for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was an example not only of his vanity but, as we’ve seen since, of his capacity for self-delusion.
At Dover yesterday, when he went to oversee the return of four dead Americans from Iran, he told the press “They are indeed great heroes, actually. They said, and they, all of them said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.'”
So I guess the Commander in Chief is interviewing each member of our military individually now, and knows where each of them stands on the policies of the day. I assume they called him “Sir” and I’ll bet they had tears in their eyes, too.
Anyway, he’s now considering a new war in Mali, and the Pentagon has dropped the names of those four dead servicemembers from the official rolls because they died during a ceasefire, not in war.
I don’t know that Bennett could have better captured the reality in a more complex cartoon.
Juxtaposition of the Day
As you may have realized, the future of our nation is playing out on the sidewalks of New York, as the concept of socialism is being trotted out as the Great Spectre of Doom upon which the midterm campaigns will be waged and you can expect a chorus of people screaming “Commies!” from now until November. It’s already started, not only among media commentators but in the halls of Congress and among the bots and trolls at Xitter.
I’ll give Benson this much credit: Indeed, landlords hate rent freezes. I’ve never lived in a city that had them, but I’ve watch enough Law & Order reruns to know how deeply developers wish tenants with frozen rents would either die or move out.
On the other hand, I do have to wonder how much the landlord’s grocery bill has gone up since he acquired the building with presumably fixed-rate financing, and how that mandates the sort of rent increases other tenants have experienced in the past decade. Still, maintenance costs have risen, so I can’t argue with her premise that landlords hate rent freezes, and, by golly, if there are more landlords than tenants among voters, this may spell defeat for leftwing populists in November.
Kelley’s accusation is a little harder to parse, since Mamdani hasn’t been mayor long enough for us to see a rise in street crime based on the premise that if he speaks out against a visiting politician with outstanding international warrants, it requires all police in NYC to become totally focused on arriving flights at JFK.
Even Toody and Muldoon were able to keep up with a hold-up in the Bronx, fights in Brooklyn, traffic jams in Harlem and Jackson Heights and missing children despite Khruschev being due at Idlewild, though, granted, it took an effort.
But then Bob Wagner was sure no commie socialist. That must be what made the difference.
Ramirez pegs this one. The reason the filibuster rule continues in Congress is because everyone with any sense realizes that what might benefit your party today could be a disaster for it tomorrow, and given the prospects for the coming midterms, calls for the Republicans to end it now would put them in a world of hurt after the elections.
Though it should be noted that it is Dear Leader, not the Senate Republicans, who thinks this is a good idea.
And, by the way, stupid really is as stupid does, as Agnes correctly pointed out nearly two decades ago. If the Republicans can’t figure out what’s in that box on their laps, it’s not because it’s an impenetrable mystery.
It’s because of the communists.
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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