CSotD: Journalism 401
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I don’t expect to devote much more attention to Natalie Harp unless something new and important emerges, but the reaction so far has been a combination of cover-up and guesswork. When you aren’t forthcoming, people fill in the blanks.
Conservatives are screaming “How dare you suggest that Dear Leader is having an affair!” while only a few liberals had suggested that. Then Melania popped up after being out of the public eye, which was announced as proof-positive that their marriage was just dandy.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, most of what I’ve seen has been speculation that Natalie may have a few loose screws, plus some discomfort with her lack of a security clearance, given the information she’s had access to. But there also seems to be a consensus that, at 80, Trump’s Stormy Daniels days are over.
Which makes Blitt’s depiction seem logical. It’s reasonable to think that the old guy likes the attention of an attractive woman in her mid-30s, and he may be feeling more nostalgia than lust. This doesn’t detract from reports that she makes White House staff uncomfortable, or that they resent her easy access and her turning up in places she doesn’t seem to belong.
But she’s not the weirdest person in his circle, which ought to be the real scandal.
Blitt’s cartoon is pure speculation, but Bramhall has solid figures. We’ve had decades of warnings about the growing national debt and the burdens our children will face when the economic Jenga tower falls, but it’s never motivated anyone to do a whole lot about it.
Trump has done well to cut his kids in on the scam, which should help shelter them from the impending doom, assuming the Trump family will be able to keep the billions they’re amassing, and while they may not be able to continue their grift indefinitely, they’re not likely to be forced to give it back.
The only caution I’d offer is that they should convert some of it to real estate and precious metals, since a financial crash could leave them holding a lot of crypto-confederate dollars.
Banx drew this one a few days ago, but it’s even more timely now that Chief Justice Roberts has overruled a federal court’s order to halt construction of the military industrial ballroom. We can expect construction to start up again and soon we’ll have a lovely ballroom all of America can enjoy from behind the fencing that has been erected to keep the peasants away.
And by the way, while Trump got the idea of revamping Alcatraz by watching a Clint Eastwood movie on TV, I kind of doubt he got the idea for a ballroom with a shelter in the basement by watching the Dirty Dozen, unless he fell asleep before the ending.
Ariail’s cartoon depends on readers knowing the story of David & Goliath, but even then it has some flaws. I think he should have made Putin more menacing to convey what is about to happen, but a more central problem is that David hurled one stone, while the Ukrainians are launching swarms of drones.
The Russians are taking massive casualties, and many of them are inflicted by drone operators miles away from the battlefield. Drones are making one of those enormous technological shifts, like the inventions of the stirrup, the breech-loading rifle, the machine gun and the airplane, that change the face of warfare.
However, Dear Leader is eliminating the unit in the US Army that has been examining this emerging technology, in much the same spirit of backwards progress with which he is returning our aircraft carriers to World War II designs and equipment.
There is also talk of, rather than naming a new carrier after a sailor who, at Pearl Harbor, went out of his way to assume a combat role, naming it instead after a civilian who went out of his way to avoid getting anywhere near the Vietnam War. And who hadn’t quite known what happened at Pearl Harbor until it was explained to him.
But while you can keep up-to-date on these matters in your local paper, military members may never hear about them, since the senior staff of Stars and Stripes has been fired and will be replaced by more obedient people who will only present the news that the president and Secretary Hegseth want circulated in the He-Man Testosterone Warfighters Club.
“Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters,” Sean Parnell, Hegseth’s spokesman, wrote in January on X. “It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”
Stars and Stripes has been around since the early days of the Civil War, with its independence guaranteed until now by an act of Congress. During the Second World War, it published the work of Ernie Pyle and the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the latter despite General Patton’s dislike of Mauldin’s realistic depiction of Willie and Joe as dirty, disheveled dogfaces instead of well-dressed, parade-ground soldiers.
But no more of that. They’ll see the military they’re supposed to see, and hear only the news they’re supposed to hear. And so will the rest of us, if Secretary Hegseth has his way.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The worst thing you can do is to make reporters curious, because it inspires them to dig, and the same thing is true of political cartoonists: A cover-up can be far worse than revealing the facts, because it inspires them to imagine what is being hidden. Honesty is indeed the best policy, because secrecy inspires conspiracy theories and ridicule, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both.
For instance, there have always been rumors that Dear Leader wears some sort of Depends, which is not all that shocking in someone of his age, but his lack of candor about his physical condition — and the frequency with which he gets “routine annual exams” — makes any hint of health issues explode well beyond what openness would make them.
So when a video showed an absurdly large something-or-other under his trousers, both the Internet and the cartoonists leapt to fill in the blanks.
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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