CSotD: Ignorance is Strength
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It’s lovely to think that, when a candidate makes a promise of “no new taxes,” the audience will respond by thinking of all they’d have to give up to make that promise true.
Slane is being sarcastic, and showing how things might run in a perfect world of well-informed, logical voters. Also, he’s from New Zealand, which may have more hobbits and ents than you have in America but also has orcs and nazgûls, and we’ve both got real people who will fall for anything.
And while New Zealand is a very long distance away, you never know who’s going to turn up here, as we’ve seen.
The urge by a failing administration to suppress voting calls for use of a highly inaccurate federal listing of people who may or may not be citizens.
Maricopa County, Arizona, used the SAVE list to check their 2.5 million voters and discovered 60 registered voters who were, according to the list, not citizens.
They devoted seven months to researching this outcome and discovered that 52 of the 60 actually were citizens, meaning that eight non-citizens had illegally voted in nine elections, including three who voted in the same election.
This article points out that those eight illegal voters couldn’t have made a difference in the 2020 general election between Biden and Trump, but claims that if all eight voters had turned out for the contest between Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, they might have swung the vote.
Piffle.
Arizona was part of Mexico then, and, given that Jackson got 54.74% of the popular vote compared to Clay’s 36.93%, eight people could not have changed the results unless they were members of the Supreme Court. Which only had seven justices then, none of them from Maricopa County.
The problem this “reform” addresses isn’t the wrong people voting. It’s people voting wrong, and the more people like that little old lady in Varvel’s cartoon are hassled at the polls by masked, armed men who carry no credentials, the less likely they’ll vote at all.
Varvel says he’d like to see that. As a poll-worker, I would not.
As the wife in Stahler’s cartoon says, we’ve gone from spinning the facts to posing threatening prospects to keep voters in line. The ads Trump is illegally charging to the government work to paint the world as a frightening, dangerous place in which only a brave, scowling Dear Leader can keep us safe.
Bramhall mocks the 1950’s style threats of communism that have been dusted off, and it does make you wonder who this fear campaign is aimed at.
As I’ve recalled several times, I showed juniors and seniors this cartoon about Pope John-Paul II’s visit to Cuba in 1998, and while they all recognized him and Castro, they had no idea what he was holding behind his back.
Anybody who was 16 back then is 44 today. The median age now is 38, meaning that half of Americans don’t even recognize the hammer-and-sickle, much less fear finding commies under their beds.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is trailing badly in the race for governor of Alabama, has trotted out a ridiculous rumor that there is a significant, dangerous presence of furries in the cockpits of commercial airlines.
No word on whether he expects help on this crisis from an FBI which now allows bestiality amongst its agents. He might better have continued the Republican war against drag queens, given the agency’s purported history.
As polls widen, there seems to be an increasing level of fear-mongering on the right, and Lester advances the notion that the Great Replacement Theory is not only aiming to replace the white, native-born majority over time, but is hoping to do so quickly enough to change the elections that are six weeks away.
Not only does he accuse Democrats of encouraging immigration (note that he doesn’t specifiy legal or illegal), but he suggests they are doing this in order to alter the outcome of this year’s elections, which seems an unnecessary conspiracy, given that the polls are predicting a massive Blue Wave that seems to grow by the day.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The midterms seem more likely to be shaped by cost-of-living issues, and especially fuel costs. While rising diesel prices will likely raise food prices, that’s not as visible as the rising price at the pump, where people can watch the numbers scroll before their eyes.
Downes points out that Trump is blaming gas prices on Iran, but it’s also notable that he asked Zelenskyy to stop attacking Russian refineries, which he claims is why diesel prices have risen to such heights. It seems doubtful many voters will see a Ukrainian surrender to Putin as the answer to fuel prices, but desperate times call for desperate claims.
More interesting, however, is the difference between Bennett’s take and that of Anderson.
Bennett suggests that MAGA supporters are discouraged and disenchanted, since scraping off the bumpersticker seems an analogy to staying home Nov. 3, which could be a major factor in the predicted Blue Wave.
Anderson, meanwhile, seems to expect not just quiet schadenfreude but mockery and open joy as the MAGA faithful face defeat and the realization that they were played for suckers.
Perhaps it’s irresistible, but, first of all, it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and, more important, changing who’s picking on whom will not end our national crisis. We need reformation, not retribution.
And, boy, do we need reformation!
We’ve entered Big Brother’s world, Telnaes says, and that seems proven by Dear Leader having collaborated a political ad celebrating himself and charging it to the taxpayers. In the ad, he repeated his practice of using music without properly licensing it, and the composer is looking into his legal options.
But it’s important to see the poster that inspired Telnaes, which she saw at an exhibit called “The Future was Then; The Changing Face of Fascist Italy.”
Big Brother was a fictional character, but Benito Mussolini was a real person, and it does feel that we’ve gone from the metaphorical lessons of Animal Farm to the more chilling vision Orwell laid out in 1984.
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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