CSotD: The Russia Hoax is Coming from Inside the House!
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Consider this cartoon from Ireland, a Western-facing but tacitly neutral nation. Turner bundles Trump along with Putin, Netanyahu and Iranian leader Mojtaba Khamenei in a package of troublemakers.
There was a time when Americans were justified in feeling that their country was, as Reagan said, “a shining city on a hill,” a beacon of freedom. Not perfect, but perhaps a case of “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” and that, as the popular phrase puts it, “democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.”
People saw our warts from the start. During our revolution, Samuel Johnson asked “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
But we fought a war that ended slavery, and then, when murderous thugs and hateful bigots rose up in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, the president sent the National Guard to restore order, Congress passed corrective legislation and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of justice. Seeing the three branches of government function as planned seems a bit nostalgic today.
However, if there were divided opinions on Vietnam, and only cautious support for unseating the Taliban, the pointless, destructive invasion of Iraq undid any sense of America as a bastion of freedom.
Now, as Kamensky puts it, we have become indistinguishable from ISIS with our plan to televise an execution in order to strike fear into our enemies and inspire our loyalists.
And if the world was once impressed by how the National Guard enforced justice in Little Rock, they’re now seeing that our federal government executes its own citizens in the streets, and they’ve seen snuff films of unidentified boatmen slaughtered in international waters.
Now we’ve entering Orwellian country with an effort to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. It should be granted that there were people at the time who insisted Watergate was a witch hunt and that Nixon was railroaded, but there was no unregulated talk radio to amplify their views and no Fox News to give it a patina of legitimacy.
There were investigations, there was incontestable evidence, there were convictions and guilty pleas and admissions, and America watched the cases unfold on television, live in the afternoon and then repeated during prime time.
To cast doubt on what happened is to promote lies, not to correct misunderstandings or errors.
But we now have multiple generations of voters too young to remember, and thus vulnerable to those in authority who tell them that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and that Nixon was innocent …
.. and that we have always been at war with Ukraine.
Trudeau makes a farce of the widespread suspicion that Trump’s staff is not telling him the truth about political realities, though his flood of false statements suggests that he is at best deliberately lying, at worst delusional. He may be misinformed about the war in Ukraine or the one in Iran, but he certainly should know he didn’t graduate from college at the top of his class.
The pivotal question in the investigation of Watergate was voiced by Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN), “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” There was no doubt that multiple crimes had been committed, and the release of the White House tapes proved Nixon had known and directed both the crimes and the bribery that attempted to cover them up.
Rowe mocks Trump’s shift into openly backing Russia in the war, portraying the way in which Uncle Sam and Liberty greet his announcement, after years of his denying what he called the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.” It’s a good analogy, because in many divorces, the revelation of a long-standing affair comes only as confirmation, not as any surprise.
Trump claims that the rise in diesel price is caused by Ukraine’s targeting of Russian oil refineries, and shifting the blame to Zelensky allows him to cover his shift from repeatedly denying being a Russian asset to openly embracing his relationship with Putin.
Trump may not be getting the full picture of how his polls are falling, but for all his passionate denials of their accuracy, he apparently knows what Whittemore shows, which is that truckers who once mounted caravans in his support are now railing against diesel prices that have them paying $1,000 to refuel an 18-wheeler, and they can have little doubt that Trump’s war of choice in Iran is the cause.
The announcement that Trump is openly abandoning Ukraine isn’t fooling many observers, though his blaming Zelensky for his nation having been invaded, and his claim that he could have stopped the war if he hadn’t been cheated in the 2020 elections, seem extremely dubious, despite how casually he makes them seem like long-established facts.
Hudson notes that the lifting of sanctions on Russia and the purchase of diesel will fund more rockets to be unleashed on Ukraine.
David Frum suggests that, if importing the amount of diesel in the Russian deal were going to make a difference, Trump could have arranged to get it from Canada, though his voluntary trade war with Ottawa would make that uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, the relief from the Russian deal is as farcically inadequate as his sending $90 checks to some Medicare B recipients. The checks will cover less than half of one month’s Medicare B payments, while the diesel imports will only account for a few days’ use. Both moves are performative nonsense aimed at reversing the Blue Wave coming November 3 without actually addressing either of the reasons for that electoral result.
Stein sums up his take on where things stand, and as horrible as is the list of outrages he gathers, it seems unlikely that any but the most devoted MAGA loyalists could mistake the reason why the nation seems so completely out of joint.
Huck does not expect Dear Leader to tone down his desperation, but he offers the hope that, indeed, it may be the sound of the opera finally coming to an end.
Meanwhile, the whole world is watching, and they’re not being fooled.
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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