CSotD: Mac Attack

 

Poor Lee Judge.

Not only do the scandals come faster than you can draw them, but even trivial gags get one-upped by a President who is far more of a chintzy, childish cheapskate than anyone could imagine.

But, yeah, the National Champion Clemson Tigers are lucky he didn’t just set out an array of binkies and bottles.

The justification for ordering in their White House dinner was that the White House chefs have been furloughed, which may well be true.

We know that the White House switchboard is non-functional, a fact that came out when Dear Leader claimed he was getting lots of supportive phone calls at a time when he couldn’t get any phone calls at all.

But you’d think, first of all, that decades of hobnobbing with the highbrows would have taught him what a proper dinner looks like, even if it’s nothing he would eat himself.

And, if he really couldn’t think beyond burger joints, he might have asked Ivanka about local restaurants and caterers.

You’d also think that, having dabbled in the USFL long enough to bring it crashing to the ground, he’d know that top athletes rarely eat junk food, and that the real stars of that championship team would be tuning, not abusing, their bodies.

And you’d be wrong, because no matter how editorial cartoonists want to portray him as a toddler, he’s always one step below satire.

 

So Mike Smith takes in the latest denial and places it in a context that we can all appreciate.

I used to advise my boys to try to figure out who their most troublesome teachers were as kids and use that as a guide to dealing with them.

It’s a good rule, but, in this case, it brings us back to a kid so impossible to deal with that his parents gave up and shipped him off to military school, while his brother and sister were both allowed to grow up in the family.

(For those who weren’t around, sending a kid off to military school was a standard threat a half century ago. For some kids, the discipline was good for them. Others used the setting to perfect their sociopathic tendencies, much the way imprisoned minor lawbreakers study to become felons.)

And if you choose to believe his disclaimer was sincere, Ann Telnaes provides the Narcissist-to-English translation.

I don’t even know what “sincerity” means to a person who is unable to say three consecutive sentences without lying. I do not believe that Trump consciously lies, but that he has developed a way of justifying his refusal to plan and his complete lack of impulse control.

The result in this case being that not only is Putin capable of fretting him, but he can play upon him readily.

I suppose if Trump were a deliberate traitor, he’d slip up and expose himself far more blatantly than he does while bumbling along in his own bizarre little universe.

I’d like to go talk to the people with whom he built casinos and find out if he ever had a coherent plan going in or if he just bullshat his way through the process in a constant stream of change-orders, leaking money like a sieve and believing it would all work out in the end.

‘Cause that’s sure how he’s doing things now. I’d bet any amount that he has never sat down with an engineer to talk about that stupid Wall.

 

Matt Davies suggests the utter lack of moral compass we’re dealing with.

Toddler-Trump cartoons are becoming a cliche, but it takes imagination to otherwise depict someone who, like a six-year-old, thinks that if he folds up the package and puts it back on the shelf, nobody will notice that half the cookies are missing.

And that, if they do, he can simply deny having any idea where they went.

One question being whether his parents sent him to military school hoping the discipline would reform him, or simply because they just couldn’t take having him around any more.

The other question being what the hell we’re supposed to do with him.

 

Meanwhile, out in the real world

The Lockhorns prompts me to remind you that it’s pointless to be looking at your 401k in the current market.

If you don’t need it yet, it doesn’t matter where it’s at now, and, if you are of an age to draw from it, you should have it in rock-solid holdings.

I suppose that, if you haven’t planned ahead, there’s no bad time to move into a mutual fund that gradually shifts from speculation to conservative preservation.

My own 401k matured two years ago and I just got my 2018 summary: A loss of about five percent, which is about what I anticipated. And, since I’ve still got a year or two of active earning ahead, it doesn’t matter.

Unclench.

If it’s too late, it’s too late, and if it’s not too late, even less reason to freak out.

 

Wallace the Brave brings me back 50-some years to a time when I had enough metal in my mouth to be a navigation hazard.

I could go into a pretty good Old Man rant, having seen how orthodontics improved, first for my kids and then for theirs.

In my day, consarn it, my friends who ran traplines were using less metal to catch beavers than my dentist was cramming into my mouth, and the inside of my lips and cheeks were constantly slashed by tiny protruding wires.

I don’t think braces will ever be fun, but I sure envy the more streamlined versions today’s kids have.

 

Tanks for the Memories

Bill Hinds wins the current Facebook fad with this then-and-now of Tank McNamara, though he’s cheating a bit by going back 45 years for that before shot.

And, BTW, my guess is that, if Tank’s college team had won the National Championship, they would have done better than cold burgers at the White House, figuring — allowing for his pre-broadcast pro career — it would likely have been Ladybird Johnson overseeing the event.

 

Our New National Anthem