CSotD: Come for the hate speech, stay for the laffs

Clay Jones gives the best response to the decision of Israel to follow Dear Leader’s suggestion, re-casting António Moreira’s cartoon of a Netanyahu dog leading a blind Trump, for which two cartoonists who had nothing to do with it were fired.

And the editor who approved it was … well, we don’t know, because the NYTimes simply said they were going to something something something, and the only visible outcome was that they quit featuring cartoons in their International Edition.

Which I guess was easier than hiring someone who knew how to evaluate cartoons.

This being the same publication that hired Molly Ivins (click that) and then insisted she not write rude things.

Anyway, Clay’s got a good takedown on the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Trump fat-shamed a guy at his Manchester NH rally who turned out not to be a protester but a supporter.

Aside from the kettle/pot element in this farce, it’s worth remembering that, when David Horsey remarked that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was not like Trump’s normal flock of spokesmodels, Breibart and gang unleashed the flying monkeys and, in response, his chickenshit employers at the LA Times fired him.

Do not stand on one foot waiting for the monkeys to descend upon our Fat-Shamer-in-Chief. Trump could fat-shame someone on Fifth Avenue, etc.

Meanwhile, there are a fleet of conservative cartoons praising Netanyahu for keeping elected American officials from visiting Israel and getting a first-hand look at what’s going on there.

Fact-finding missions, after all, are supposed to be about golf and nightclubs, and both are rare in Palestinian enclaves.

If you missed DD Degg’s report on what happened when Ed Hall argued with the decision, you can read it there.

Sending the flying monkeys to complain to Facebook and Twitter remains a viable strategy for controlling Trump critics, though most banned cartoonists win on appeal.

 

Kirk Walters offers this commentary on the situation in Hong Kong.

I seem to have skipped a few steps in all this, but the last time I was paying attention, people were protesting a new law that didn’t need to have been proposed in the first place and it seemed like a case of the Mainland government stirring up something that could have been ignored.

But this article on how the Chinese have papered over Tianamen Square and forgotten it is key to understanding why Xi Jinping can’t leave well enough alone on Hong Kong: Unity is all, at any cost.

And that doesn’t mean a cadre of leaders at the top demanding obedience. It means a nation of people willfully and happily pledging that unity.

However many people died in Tianamen Square — hundreds? thousands? — the Chinese People’s Party does not have to speculate about shooting people on Fifth Avenue because they’ve done it and it works.

My fascination at the moment is not with how much Dear Leader admires various blood-soaked tyrants but with Disney’s decision to use actual Chinese actors in its live-action remake of “Mulan.”

And how much I’d love to have a camera planted in their offices, now that the star — not just a costar but the title character — of that upcoming film has come out in favor of beating the shit out of people who demonstrate for freedom, touching off #BoycottMulan

As has Jackie Chan, which is a little more startling but less newsworthy, because his movies don’t honor one of China’s revered legends. Or any of them.

It’s interesting to read Yifei Liu’s biography, because she was born about a year and a half before the Tianamen Square demonstrations and her mother brought her out of China when she was two, interesting timing if you believe that unity is more important than democracy and human lives.

And then she went back at 14 to become a movie star.

I have no idea how to read any of that except that not every actor or rock star turns out to be an astute political commentator, though some do.

Mostly, I’m awfully glad I’m not in charge of making sure “Mulan” is a success.

It releases in March, 2020. I’d be praying for a peaceful resolution in Hong Kong, but that might be like praying that the ice sheets on Greenland stop melting.

 

Juxtaposition of the Frozen North

(Morten Morland)

(Peter Kuper)

Now we have a proposal from Dear Leader so totally daft that, if it didn’t trigger the 25th Amendment, it at least left cartoonists grasping for gags.

Even Andy Borowitz had to stretch to come up with something more ridiculous than the thing itself.

The legend is that Erik the Red named the island “Greenland” because he was a land developer and thought the name would attract settlers.

Which is like hanging a “For Sale” sign on the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, 1200 years later, some sucker has actually torn off one of the little tabs and Erik the Red’s phone is ringing.

I don’t expect the sale to go through.

At some point, Trump will find out that 88% of the folks who live there aren’t Danish or even Norwegian.

 

Juxtaposition of Financial Illiteracy

(Ted Rall)

(Dana Summers)

Ted Rall is doing a series of cartoons about his mother’s Alzheimers, and I’m sympathetic to that and to his frustration here over her lifelong addiction to saving with no particular goal of spending, and her failure to plan for a disaster she might have seen coming.

I have no sympathy for the thinking in Dana Summers’ cartoon, because that’s not how 401k’s work.

If you have a sensible 401k, you’ll check it once every quarter or so out of curiosity, knowing it isn’t vulnerable to the day-to-day vagaries of the stock market.

Somewhere between Mrs. Rall’s refusal to spend any of it and Summers’ apparent contention that, upon retirement, you liquidate the whole thing there is an intelligent budgeting plan in which your retirement account supplements your social security and you live a modest, pleasant life.

Meanwhile, leave it alone. Go play with the dog or read a book or bake a pie.

 

And finally:

… but my eyes still see.