CSotD: Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better
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Adam Zyglis (Cagle) offered this cartoon several days ago, when Mitch McConnell finally broke his silence and admitted that Joe Biden had won the election. And, yes, it was as controversial as admitting that the sky is blue.
But the cartoon had a short shelf life because the news did not, in fact, quash Trump’s attempts to deny the obvious. If anything, the more people turn away from Dear Leader, the most frantic he becomes in pursuing his attempt to overthrow the election.
Steve Brodner (Ind) cites the latest outrage, an off-the-wall White House conference in which there was discussion of declaring martial law and re-running the election in areas Trump had lost, as well as appointing noted nincompoop Sidney Powell as a special prosecutor to look into voter fraud.
The Washington Post’s coverage makes it pretty clear that (A) ideas were floated, not necessarily adopted and (B) most of the more outlandish ideas were impossible in the first place.
Those of us who have been around awhile are aware that various administrations have played the “What if we . . .?” game in the past, commissioning studies of unlikely scenarios like making war on such-and-such country, canceling an election or rounding up dissidents.
Most come to nothing, so there is a certain so-what factor here.
Except that knowing how government has worked in the past hasn’t provided a lot of clues in predicting how this particular government works.
Attempting to analyze the current administration is like fighting a drunk: You can be a Golden Gloves champion with black belts in every martial art, but none of your skills help when you’re up against someone who doesn’t behave logically.
For instance, who let Mike Flynn into the building in the first place? Pardon him if you must, but then keep your distance. Ditto with Sidney Powell: After her spectacularly laughable failures in court, the smart thing to do would be to pretend you’d never heard of her.
But this isn’t chess. It isn’t even TEGWAR.
It’s Calvinball.
The real solution to having to fight that drunk is to have a couple of his friends intervene and persuade him to sit down and have another drink, if they can’t get him to call it a night.
But, as Benjamin Slyngstad (Ind) points out, Trump’s GOP allies have utterly failed both Trump and the nation. “An elephant’s faithful, 100 percent,” but they’ve interpreted faithfulness in a manner that didn’t work as a defense at Nuremburg and isn’t standing up very well today either.
GOP compliance with blatant lies and a stated intention of betraying the Constitution is not loyalty to anything but self interest.
It begins with the absurdity of doubting the outcome of the election.
You can believe the Benghazi stories and the Hunter Biden stories, and you can believe that the trade war with China worked to our benefit. That’s politics.
But no sane person can honestly believe, given the vast number of precincts and counties which collected and counted and reported their numbers, that any conspiracy to falsify the outcome would not have been recognized and revealed by the people who had provided those authentic figures.
Aside from whether someone would try it, nobody could pull it off.
Look back to 2016, when Dear Leader wasted several million dollars on an investigation of voter fraud that produced nothing. Now imagine the nerve of trying it again.
Yep. Here we are.
People have compared the current state to “1984,” in which a very clever system has been devised to manipulate people.
It’s nothing of the sort. It’s Orwell’s other novel, “Animal Farm,” in which evil pigs take advantage of the natural gullibility of other animals.
The more clever a con, the more likely it is to fall apart.
But there is nothing clever going on here. Where the sign on the barn once read “Four legs good, two legs bad,” you simply change it to say “… two legs better,” knowing that, while some animals will think they remember something else, the majority will bleat the new slogan until everyone agrees it’s correct.
Particularly if you fill them with stories about how Snowball betrayed us all, and destroyed the wonderful wall we’d built and that Mexico was going to pay for.
Sorry. “Windmill.” Whatever.
Until you come to the ending:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Do the animals take any action, or do they simply stand there in confusion?
Or do they shrug and go back to work?
I guess we’ll find out.
The Ministry of Truth Reads The Comics
DD Degg scooped me on the politburo’s response to Ann Telnaes (WashPost)‘s massive takedown of GOP collaborators, and he did a better job of tracking sources than I might have — if you missed it, go take a look.
But let me add some dispiriting analysis, because the reaction to her piece is not simply foolishly dishonest, but genuinely frightening.
Of course, Anti-Semites did not invent the idea that rats are bad. The notion of rats as disloyal, unpleasant vermin greatly predates the rise not only of Nazis but of the German nation itself.
It’s an obviously stupid accusation.
But I became aware of it through a Twitter posting by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, and went to have a look at the response he got.
Adams has already created issues for himself with misogynistic postings and radical fringe politics, so I wasn’t shocked at the posting itself.
When Donald Trump says something divisive and foolish and hateful and disloyal, his acolytes applaud, but there is massive pushback and ridicule from others.
Adams, however, whose Twitter account has more than 658,000 followers, gained nothing but praise, and mountains of it.
Makes me wonder who else is being listened to so uncritically.
To put it another way, if you wonder why someone walked into a pizzeria and began shooting up the place, or why an air-conditioning repairman was run off the road and held at gunpoint, wonder no more.
Four legs good. Two legs better.
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