CSotD: Blogger’s Day Off

Pat Byrnes (Cagle) points out the obvious, which is okay because there are so many people who can’t see the obvious, though, as noted here before, it’s not like they’re gonna see it even if you rub their noses in it.

Still, it’s necessary to raise an objection when ignorance is being ginned up by deliberate lies, not so much to correct the lies as to alert the people who care about such things.

But, yes, the GOP does indeed have a solution, which includes making it impossible to use exaggeration and ridicule to confront them.

Case in point:

 

Mike Luckovich (AMS) uses absurdity to attack the GOP’s war on teaching history, and we can get a grim chuckle out of this ridiculous exaggeration.

Or at least we can as long as we forget the textbook that McGraw Hill published and distributed until seven years ago.

Kinda takes your breath away, don’t it?

It also puts an interesting twist on the Tucker Carlson/Matt Walsh plan to put cameras in the classrooms so parents can spy on teachers who aren’t using Big Brother’s approved curricula, given that it was a mother who looked through her child’s textbook and spotted this jaw-dropper.

McGraw Hill explained that nobody noticed it. Well, first of all, somebody wrote it, and, second, it’s a full color page, designed to catch the children’s eyes but apparently not flashy enough to catch yours.

Come on, man.

I’ve got nothing to add. You don’t need me to point this stuff out.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Dana Summers – Tribune)

 

(Dave Granlund)

Dear Leader is telling his graphic stenographers what to draw, and I’d have a lot to say about this except that Dave Granlund said it.

It’s not so much that the loyal fascisti are accusing an obviously intelligent man of being intellectually decrepit, but they’re doing it on the orders of a dysfunctional ignoramus who not only ignored staff briefings and intelligence reports, but proudly displayed his lack of knowledge, his inability to stick to a script and … okay, we’ll get back to this in a minute.

Anyway, I’ve said before that political cartoonists should be journalists. I don’t suppose there’s any point in saying it again.

I also don’t suppose there are many papers that ran both the accusation and the rebuttal.

We’re going to Hell in a handcart.

 

The lies and the lack of progress are no accident.

As Darrin Bell (KFS) points out, it’s a deliberate extension of Mitch McConnell’s openly-announced plan to oppose everything, now being carried forward by the shameless fellow travelers who have ridden his coattails into Congress on the theory that tomorrow belongs to them.

And, as Bell also notes, the Democrats continue to hope these brownshirts will reverse course at least on things that obviously benefit their constituents, like infrastructure repair, and might even save their lives, like getting vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Fat chance.

 

Which brings us to this piece of gaping idiocy, and I’m not in the habit of expressing my disapproval in quite such stark terms, but we are, after all, talking about Ben Garrison, who delights in over-the-top attacks and who has not only failed to read Don Quixote but hasn’t even grasped the concept of “tilting at windmills.”

Which failure, Derf Backderf points out and documents, he has demonstrated over and over, because, if you’re going to act the fool in public, why not repeat your folly?

Second day in a row Derf has done my work for me. I oughta put him on the payroll.

 

Speaking of windmills, this Matt Davies (AMS) piece has been in my files too long and, while I like it a lot, I try to run cartoons within seven days. But if Ben Garrison is going to insist we discuss windmills, who am I to protest?

Especially when, once again, I can avoid doing my job simply by calling upon a stable genius to explain this complicated issue.

Hey, person, man, woman, camera, tv, y’know?

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

(Red and Rover – AMS)

 

(Bizarro – KFS)

 

(Wumo – AMS)

Even here, I have almost nothing to add beyond how strange it seemed to have three strips about boring — sorry, “mellow” — music drop on the same day.

Though I realize I’ll have to defend putting improvisational jazz in that category.

I like jazz, but I like structure, and that can be a conflict. It makes me snicker to see high school “jazz bands” in which the kids are playing from sheet music. When we started our Irish pub band, we had a violinist instead of a fiddler, which not only limited us to songs for which we could find sheet music, but brought things down because she was playing the notes instead of playing the songs.

She quit and we somehow wound up with a fiddler who became three-time fiddle champion of Colorado and eventually left us to go be terrific elsewhere, but, man, did we kick ass when he was with us.

However.

However, most improv reminds me of when other people — certainly never me — would get into extended riffs while tripping, and it was fun, but the few times anyone turned on a tape recorder, it just sounded, later, like a bunch of musicians tripping.

But there is an element of the Emperor’s New Clothes that kicks in on this stuff and people who would happily laugh at acid riffing are reluctant to admit that a lot of improv jazz is indistinguishable from that because it would sound like they aren’t hip. Or hep. Or either.

 

So here’s yesterday’s Barney and Clyde (WPWG), to which I will add that I loved writing sonnets in junior high because it’s like solving a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku, making everything fit just so while still telling a story.

Robert Frost said blank verse is like playing tennis with the net down, and he wasn’t above playing games with rhyme and meter, as seen here:

Now I’ll leave you with a bit of Cab Calloway, who was also playful but, boy, god help you if you weren’t tight and doing it right.

 

Stay groovy. And, BTW, that trumpet player is Jonah Jones.