CSotD: Other Voices, Other Gloom
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I agree with Tom Stiglich (Creators) so very rarely that I’m going to give him the honor of leading off today’s rant.
I don’t agree with him that Hillary Clinton is a villain. I like her, and I think she’d have made a pretty good president and certainly an improvement on what we got instead.
But, as it happens, I had a conversation about the reason we got what we got instead, just a few days before the first delusional rumblings came of nominating her again, .
In 2016, for some reason, the National Democratic Committee engineered the nomination of a candidate widely hated outside the mainstream Democratic fold.
She had, much earlier, called it correctly: There was a “vast right wing conspiracy” against her and her husband, The Arkansas Project, launched and financed by Richard Mellon Scaife, dedicated to promoting nonsensical rumors about things like the Vince Foster suicide and expanding miniscandals like Whitewater into major controversies.
It was then echoed in the vicious partisan nonsense over Benghazi and her e-mails.
None of this made her a villain, but it certainly made her a lousy candidate, while the ludicrous idea that no other Democrat wanted to run for the office sparked suspicion that the fix was in.
Again, I think she’d make a pretty good president, but I also think Ed Muskie would make a good president.
I suspect they have equal chances of being elected in 2024, and he’s been dead for a quarter of a century.
I’m not agreeing with everybody on that side of the aisle, mind you. For instance, I’d suggest that Michael Ramirez (Creators) offers an excellent example of chutzpah: A Trump supporter criticizing the Biden administration for failure to respond to the pandemic in a timely manner.
Never mind the “apologies to Walt Disney.” How about some apologies to the families of the near-half million Americans who died while Trump was denying the crisis, stifling the voices of experts and recommending nonsensical home remedies, all the time turning a health crisis into a partisan loyalty test?
Bogus blame-casting is also a good segue to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
I encountered a nearly empty dairy case at my local Price Chopper the other day, which forced me to spend an extra buck on half-and-half instead of the generic creamer I usually buy.
However, it wasn’t clear to me whether it was a matter of the store not having anyone to re-stock the cooler, or some wholesaler not having anyone to bring new supplies or dairy producers not having anyone to tweak the udders.
Which reminds me of this classic Punch cartoon, but I digress, though, then again, perhaps I don’t, because who knows what sort of help those dairies have been able to hire lately?
In any case, I’ve got a whole lot of possible explanations for empty shelves besides blaming Joe Biden.
In part because going back the next day often shows those gaps to be temporary and in part because, while I might blame him for the empty shelves Walt Handelsman portrays in Louisiana, it takes a bit more effort to tie his competence to any shortages Matt Golding has experienced in Sidney, Australia.
Well, perhaps not so much “more effort” as “greater motivation.”
For instance, this politically-themed cartoon from The Flying McCoys (AMS) raises the question of whether a wealthy nation might be unable to feed its people through lack of will, lack of effort or lack of capacity, and whether there’s much difference.
Though it’s worth remembering that the Republicans who popularized the slogan had little success in fulfilling their boast, and have spent the near-century since complaining about the reforms which at least edged us closer to that goal.
As has been noted by others, funding additional war machines is “good defense” and cutting taxes on billionaires “builds the economy,” but feeding our children is “socialism.”
Though, as Madam & Eve points out, the notion of the privileged elite sacrificing for the benefit of the undeserving peasants seems as hard to fathom in other countries as it is here.
Granted, other countries aren’t as active in reducing the number of poor children as Steve Sack notes we have become.
We insist that they be born, of course, but then we don’t provide health care or guarantee that they get adequate food and education, all the time tolerating an ammosexual culture that spreads murder and accidental shootings throughout the land.
Check it out for yourself: Go to Google News and search for “shooting.” Google News covers most of the world, yet see how many of the results for “shooting” come from the United States.
It makes for lovely reading:
A two-year-old Texas toddler shot her mother and baby sibling in a Walmart parking lot Wednesday morning, police say, after the child grabbed the gun from between the seat and center console of her parents’ car.
Police said an employee got into an argument with a customer, later identified as 27-year-old Theotis Polk, over an order at the drive-thru window. Polk then walked up to the drive-thru window, pulled out a gun and opened fire. Police said that another employee in the store, a 16-year-old boy who was not involved in the argument, was shot in the head.
Lance Tello Jr. has been at the Bexar County Jail ever since on a charge of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury. He’s accused of shooting the baby in a fit of rage during the middle of the night at Tello’s family home on Five Forks Dr.
It’s a good argument for “American Exceptionalism” but perhaps not the one anyone was looking for.
Meanwhile, rising murder rates are charged to Democratic city governance rather than to our tolerating and encouraging of a gun culture that rivals Third World warlord nations.
Grand Avenue (AMS) notes that “Blue Monday” — a non-event with a ridiculous origin — is tomorrow, coinciding with Martin Luther King Day.
A depressing celebration of futility seems appropriate, given his life-long fight for poor people and his death by gunfire.
And that his birthday is one of those national holidays few workers actually get off.
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