CSotD: The Anarchist’s Cooked Books

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.

Dr. MacLeod piggybacks on the success of the new Indiana Jones movie — in which an 80-year-old proves he’s not too old to be a hero — by pointing out how things have changed not since World War II but far more recently.

After all, we were just saluting the Greatest Generation and gathering around the TV to watch Band of Brothers in 2001, and now we’re cheering for Moms For Hitler as they reform our schools along acceptable cleansed lines.

Well, some of us are. The rest are sitting back doing nothing. Most school board positions go unopposed in local elections and if the anti-education people — who don’t want to spend money on schools but definitely want to supervise curricula — take over boards, it’s because nobody stepped up to challenge them.

And that’s only one canary in a much larger coal mine.

Juxtaposition of the Day #1

(RJ Matson)

(Michael Ramirez — Creators)

Tommy Tuberville’s assault on the military has not born fruit but it has introduced a chance to make his one-man blockage of promotions into an all-out cluster to tie up the entire Defense Department. The Freedom Caucus has responded by adding unacceptable amendments to the defense bill that should keep things bottled up even more efficiently than Tuberville’s performative gesture.

Now, to be fair, Tuberville loves the military and even started a foundation that raised money for veterans and then kept most of it for themselves. But he’s improving: While he apparently didn’t know that the Soviet Union was on our side in WWII, he has backed off his insistence that having white nationalists in the military was okay because they’re good patriots.

So there’s no reason to agree with Liz Cheney when she says

 What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots. And so I don’t look at it through the lens of ‘Is this what I should do or what I shouldn’t do?’ I look at it through the lens of ‘How do we elect serious people?’

And Ramirez, similarly, asks why the Army tries to avoid white supremacists in favor of recruits who are “woke.” It’s true they’re trying to eliminate violent racists, but the posters he imagines have nothing to do with those efforts.

The Army isn’t complaining about anyone’s politics as they struggle to meet recruiting goals. They’re complaining about 3% unemployment that makes signing up less attractive, and about potential recruits who are overweight and can’t get high enough scores on the ASVAB tests to qualify.

They also note that recruitment is down since we left Afghanistan. War is good business, and nobody wants to invest their sons and daughters at the moment.

But it hardly matters if Kevin McCarthy’s Little Rascals are determined to add toxic amendments to the defense appropriations bill to make sure it doesn’t get through the Senate, and if Tuberville is determined to disrupt the chain of command until his face turns blue.

All in the name of patriotism, of course.

Of course!

Meanwhile, as Mike Luckovich points out, the party that once ran on a platform of law and order, and that still claims to back the blue (except on the steps of the Capitol) is campaigning to defund the FBI for reasons that don’t seem clear, except that when the feds find fault in people we like, it has to be because law enforcement is corrupt and even possibly woke.

For instance, as Gary Varvel says, when someone drops a bag of cocaine in a heavily trafficked public portion of the White House, competent law enforcement should be able to prove it drifted from a more secure area and that a video of people taken two days after it was found shows they were the ones who brought it there.

Or something. Anything. Doesn’t matter. We don’t need proof.

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

Bill Bramhall points out that FBI Director Christopher Wray apparently agreed with Alice that his inquisitors — a word not chosen at random — were nothing but a pack of cards, but had to sit through his appearance before Congress anyway.

Side Note: I often wonder if Congressional hearings were as loaded with performative nonsense in the days before CSPAN?

I also often wonder if someone told Gym Jordan that he looks groovy without a sportscoat, but see Liz Cheney, above.

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

(Patrick Blower)

(Christian Adams)

We can shift overseas and look at the NATO conference in Vilnius but, while we’re examining British cartoonists, there’s Joe Biden and the United States right in the middle of it all. Hard to avoid ourselves.

As for Blower’s whiparound, we might have to give Trump partial credit for this, but NATO members have, in recent years, come significantly closer to the agreed-upon funding level of two percent of gross domestic product, and it turns out that Greece is even slightly above the US in doing so.

If you go back and play with that interactive chart, you’ll find that Greece is #12 in actual expenditures, while Blower and Adams’ UK is second. Personally, however, I find it most fascinating that Turkey, which was throwing up barriers to Sweden’s membership, is last in percentage of GDP donated.

Biden, as Adams says, is telling Ukraine to wait for membership, though I suspect he’s being frank in private talks, even if he’s being more general in public statements, saying that Ukraine is not yet ready.

As Chip Bok (Creators) suggests, it wouldn’t make sense to admit Ukraine to NATO in the middle of a war, given that NATO nations would then be required to jump in.

Bok seems almost disappointed, but, so far, arming Ukraine seems adequate, not just because they’re proving so capable but because Russia is proving so disorganized, undersupplied and demoralized.

It’s true that Russia has nuclear arms, but we can hope, if not entirely assume, that Putin would get opposition from his remaining generals over that escalation, given that it would almost certainly touch off a wider conflict.

Which we might also hope, if not entirely assume, is another thing Biden has said in private that he hasn’t said in public.

The anarchist bloc may be louder, but that has never meant much when the chips were down.