I don’t mind opposing points of view, but I get tired of citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and I get particularly tired of political commentators who make it hard to distinguish avoidable ignorance from intentional lying.
In case you missed the impetus for Lisa Benson (Counterpoint)’s current cartoon, President Biden attended a conference in Europe that included some skydivers, and he stepped over to talk to one of them after the jump.
In that linked analysis, you’ll see both the full clip and the altered clip, as well as excerpts of how Republican loyalists used it to slime Biden. And to editorialize a bit more, I wish the Washington Post hadn’t started their tradition of awarding “Pinocchios” for lying, because it’s neither cute nor funny.
Point here being that I don’t know whether Benson was too irresponsible to check the facts or decided to deliberately circulate a lie, but I suspect the former: She liked the story and is passing it on without looking for confirmation.
The phrase in bad journalism is “too good a story to check,” and that’s not cute or funny either.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Summers is chortling over the notion that Democrats, having taken to pointing out that Trump is now a convicted felon, are reluctant to admit that Hunter Biden was also convicted.
Which would be a good point if he had one iota of proof that it’s true. But while Democrats may object that the law Hunter Biden broke is rarely enforced, German apparently agrees with my experience that nobody denies that he broke it and was properly found guilty.
They’ve also pointed out that Hunter Biden is not a candidate for public office and that the GOP has failed to come up with anything but rumors and disproven accounts to back up their constant refrains about “the Biden Crime Family.”
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for facts, the former president made a speech in which he bragged about passing a test several years ago to prove his mental fitness, accused Biden of senility and, in the next paragraph, blew the name of the former White House doctor who administered it.
Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately.
Jackson. Ron Jackson. Person, man, woman, TV, camera, Jackson.
Okay, that one is kind of funny, but it would be a lot funnier if Trump were trailing by 20 points.
A recent poll by NBC News indicates that, despite fears over Fox and Newsmax coverage, some of Trump’s greatest supporters are people who don’t follow any news at all.
As Fiona Katauskas points out, ignoring reality is comforting even if you never embraced it in the first place.
I wish NBC had asked how many of these blockheads vote, but I’m not sure I’d want to see the answer.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I like these both, though I’d like Luckovich’s more if he hadn’t used a clumsy bit of dialogue to explain the gag. No need for clutter: Let the picture tell the story.
Meanwhile, Margulies manages to envelop both Thomas and Alito in one corrupt sweep, with a nod to the ongoing inflation bubble, by which I don’t mean a bubble of actual inflation but rather a bubble of people complaining about it without understanding it or knowing where it currently sits.
(For those who care about such things, it actually went down a bit last month.)
Though as Drew Sheneman points out, all this fluctuation in the Little People’s Economy is cold comfort to those who actually handle the purse strings that matter in America.
The older I get, the more I see, the more I love the tale of the fisherman and his wife.
I imagine the man who can’t reason with his wife about flags, and her screaming “Clarence got Ginni a motor home! How come we don’t have a motor home? What the hell is wrong with you that you can’t get us a simple motor home?”
Juxtaposition of the Day #2a
All sorts of people have risen up to protest the SCOTUS ruling that departed from originalism to delve into mechanicalism and parse what the ban on bumpstocks surely meant rather than what it clearly intended.
Markstein is among many who cited the Las Vegas mass shooting and predicted further bumpstock mass murders.
Clay Bennett singled out Sotomayor’s dissent, pointing out that while she observed the obvious, the six-member pro-slaughter majority defied the obvious with their ruling.
The good thing is that the ruling doesn’t mean Congress couldn’t pass legislation to outlaw the device, but mostly that the president can’t just ban it.
The bad thing is look at Congress.
However, as with the overturning of Roe v Wade, and as with the clear intention of the Court in fishing around for a case with which to allow bans on contraception, this bizarre ruling may motivate people of good faith to turn out in November.
And see if they can outvote the faithless ones.
SCOTUS has not yet ruled on Dear Leader’s plea for invulnerability, though it sure didn’t take them this long to decide that Nixon had to surrender his tapes …
… or, as David Horsey pointed out at the time, that Bush’s Florida campaign manager should determine the results of the 2000 presidential election.
So I don’t know why they’re taking so long on this one, but if they find him to be officially above the law, it may be one more motivational message to voters.
Finally, to offset today’s maudlin cartoons about fathers doing things with their children, Michael Ramirez (Creators) celebrates Father’s Day by pointing out that family loyalty sucks and so do imperfect families who support and express love for each other.
Makes me wonder how the elections would turn out if all the perfect people voted for Trump and people with flaws voted for Biden?
I think the court is delaying the decision on presidential immunity because they really want Trump to win and grant him immunity for whatever he wants to do, but if they decide too soon – oops! – they will have granted Biden above-the-law abilities. Not that the Democrats would use such a decision, even though it could save the country. It seems that all politicians these days have corporate masters, but the Democrats seem to care more about citizenry.
This very much seems to be the case. It’s the only logical reason for why SCOTUS hasn’t made the obvious ruling that Trump is not above the law.
It’s pretty horrifying, to say the least.