I don’t know the lead time for Prickly City (AMS), but it’s been a very long time since Harris began a whirlwind of appearances and interviews. There was a fair amount of whining from the Usual Suspects that she wasn’t sitting for interviews with them, but she’s hardly been invisible.
What I will grant is that, given lead time, this may have been drawn before Trump began bailing out on scheduled interviews, with his campaign claiming, on the one hand, that he’s the most fit politician in American history and, on the other, that he was exhausted.
Still, I’ve seen quick response to developments from other strips on the funny pages. If you’re going to play politics in an election year, you need to set realistic deadlines.
On the other hand, being able to post next-day responses won’t save you from failing to do your homework. Dana Summers (Tribune) warns of the horrors of a tax increase on the middle class when Harris’s tax proposals target millionaires.
And I have no idea what Bob Gorrell (Creators) is talking about. This might have been a good one to hold for November 6 in case of a Trump victory, but it doesn’t seem to make sense now, since Harris’s appearances have, indeed, seemed cheerful, even as she begins drilling down on policies and on why she feels she’s the better candidate.
It seems weird — there’s that word again — for Trump supporters to complain about her laughter and then turn around and say there’s no joy in her campaign.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I gather someone on Fox or possibly Newsmax has been complaining about Harris answering “predetermined” questions, but this is hardly the first presidential campaign either of these cartoonists have witnessed.
Pre-screened questions are standard. For example, back in 1994, 30 years and several elections ago, a young woman at an MTV town hall had a political question in mind but was told by producers to instead ask Bill Clinton if he wore boxers or briefs.
More recently, a Republican candidate at a town hall answered predetermined questions from pre-selected participants on housing affordability and small businesses, then cut off the questions and bopped to pre-selected music for 39 minutes.
Perhaps they missed it.
The issue in this election, as Matt Wuerker (Politico) explains, is that Trump has an unerring instinct for attracting media attention and that, no matter how transparent his lies or ridiculous his stunts, he somehow is still taken as a serious candidate rather than dismissed as a goofball.
And he’s right: He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. For that matter, he could probably dump a dead bear in Central Park and claim a worm ate his brain and not torpedo his campaign.
There was a time when cheating on his wife knocked Gary Hart out of the race, but Trump has cheated on all of his wives, bragged of sexually assaulting women, popped into a dressing room to see underage girls in their scanties, all without putting a dent in his popularity with people who claim high religious principles.
Good media relations help, of course.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
It’s hard not to laugh over Trump’s bizarre remark about Arnold Palmer’s penis, which Wuerker listed among the oddities that have attracted media attention.
Marlette manages to slip in a cartoon related to the frequent remarks about “taking away Grandpa’s car keys” without using that exact cliche. I think we really would worry about a relative who was obsessed with penis size, but somehow it’s just one more act in the Trump Clown Show.
Ohman connects it to Stormy Daniels’ revelation that Trump is undersized, and while that might not be revealed after a golf game, it’s hard to imagine he got through several years at a residential prep school without some recognition, if only his own, of his less-than-impressive equipment.
But it’s not necessary to know his dimensions to realize that it’s one thing to brag about assaulting women in what you thought was the privacy of a tour bus and quite another to address a crowd on the topic of how having a large penis makes you a “man’s man.”
For my part, I always strove to be a woman’s man, but let’s not drag Dr. Freud into this, except to observe that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar but the real problems come when it’s only a cigarette.
Juxtaposition of the Day #3
Speaking of things that would end anybody else’s political career, admiring Adolf Hitler used to be pretty high on the list.
But as Jones and Ohman suggest, it’s simply the capstone on a series of clues about Trump’s tendencies that goes back to he and his father being charged with racial discrimination in housing and his more recent dinners with neo-Nazis and Anti-semites.
He has not only said that Hitler did some good things, but expressed his envy of Hitler for having such loyal generals. He probably wasn’t including the ones who tried to kill the Fuhrer or Erwin Rommel, the brilliant general who just kinda disappeared when his loyalty came into question.
However, he could apparently kill six million Jews on Fifth Avenue — or at least admire the folks who did — and not lose a single vote, though he has said that, if he loses, it will be the Jews’ fault.
But oh! Look! He made French fries!
Well, he didn’t make them; he just scooped them into holders and handed them out to some predetermined pretend customers while the media laughed and ignored General Kelly.
To tie our last two Juxtapositions together, here are the lyrics to the march from the Bridge On The River Kwai, which was a real World War II song that the men sang rather than just whistling:
Hitler has only got one ball
Goering has two, but they are small
Himmler has something similar
And Dr. Goebbels has no balls at all
Perhaps you’ll want to whistle it while you stand in line to vote.
I don’t think they’ll let you sing the lyrics within 100 feet of a polling place.
Sigh. Where’s Victor Laszlo when we need him?
Erwin Rommel was part of the plot to kill Hiter in the summer of 1944. He was so famous that he was permitted to commit suicide so they would leave his family alone.
Always good to click the links. His death was largely covered up and his part in the plot was questionable. Details at the link provided.