CSotD: Sunday Miscellany
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Dave Coverly gets the Crystal Ball Award for having drawn this piece godknowswhen but well before Dear Leader declared himself a king and got plenty of pushback.
It wasn’t French Revolution level pushback, mind you, despite his having echoed the Sun King who reportedly said, “L’Etat c’est moi,” which is cousin to “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” which is also only a reportedly real quote, being attributed not to Napoleon but to Rod Steiger playing Napoleon.
Napoleon also did not say “Little darling, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter,” but that arc does have a tendency to bend, if you can wait long enough, which is what the Russians did in 1812.
I don’t know that anyone in the West has ever shown that kind of numb patience.
Tough-but-Fair cartoon from Ben Jennings. We can express that feeling, but it seems at best foolish and at worst hypocritical when we sit surrounded by the evidence of why our reputation is cratering.
It’s encouraging to see some disapproval, if not outright resistance, building, but Americans never seem to summon the take-to-the-streets fury of their European counterparts. Sitting in the easy chair and wishing things were different is not the same.
Humanity will, of course, change; human society will, of course, continue to develop — in spite of men and the errors of men. But that is not a revolutionary attitude. — Fidel Castro
Resistance is growing, and sales of Teslas are reportedly down, though Matt Golding is Australian.
Tesla drivers worldwide may be embarrassed by their cars, but Americans are the ones who have cause to be embarrassed by their votes.
It will be interesting to see where the changes in attitude emerge. There will no doubt be some who will regret supporting Trump in a personal sense, because, as Duquette draws it, their child gets measles, or perhaps because they’ve lost their job to the muskrats.
We’re seeing posts pop up on social media, purportedly from people who voted for Trump and are suddenly unemployed, and who thought the Leopards Eating Faces Party would not eat their faces. Some, no doubt, are phony, but they’re not all fake.
Besides, facts and truth left the building awhile ago. Setting a mood matters and it’s important to let people know regrets are okay.
Though if having over a million deaths from Covid didn’t stop people from complaining about masks, I don’t suppose outbreaks of measles and mumps will bring about a shift in attitudes either.
Goodness knows, it’s not as if the flow of misinformation were slowing down. How much of it is intentional and how much is the result of sloppiness we may never know, but it’s obvious that the blitzkrieg of destruction has caused a lot of bad math and bogus claims.
Kelley has been caught in a foolish error on the part of the muskrats who broke into the IRS data base and assumed that everyone listed there was receiving checks. I don’t think they lied. I think they didn’t understand what they were seeing.
But they got it wrong and unless there is a Great Correction coming (fat chance), the myth of 150-year-old people getting checks will live on, along with Al Gore inventing the Internet and Trump holding a Bible upside down.
The myth of forbidding people to say “Merry Christmas” lives on no matter how often it has been clarified that “Happy Holidays” was offered as a polite way to acknowledge other cultures and other religions.
It’s not that Lester is completely wrong: Some stores may well have told staff to use the more inclusive greeting.
But it was never a widespread command, much less a law. It’s like sneezing into your elbow: A polite gesture.
Like using a term that everyone in the world uses, prefers and understands, rather than making up your own.
By contrast, as Berge points out, Dear Leader has decreed that any journalist using the international name for that international body of water will be barred from covering the White House. That’s also not a law, but until the courts say it isn’t, it might as well be one.
Loyalty is the dominant issue, in the selection of Cabinet Members, in the retention of senior military officers, and in who is allowed to report on Dear Leader and what they’re allowed to say.
Truth matters: Big Brother loves you, the Leopards Eating Faces Party only eats other people’s faces, never yours, and, of course, four legs good, two legs better.
There will be other opportunities for Dear Leader to inflict damage on Americans, especially if he gets his hare-brained tariffs program in place. He continues to describe them in false terms, repeatedly claiming that tariffs are paid by exporters and that the money raised is therefore from foreign sources.
There remains, as always, a question of whether he is genuinely ignorant or deliberately lying. Having falsely said we were sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, instead of not saying it again, he declared that it was $100 million worth. And he justified his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico with the farcical claim that the US has the longest shoreline on the gulf.
Now we says we don’t need Canadian imports, but, as Sheneman suggests, our housing industry very much needs Canadian lumber, and adding tariffs will add cost to houses at a time when higher housing prices are the last thing we need.
Trump’s first tariff war with China didn’t hurt China, which turned to Brazil for its massive imports of soybeans. Now, as further tariff clashes look probable, Brazil is already positioned as not just a favorable source but a preferable one.
Which seems historically logical, since it was the farmers who suffered under McKinley’s tariffs while the robber barons prospered. If Dear Leader gets his tariffs, farmers will once more be among those who suffer the most.
Though it’s not just tariffs. USAID bought billions of dollars of food from American farmers, while most military aid for Ukraine was also spent here in our defense factories.
It’s wake-up time.
It’s one thing to choose fat slavery over lean freedom, but lean slavery seems a truly foolish preference.
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