Okay, I recognize the cartoon character in this one, and I’m inclined to agree with Bill Day that the damage done is pretty negligible.
However, a lot of that is due to the overlap with the revelations in Bob Woodward’s book, which comes out tomorrow but was excerpted and discussed in the Washington Post the day before the anonymous Op-Ed piece appeared in the NYTimes.
My overall suspicion is that this produced an “Oh, Shit!” moment on both ends, but mostly in New York, because these types of stories are developed over at least several days if not several weeks, and, had the Op-Ed appeared a week before the Woodward piece, or even the day before, it would have hit with more impact.
Appearing a day later, it hit with a damp sense of “Yeah, we knew that,” and mostly offered Woodward a gateway to talk about how much more he’d have done with the information.
It also offered, as noted yesterday a chance for a lot of righteous carping by flawless journalists and a distraction for Trump to wave to keep people from reading Woodward’s more detailed, well-documented takedown.
The question, as I see it, is whether — assuming you didn’t know Woodward’s piece was about to appear — you’d have used what you were given, or held the story hoping to get more?
That is, had this been formatted as an interview with an unnamed senior insider, rather than a piece in the insider’s own words, would it be getting the same treatment?
Would it be attacked as a “single source” story?
Maybe.
However, even in the famous “You haven’t got it” scene from “All the President’s Men,” Bradlee doesn’t say “Don’t run it.”
He says, “Stick it inside someplace.”
Fair enough.
Though I’d suggest that a bite on the ankle would have hurt more if Vader hadn’t just gotten kicked in the crotch.
BTW, with regard to yesterday’s comments, Bob Englehart says he only noticed the resemblance while inking, but decided it worked, since “Alfred would be an improvement over most of his staff!”
I got a laff out of Jeff Danziger’s take, and the nice thing about this is that you don’t have to know that Danziger did not have bone spurs and, in fact, came back from Vietnam with some medals.
Bonus Points for the fact that he leaves it up to the reader to observe that Trump is getting a free pass on his draft-dodging from the ultra-patriots who held Clinton’s feet to the fire over a much less egregious attempt to avoid the problem and who happily spread outrageous lies about John Kerry’s quite admirable service record.
Well, as the President’s lawyer explained, truth isn’t truth.
For my part, I’m with Mo: Too much too fast too one-on-top-of-each-other and, in the words of George Jetson, “Help! Stop this crazy thing!”
Parenting Notes
My rule — only said, never enforced — was that I wanted the boys to pick a college far enough away that they had to do their own laundry. Pajama Diaries poses a situation where Amy can drive home for services and get back in time to study, which is also within reach of the washing machine.
My kids all ended up within two or three hours of home, which meant that Thanksgiving was possible but they needed at least a three-day weekend to make the trip practical.
I was halfway across the country and only went home for Thanksgiving freshman year, but, if it’s any comfort to Jewish kids whose holidays never rated a break at most colleges, by the 1990s, the urge to be inclusive meant you’d get a break for Easter but have to be back in class Monday.
So Christians got a break such that they would be on the road on the major religious holiday upon which the break, and their entire religion, was based.
Now I’m looking forward to next year, when Amy explains that, even though, yes, it’s only an hour away, she has this other thing going on …
Roots and wings, folks. Roots and wings.
Meanwhile, Jonesy reminds us that Peruvian immigrants can’t just turn up at a railway station with a couple of jars of marmalade and expect a warm welcome, can they?
Jonesy adds “with apologies,” but jayzuz, where do we start apologizing?
When even Sweden is suddenly stinking with Nazis, what chance do the rest of us have?
And this follow up to our earlier discussion:
Frazz could cut this one short by simply explaining that bologna, no matter how you spell it, is simply pig noses and lips extruded as large, bland sausages and then sliced into flat circles instead of extruded in the shape of a small, bland sausages and eaten whole, and that we do not put catsup, ketchup, ketsup, kitcap or kôe-chiap on bland pig noses and lips.
We put mustard (or mustarde) on bland pig noses and lips.
I had a friend who worked in a turkey processing plant and warned us against turkey loaf, which is a lot like bologna and which he said was made from the turkeys that fell apart on the processing line. And not always onto the clean, sanitary table under the line itself.
They were cooked up and deboned and mushed and mixed with preservatives and extruded into large plastic sleeves, but sometimes you’d notice that you had eight out of 10 loaves done and sealed and you still had three baggies of preservative sitting there, which means you missed one, so you’d add two baggies to the next loaf so that things would come out even.
So you’d just sent one totally unprotected loaf out into the world along with one that had a double dose of nitrates and nitrites and whatever else, which, viewed one way, means we shouldn’t fret over preservatives, since there wasn’t a raft of people either dying of botulism or of chemical overdoses.
He intended it another way.
Though I suppose it’s nothing a little ketchup and Wonder Bread wouldn’t counteract.