CSotD: My I-Don’t-Have-to-Run Day

We’re dealing with sub-zero weather moreso than snow, though we got a load of that the other day. Enough to make me laff at this Zits, because I’ve had a VW van and, when your source of heat is the gentle breeze blowing over the engine eight feet behind you, the distinction between wipers that move and wipers that actually clear snow and ice is pretty theoretical.

 

I gave up my 1971 camper when I moved from the Front Range of Colorado, where winter is a part-time event, to Northern New York, where it locks in for three or four months.

It’s the only car I miss, but, then again, even in Colorado we got black ice, and this 10-year-old Zits classic is the absolute truth.

Either Scott or Borgman must surely have owned one and known the thrill of driving it in winter, as well as the excitement of going down the highway with nothing between you and the vehicle ahead except a spare tire and two cookie sheets.

I miss that beast!

 

While I’m doing a 70s rant, that’s not a cartoon above but simply a retouched icon, because I’ve seen reports recently about how people over 65 are more apt to pass on fake news than those younger.

I’m cool with that, particularly since the articles themselves note that older people didn’t grow up in a digital world.

It’s a little like proving that people who spoke another language until they were 30 have more pronounced accents than those who spoke English from the cradle.

But several headline writers have phrased it that Boomers are more apt to spread fake news, an all-too-familiar case of layout editors who don’t read beyond the opening sentence of an article.

So I did some math. Just under half the people over 65 are Baby Boomers, while about two-thirds of Boomers are younger than 65.

The headlines, therefore, are objectively wrong, before we get into the notion of whether there really are such things as “Baby Boomers.”

I’d like someone to explain what unites “Boomers,” since some of us went to college and some of us worked the mills, some of us went to Vietnam and some of us took to the streets and some of us listened to Bobby Vinton and some of us listened to Led Zeppelin and some of us watched Davy Crockett and some of us watched the Brady Bunch.

Using Madison Avenue stereotypes to define people is stupid to begin with.

Spreading fake news about fake news simply completes the process.

Meanwhile, John Deering points out how the self-proclaimed Most Popular Republican President Ever measures up to the previous holder of that title.

I’m not gonna argue this one, because Jimmy Kimmel does a better job than I would, and reaches far more people.

I’ve said before that Bob Dole lost the presidency when Jay Leno started in on the “old guy” jokes, and this sort of mainstream mockery — fair or unfair — has genuine power.

Plus the last segment illustrates how sometimes the best way to make someone look stupid is to quote them accurately:

(We’re experimenting with the site; if this doesn’t play, go here.)

 

 

Ed Hall, by contrast, approaches the matter of the Wall and the Shutdown seriously, showing the cost of this temper tantrum.

Trump has done a nice job of persuading the Deplorables that it is the Democrats’ fault, even though they’ve offered support for greater border security, including, where appropriate, barriers.

And Trump’s illogical, nonsensical explanation of how higher prices for imported consumer products somehow translate to Mexico paying for the Wall is a masterful con game.

Fortunately, the human cost of this folly is not confined to the Southern Border but is nationwide, so that, if the loyal opposition can break through the “both sides” lie, the balance should ultimately come down on the side of sensible policy and reasonable compromise.

Not only are people tightening their belts through this temper tantrum, but they’re doing things like spending the down payment they had for a house, digging into that 401k and paying a huge penalty, or going to predatory payday lenders (who Elizabeth Warren might have shut down if the GOP had let her).

This fraud-based, ongoing shutdown is not a victimless crime, and its outcome will depend on the extent to which people realize that it is a tantrum and not a genuine political impasse.

 

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East …

Kal Kallaugher notes that the Grand Buffoon is not simply disgracing himself at home.

It occurs to me, first of all, that Trudeau pere‘s simile of sleeping with an elephant and feeling every twitch is, in the global village, no longer confined to those who share a common border.

An incompetent American president is a global threat.

 

There is also a parallel to the Crimean War, the first major war fought with telegraph lines in place such that the folks back home could see, nearly in real time, the blunders that previously had been buried in reports arriving weeks later.

There was a time when we could blunder under a cloak of secrecy, or at least sheltered by delay. Those days are past.

What we’ve done so far in the Middle East, and what we’re planning to do in Syria, is no secret, except possibly to our own military command.

 

And at least the squabbling nitwits in command at Balaclava understood that the Russians were the enemy, even if they weren’t always able to locate them.

Anyway, their preening nationalism later inspired some lovely cartoons. Perhaps ours one day will do the same.

(If it doesn’t play, go here)