CSotD: ICYMI

So, having wearied of chasing Hillary Clinton around the Capitol over Benghazi, Devin Nunes is trying for an easier target.

He’s suing his cow.

He’s also suing his mother. That’s one cold-blooded dude.

But perhaps he should read this article from 1988:

Note the term “unanimous.” In Hustler v Falwell, even Scalia and Rehnquist agreed, not just Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun and O’Connor. (Kennedy had been appointed too late to hear the case.)

Devin, 8-to-Nothing is as rock-solid as 9-to-Nothing, and adding Associate Justice Dilly-Dilly to the bench didn’t change that.

If you’re going to sue anyone, it should be the attorney who charged you a fee to file this pointless, futile lawsuit. And maybe whoever told you that you could serve in Congress and nobody would ever be mean to you.

No, I’m not a lawyer. But neither am I a dunce nor an ignoramus.

And, while I realize that “LLD” stands for “Law Library Denizen,” you don’t have to spend hours in the books to come across “Huster v Falwell.”

 

All you have to do is read “Comic Strip of the Day,” because it was covered here, first a year-and-a-half ago in connection with the AAEC Conference, and then last April in connection with a more exhaustive examination of the case at the University of Minnesota.

 

And from the latter came this Ann Telnaes cartoon, which contrasts the original parody with her own updated version and perhaps you should sue her, too, and the University for allowing the conference and the surviving members of the Supreme Court, without whose connivance there would be no satire or parody or criticism of the government.

What the hell, sue James Madison, too. They don’t have problems like this in other countries.

 

Meanwhile, if anyone is regretting not having turned up for that Minnesota conference, here’s a link to CSPAN’s recording of the above panel …

 

Each of which are about an hour long but both of which were very interesting, quite well-run and well worth your time.

Though my reporting — linked above — is, of course, not only adequate coverage but most delightful.

And it’s all going to be introduced into evidence when Devin sues me for this blog posting, so maybe you can catch it then.

(UPDATE and h/t to Ann Telnaes: Here are several more video links from Minnesota. It would be off-topic to suggest that Jack Ohman offers the most laffs.)

 

Incidentally …

Nunes’ lawsuit against Twitter is laughably inane, and his paranoid contention that Twitter is repressing conservative voices got horselaughs from a CNN panel last night, each of whom could readily draw from their own twitter feedback to prove that plenty of it is getting through.

However, he might get a hearing on Twitter’s extremely lax application of its Terms of Service.

When this slide came up in Minnesota, the relevance was Rahl Emmanuel ignoring a fake Twitter account using his name while another politician went after someone faking his identity and ended up mostly drawing more attention to the parody.

And we’ve already seen Devin Nunes’ Cow take a huge leap in followers since Golden Boy pointed out its existence.

I suspect the only “victory” he could win would be a lot of fake accounts being just as insulting, only now with the word “satire” attached to them, and, while Andy Borowitz’s Facebook postings recently added a large, bold disclaimer, people continue to mistake them for real news.

I’d suggest that Nunes should simply shut up and be grateful that people are as gullible as they are.

Otherwise, I doubt we’d have ever heard of him.

 

Speaking of the gullible:

Pun of the Month Award goes to Jimmy Margulies for the labels under this explanation of Trump’s connection to white supremacist movements.

There are many complicated ways to get there, but the point of an editorial cartoon is to skip the balloon juice and make a point, and — BAM! — there it is.

How long did Cain hate his brother? As long as he was Abel.

For those who take the Bible as history, the story is somewhat trivial, since all of Cain’s progeny would have died in the flood.

For those who take it as folkloric, however, there is a sense that good and evil are being presented as long-established central facets of the human condition.

And as the Old Testament becomes less folklore and closer to history, you still find that people are defined by whether they exploit evil or repress it, which is what makes King David so fascinating and King Nebuchadnezzar so one-dimensional.

That’s still a pretty good yardstick.

 

Kevin Siers is more direct with largely the same message, and you’ll find a thread running through this entire post about politicians who have built careers on appeals to people’s baser instincts, as well as on their weaknesses and gullibility.

Politicians are, at heart, salesmen, and Trump is much more of a salesman than he is a politician, so it’s not surprising that he reaches deeper into the bag of tricks.

When I was selling vacuum cleaners, I learned that the best way to close a sale was to ask the simple question, “Do you want it?” and stave off questions about price and financing until I had an answer to that.

“If I gave it to you free, would you want it?”

And I ain’t sexist, but, when I asked the question, I’d be looking at the person who — based on our conversation so far — seemed most likely to use the vacuum cleaner, and that never was the husband.

Once I got her affirmative answer, cost became secondary to how much he loved her.

When you get good at this, it either stokes your adrenaline or turns your stomach.

Though, according to The Big Book of Folklore, you are permitted to make amends.