CSotD: The National IQ Test Continues
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I like Ed Wexler‘s cartoon, but only because I take the Donald Trump figure as a kind of collective metaphor. That is, I agree the bar has been lowered, but Wexler jumped the gun in assuming Trump would proclaim his own innocence.
He sure ain’t the only one to be making assumptions at this stage.
There have been sighs of relief from among Dear Leader’s followers, including an utterly bizarre tweet from Nikki Haley, who, having resigned as UN Ambassador, is now climbing back aboard the sinking ship:
The responses she received suggest that not everyone, in fact, has to acknowledge that @realDonaldTrump did not interfere and somehow they seem to remember that he declared it a witch hunt numerous times, threatened to fire the attorney general and a few other people over it and perhaps made witnesses question the wisdom of cooperation.
Others suggest she at least wait until she’s seen what’s actually in it before declaring the whole thing over.
But perhaps she means we should “move on” to the part where the evidence Mueller uncovered is used in other proceedings.
And they already are: Elie Honig, former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, points out that the fact that there are no new indictments is different than there having been none at all:
Someone else suggested that perhaps Haley is angling to be made Secretary of State, once Mike Pompeo — having handed over the Golan Heights and suggested that God sent Trump to save Israel — is raptured into heaven.
Well, perhaps. I don’t know because only faith-based publications were permitted to participate in the briefing he offered.
“Lower the bar”? You’d have to dig a trench.
Anyway, if Nikki Haley is jumping the gun in pronouncing it over, Dear Leader himself has not. In fact, somebody should go hold a mirror under his nose, because he stopped tweeting Friday a little after noon, which is to say, about five hours before we learned that the report had been turned over.
(Update: He’s alive! He’s alive! As of eight this morning!)
Loyalty Oaf
Ward Sutton has some fun with a most unhumorous situation, which is that you can’t hold Trump accountable for the fact that Congress refuses to hold him accountable and that this abandonment of the system traces to one man.
A lot of people are complaining that the federalist system gives small states a disproportional voice in presidential elections, but they might more constructively devote some energy to asking why Kentucky, with just over one percent of the national population, is allowed to dictate the actions of the country’s entire legislative branch.
Which by the way
I like today’s Candorville, and there are all sorts of fascinating threads you could spin off it, beginning with questioning some of those slave interviews, most of which came from the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Project, which sent writers out to collect oral histories.
That included 2,300 slave narratives, since, as Lemont notes, in 1936, there were still plenty of slaves alive to be interviewed.
However, historians are dubious of some of these interviews, since good manners and the racial divide made it unlikely older African-Americans would be frank with young white college kids.
As Zora Neale Hurston, one of the few black interviewers in the project said,
You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.
Still, Lemont is right that we’re not all that far away from the days when the Founders were putting together the nation in the first place.
And there’s an interesting “What If” history project in “What if the North and South hadn’t compromised?” because we’d have ended up with two nations, an industrial one that would have phased out slavery more or less as it did, and an agrarian one that, well … there’s the crux of your novel.
The more history I live through, the more complex it begins to appear.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Rubes)
As it happens, I was listening to “Wait Wait” yesterday (I also listen to “As It Happens,” but let’s not get distracted) and they brought up a story in the New York Post about models carrying books as hip new accessories.
Which I think is a good trend because, unlike a chihuahua, a Stephen King novel will not take a crap in your purse and it’s much easier to explain why you need to bring your copy of “Don’t Stop Believin'” into a restaurant for emotional support.
Granted, I had no idea who Bella and Gigi Hadid were until I saw the piece in the Post, and perhaps I’m old, but, then again, I had no idea who Lizzie Grubman was until she hit the wrong pedal on her car and I was considerably younger then.
Page Six is devoted to very important people nobody 12 miles from the Empire State Building has ever heard of, but that didn’t stop a writer for Glamour magazine from leaping to the defense of Bella and Gigi, with a spirited rant about something or other which sounds an awful lot like what you used to hear if you insulted one of the Mean Girls in junior high.
The best part of her rant is that it spares me having to comment on Rubes because it is punctuated with both emojis and with the GIFs that have become an imbecile’s imitation of wit.
I do wish cartoonists would quit using the format for their strips, because then blocking GIFs entirely could raise the nation’s composite IQ by 40 points.
I promise Leonardo Dicaprio that I would not forget what he looks like.
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