CSotD: Explanations, where available

If Sheldon‘s duck, Arthur, had swallowed an encyclopedia instead of a dictionary, he’d understand electrical wiring.

It’s a bit of a disability, being bright enough to ask the question but not bright enough to figure out the answer.

He wouldn’t be content with the explanation my dogs have always accepted, either, which is that, when I walk into a room, it becomes bright and cheery.

Which, given that I’ve never had a dog who cared if the lights were on or off, is a whole lot better than letting them figure out that humans can’t navigate around in the dark.

This seems like a trivial, even silly, point, until you expand upon the general principle and realize there are whole nations whose governments depend on the same simple, loyal belief.

And not just the United States, though what I can tell from Brexit is that people are questioning Theresa Mays’ ability to replace lightbulbs, as well as her ability to turn them on and off.

 

I’ve followed Brexit closely enough to know that Alex says more in these four panels than other cartoonists have said in all their dead parrot cartoons, which say little more than that Brexit is dead, which it can’t be, and they do it via a political riff on a classic gag that is nearly 30 years old.

And worth seeing again …

… in large part because Thatcher was a strait-laced old matriarch whose speechwriters had to teach her to deliver lines she’d never heard and didn’t quite understand. This was the British equivalent of Laugh-In getting Nixon to say “Sock it to me?” and you can’t recapture that.

More to the point is that while other cartoonists have tried to depict Brexit in grand, sweeping, international terms, Alex is in the enviable position of being perfectly stationed to examine the thing in terms of what it means to people, though, granted, to upper middle class people who deal specifically with finance.

As noted before, Alex and his pals have long been anticipating with dread the need to open and staff a bank in Frankfurt so the firm can maintain a legal presence in the EU.

But today Alex makes the point that all predictions are misty bullshit, while also perhaps casting a dig at youthful insistence on making them anyway.

Or perhaps at middle-aged cynicism.

I suppose we should maintain some of each.

 

By Contrast

By contrast, as Ann Telnaes points out, anybody who needs help understanding the proposed improvements to the health care system is a hopeless nitwit.

I might have swapped the pair, because the first principle in the proposal is to destroy what Obama accomplished and the second is to replace it with the wonderful proposal the GOP braintrust has labored on for eight years.

If you don’t get that much, we’re back to the dogs — not the duck — questioning how electric lights work.

 

And the duck might ask the same question as the patient in Bill Bramhall‘s cartoon, but the dogs will not.

Point being that the GOP has no plan and Trump is willing to float proposals that haven’t been thought through, plus that he has a record of peddling snake-oil.

It’s also a reminder that you wouldn’t keep getting those Nigerian emails if people didn’t keep falling for them.

There are no slam-dunks in this league, and there won’t be one in 2020, and not just because of our

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Chan Lowe)

 

(Clay Jones)

Both Lowe and Jones pick up on the stunning gall of Donald Trump supporters criticizing Joe Biden for being overly huggy.

But, while Lowe contrasts the level of sexual assaults and direct misogyny we’re talking about, which can be a bit dodgy, Jones’s essay balances the outrage over the insane gall of Trump supporters saying anything on the topic, along with a bit of “Say it ain’t so, Joe” fury of his own.

Both are deserved. For Kellyanne Conway to take a paycheck from the pussygrabber while criticizing the hugger is an insane level of hypocritical dishonestly.

However, Biden has left himself wide open, and any chink in the armor is an opening.

Some of it is generational.

In the Eighties, men were badgered to be more demonstrative and, while the “chasing secretaries around the desk” cartoons disappeared, we all attended breakfasts where the speaker directed us to stand up and hug the person next to us.

Then, sometime in the Nineties, those of us with any sense of which way the wind was blowing began to back that off.

It’s odd to read this article from Jezebel, in which the women of The View say they think the objections are overblown (and partisan), and then, after a relatively objective article, the reporter breaks character and declares them all wrong.

More instructive, however, is the flood of comments from women who, given that this is Jezebel, after all, we can assume are younger than the View’s Mom Squad, many of them saying they’ve never been hugged or touched in the workplace.

I believe them because, being all of seven years younger than Joe, I had no trouble reading the winds and trimming my own sails back then.

Perhaps my transition was sped up by a young teacher I knew who told me she’d been granted tenure and summed up her joy by saying “No more supportive hugs!” from her principal.

Biden has apologized and I hope he’s knocking it off, but it’s probably too late. Oh well. He and Bernie are good guys but their time in the sun has passed.

Still, if the Democrats are going to let their most sensitive followers eliminate candidates, Trump is going to get to run unopposed.

 

And, finally, this arc to watch

Non Sequitur is in the second day of an arc Wiley describes as his mea culpa for the late-night blunder that all but tanked his strip.

As he admits, those it’s intended for won’t see it, but it should be interesting for the rest of us.

 

Here Singeth All

https://youtu.be/aBUDm3yicJs