CSotD: Out of Touch

I’ve been tempted to go one of two directions lately: Either to run an entire day of Joe Biden cartoons or to run an announcement saying “No blog today. There was nothing but Joe Biden cartoons.”

Jeff Danziger offers an antidote of sorts.

I don’t really think — and I doubt Danziger thinks — that the Russians are looking upon this in puzzlement.

Quite the opposite: I’d bet they’re looking upon it with glee and ordering the trolls at the Internet Research Agency to crank out more Joe Biden memes pro-and-con, and post them on Facebook.

In any case, every freaking cartoonist in America has commented on this and even if a Republican cartoonist is seeking to end Biden’s (undeclared) candidacy, it makes me wonder why anyone considers him such a threat.

Every other time Biden has run for president, he’s managed to bring it all down on his head without any outside help.

And, as noted before, we’ve seen too many of these jolly feeding frenzies center on partisan nonsense, like Al Gore’s lies that weren’t lies, or John Kerry’s war record as seen through the eyes of the Swift Boat Veterans for Horseshit, or, from the other side, attacks on Dan Quayle for dumb things he never said or did.

I have heard cartoonists say they’re hearing from editors that there’s too much anti-Trump cartooning, but is anyone cynical enough to simply play to the market?

I suppose piling on Biden makes for a change, but Trump truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

Jeff Stahler gets extra credit for mashing up Dear Leader’s absurd comments about wind power with his empty promises of a health care plan.

That old bromide about remaining silent and being thought a fool rather than speaking up and removing all doubt doesn’t begin to capture the stream of uninformed nonsense that pours forth from a man too lazy to learn the facts and too vain to keep his mouth shut.

I don’t believe he deliberately lies. I think he just natters on mindlessly, like the old drunk at the end of the bar. Only with the nuclear codes.

And, by the way, I’d heard the stories of the whop-whop-whop of windmills and their death toll on birds, so a decade or so ago, as I was tooling around Northern New York with a little too much time before my next appointment, I pulled up next to a windmill, shut off my car and rolled down the windows.

I heard nothing. Nor did I see any dead birds strewn around below the slowly turning blades.

Granted, I’d have to park next to a thousand or so active windmills before I could make a scientific statement.

Still, there’s a lot of nonsense out there and, as it happens, the anti-vaxxer who insists Obama was born in Kenya is only the wackadoodle edge on windmill mythology.

Advice to Cartoonists: Drop the Biden stuff and do your windmill cartoon right away, because this will also get old and it’s not like he won’t feed you more straightlines.

 

For instance, Matt Wuerker points out that Mexico’s problems have some American roots, though we’ve had people suggesting Americans stop providing an incentive for drug dealers for quite a few years and I haven’t seen it work yet.

And besides, while a successful “Boycott Opioids” movement would solve a lot of problems, the economic impact would be on American pharmaceutical companies, not Mexican dope dealers.

But there’s this: If those opioid makers can be asked to keep track of the number of pills they produce vs the logical number of pills needed for legitimate medical purposes, would it disturb our Founders’ dream of keeping America safe from school children to insist gunmakers make a similar effort to account for legitimate demand vs actual output?

There are already some rules for overseas sales, after all, as one of my fellow Granite Staters is learning.

In any case, Wuerker is right to point out the simplemindedness of the notion that the woes all start from the other side of the border.

Dear Leader seems to know about as much about drug smuggling as he does about wind power. His notion that it’s the migrants who bring the drugs is imbecilic.

I suppose you might have the odd mule who wants to stay, but my experience on the Northern Border is that mules want to return and get more drugs and make more money. They’re smugglers, not migrants.

And I would think that the way to change things would be to have more people on our side of the border searching incoming cars and trucks, plus stationing more Coast Guard ships off the coast and having more officers searching cargo containers at seaports.

Also, people are searched as they enter a country (i.e, by the Americans), not as they’re leaving it (e.g., by the Mexicans).

One would think a world-traveler like Trump would know that.

Apparently, one would be wrong.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Retail)

(Bliss)

In my job as editor for a kid-written publication, I’ve added an instruction that, if someone you are interviewing tells you to follow your dreams, follow up by asking them how they did that and get some specifics.

It reminds me of when Ed Sullivan would have baseball players on his show and it became a standing joke in our family that the player would advise young people “Don’t copy anyone else’s batting stance.” And the punchline was that it happened nearly every time.

“Follow your dreams” is equally vapid.

Unless your dream is to take another nap, in which case, I’m right there with ya.

 

Wallace the Brave, however, has a different way of following, or perhaps instigating, dreams, and, no, you don’t want to just be another Tammy, fruitlessly scanning the wood chips.

Even being “The Tammy with the Cast on Her Arm” is better than that.

 

Speaking of dreams, and windmills …

(The intellectual’s equivalent of the eating scene from Tom Jones.)