CSotD: Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!

I’m starting with Clay Bennett‘s diagram of the table for the G-7, because it doesn’t allow for a whole lot of debate or denial or refutation.

You can interpret it: There is discussion that the conference host, French President Emmanuel Macron is primarily concerned not with possible disagreements over this or that economic factor but simply whether they can have serious discussions or whether Trump will dominate the whole thing with his childish ego trips.

But even if you support the Chosen One, it’s impossible not to concede that we have managed to distance ourselves from the other members of the G-7.

At which point, of course, someone could try to pin you down on what that means, which, given the number of times Dear Leader has contradicted his own views on international trade, might be difficult.

 

For instance, he’s gone from simply accusing Democrats of being “socialists” and is now calling them “communists.” Both are scary words, but Dear Leader clearly slept through his classes at Wharton, and it’s important to point out that he was only in the mediocre underclassman college, not the well-respected graduate school.

In any case, Paul Fell suggests that there are Trump supporters in the hinterlands who cheerfully accept government largesse while decrying the “socialism” they don’t understand.

I think they’re wising up, but I could be wrong. We’ll see.

Farm subsidies are a constant source of debate: We need to keep farmers on the land, even though they would produce too much food if they all went full-throttle.

But our means of limiting production is flawed, outdated and needs adjustment. We all know that.

However, the current bailouts to farmers injured by the Chosen One’s trade war with China are in a different classification. They are more communist than socialist, and remind me of a session I attended in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

An economics professor from SUNY Plattsburgh explained to two dozen Soviet timber executives — CEOs of substantial businesses — how two companies might compete in making coffee cups, with one gaining the edge that would put the other out of business.

A hand went up: “You did not explain the role of the central government in setting production quotas.”

The next question was more of a comment: “How can a system be said to work if a company is allowed to go out of business?”

That’s communism, and it’s how you keep a government afloat when there is no rational economic planning, structure or policy at the top.

 

Dave Brown isn’t the only cartoonist to play with the “Chosen One” foolishness, but he does a nice job of turning it to commentary on Trump’s relationship with Putin, which is a strange partnership on so many levels that it beggars analysis.

We started with a cartoon that didn’t allow for much debate. This one, by contrast, will be denied by Trumpanzees who, having absorbed not one sentence of the Mueller Report, think it cleared the Chosen One from Russian influence.

All it said was that they couldn’t prove that the Trump campaign actively coordinated with the Russians, that they planned, that they worked on projects together.

It didn’t even say they weren’t actively working together — only that they couldn’t prove it.

The report was clear that Trump benefited from Russian interference, whether his people met with their people or not.

Never mind. You might as well try to explain it to the dog.

It’s just annoying to those of us who, if we criticized Johnson or Nixon, were told to “go back to Russia,” that we now find the conservatives buddying up to Russia and China and blowing off NATO.

John Birch’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.

 

Though Dave Whamond did make me giggle.

Still, if you’re going to sell out, you should show a profit. Trump’s disloyalty isn’t even good business.

 

And if conservatives don’t mind him making friends with Russia and China, you’d think they would at least call him out for having the nerve to actively, purposefully dodge the draft and then pretend to be one of the guys at a veteran’s meeting.

Even those of us who simply didn’t serve tread lightly among those who did, and Ed Hall offers a harsh but telling commentary on a draft-dodger with the gall to tell a meeting of veterans that he wishes he could give himself a Congressional Medal of Honor.

It was a joke, but he hasn’t got the sense to know it was a tasteless, inappropriate joke.

Though, to be fair, if Trumpanzees don’t understand what the Mueller Report said about Russia, Trump opponents seem equally ignorant about how draft deferments worked and how Trump got out of serving.

He didn’t dodge five times. He took the same, perfectly honorable II-S student deferments as millions of young men in college.

Going to college and taking a deferment wasn’t “dodging.”

 

(Unless you went here.)

It was that letter at the end, the phony heel-spurs letter from a doctor who was a tenant of his father, that amounted to draft dodging: A deliberate lie told to avoid service.

Al Gore took four II-S deferments, as did Rocky Bleier. Then they served in Vietnam, with honor, despite being — by current definition — four-time draft-dodgers.

Chuck Robb did four years of ROTC, so he didn’t have any II-S deferments. He had II-D deferments, so, by current standards, he was also a four-time draft dodger by graduation, whereupon he reported to Quantico.

 

Etc. etc. etc. Nearly every officer on that wall, and not a few non-coms as well.

Bottom Line: None of those guys would joke about deserving the Medal of Honor.

 

Jim Morin may be a bit harsh here, but the question on the table is whether the president’s increasingly disoriented mania is simply a strange feature of a useful puppet or beginning to harm GOP chances in Congressional elections.

Or, y’know, some kind of patriotic crisis.

(Does anybody still care about “patriotism”?)