CSotD: Rats at bay

Jim Morin provides a good starting point and what may be Trump’s best defense: To simply scream that it’s all a hoax and a witch hunt and unfair.

I particularly like that Morin does not have him pointing at his political opponents so much as the system itself. We’ve had several cartoons showing him destroying or defacing the Constitution, and that’s correct.

But here he blames the entire concept of Justice, and that’s probably closer to the truth. The “toddler” image has followed him because it’s accurate. He simply has a three-year-old’s attitude of “I want this, why can’t I have it?”

 

And, as Ann Telnaes suggests, it’s always worked for him before and he genuinely, sincerely can’t understand why it can’t work for him now.

He’s not joking; he’s not being dishonest.

It’s true that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, but the fact that his father set him up in business seems perfectly normal to him, and he probably tells himself stories about how hard he worked to get there, because he’s heard other people tell those stories.

And you don’t have to dig very deeply into commercial real estate to discover that it really is all about “the art of the deal,” and that, while not everybody who makes it big in that world is mobbed up, if they aren’t, they’ve worked very hard to avoid it.

What, in his case, is bizarre is his inability to understand that the rest of the world doesn’t work that way.

But it’s part of his narcissism, which makes him not simply lack empathy, as we’ve seen, but even lack a basic level of self-awareness.

Jeff MacDonald and OJ Simpson both know that murder is wrong, and their narcissism therefore persuades them that they didn’t do it, and furnishes them with an alternative explanation for what happened.

Trump does not need an alternative. He simply doesn’t believe what he does is wrong.

 

And so if the New York courts are going to be mean to him and pick on him and try to make him disclose his earnings, he’ll simply move to Florida where they don’t do that sort of thing. And Andy Marlette suggests the level of respect for Florida he brings to the move.

Florida has always offered wealthy retirees good tax benefits, and if you’re not familiar with Meyer Lansky, you at least remember his fictional doppelganger from the Godfather Part II, Hyman Roth, and, yes, I find it humorous and ironic that people would move to Miami to avoid the heat.

And I find it encouraging that it’s not always that simple.

Lansky had two advantages: One was that he really did move to Florida, though losing major holdings in Havana was unintentional. But, though Republicans continue to see Commies in the Democratic Party, I don’t think Trump will find fatigue-clad resistance fighters seizing his New York properties.

Lansky’s other major advantage was that they could never pin much of anything on him, which is the benefit of knowing you’re breaking the law.

It tends to make you do a better job of covering your tracks.

 

So we’ll see. Joe Heller makes the point that the GOP — at least those who have not announced their retirement or otherwise quietly left the room — are determined to close ranks behind Dear Leader, but that they should not expect any such loyalty from him in return.

 

As Bill Bramhall observes, they didn’t like it when it was behind closed committee doors and, now that they’ve had the open vote they asked for, they don’t like that either.

Several people have noted that, while the GOP has complained about the process, they haven’t claimed Trump was innocent, and they would do well to avoid that aspect of things.

People keep comparing Trump and Nixon, but there’s little common ground, and one of the major differences — aside from Nixon knowing he was guilty and having respect for the government — is that people understand burglary and witness tampering.

And if Trump were offering Zelenskyy a brand new car in exchange for his investigation, they’d probably understand that as bribery. If he were threatening to release photos of Zelenskyy with a Shetland pony, they’d understand that as blackmail.

I don’t think they see criminality in what Trump is accused of, and “So what?” may prove to be a perfectly effective defense in the court of public opinion.

But before it comes to that, continuing to frame it as “Republicans versus Democrats” keeps it in the context of politics as usual.

People don’t seem to give a damn how many House-passed bills Mitch McConnell has been sitting on, or how many unqualified judges the Republicans have awarded with lifetime appointments.

They’re not going to care how pissed the Democrats are over how Dear Leader chooses to carry out foreign policy, at least as long as, when he abandons our allies, the results are framed in vague terms like “ethnic cleansing.”

 

Different Rats: The good kind

Today’s Free Range provokes a thought I hadn’t had, which is how far up the St. Lawrence the rising sea will reach. There’s a lot of low-lying land alongside that mighty passageway, so I’m not sure the Thousand Islands are in danger of being submerged.

But if they were, this Kraft/Wishbone crap isn’t what you should mourn.

 

People from back home fill their ice chests with River Rat cheese when they’re in town and I’ve had a bottle of this real-deal Thousand Islands dressing.

The story is persuasive. Put this stuff at risk and you might have a better chance of rallying the real people.

Well, you would if they ever ate salad. Too bad that guide’s wife didn’t invent some fabulous kind of steak sauce.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Macanudo)

(Wallace the Brave)

And you thought Calvin got a kick out of making people’s days surreal.

Linears and Will Henry treat the comics page the way Kurosawa treated the movies.

Not saying that’s a bad thing.