CSotD: Truthiness
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The idea that everyone was glued to the hearings is a bit fanciful, though somebody posted a photo taken on an airplane where all the screens were playing the same thing despite the choices available, including the choice of nothing at all.
However, the laundromat TV was tuned to a comedy when I put in my wash and turned off when I came to empty the dryer. I guess those who buy airplane tickets are different than those who don’t have their own laundry equipment.
But Christopher Weyant adds another element, which is that Fox has been broadcasting from Cloud Cuckooland, adding chyron statements to undercut the testimony, undercutting it themselves in the breaks, and, of course, giving Dear Leader free rein to take over Fox and Friends because they really are his friends.
Best analysis from that last link:
If you heard your own grandpa talking like this, what would you do? Would you give him control of the most powerful military force in the history of the world? Or would you take the car keys?
But, as has been noted here and elsewhere, rightwing media has spent a couple of decades building up the notion that, as Kellyanne Conway famously explained, there are “alternative facts,” that truth is whatever you want it to be.
You don’t have to produce Elvis in order for him to be alive. He faked his death in order to avoid further publicity, so of course we can’t find him.
And when someone does produce a birth certificate showing Obama was born in Hawaii, that’s just part of the conspiracy.
And that flag on the Moon was waving in the breeze, despite the lying explanations from NASA.
And, as Pat Bagley suggests, the real problem is that the Republicans weren’t allowed to call the witness who could explain it all, but they have plans to fix that.
Perhaps they will subpoena Brian Kilmeade to explain how telephones work.
I also find it hard to believe that people just accept that you can hear both sides of a phone call three thousand — or five thousand miles away.
I kind of thought that was why we had telephones in the first place, but, then again, the rightwingers keep complaining that the impeachment process is an attempt to negate the results of the election.
I also kind of thought that’s what impeachment was for.
In the days before Fox and talk radio, believing utter bullshit was much more difficult. When Alice told the White Queen she couldn’t believe impossible things, Her Majesty responded. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
However, today Fox and Friends runs for three hours every morning on weekdays, and four hours on weekends, which explains why President Trump was able to believe 18 impossible things, if not before breakfast, at least before lunch.
Practice, practice, practice.
It does not explain why the entire Republican party has become a willing collaborator in this farcical sellout, but Bill Bramhall properly depicts the situation.
One of the basic factors in understanding the roots of the Constitution is to recognize that the Founders despised and distrusted political parties.
They could have easily established a Parliamentary system in which party strength determines who governs and party discipline ensures that majority rule will proceed along party lines.
They didn’t.
They also didn’t forbid political parties: They simply set up a system that would not enshrine them.
This was a bit like leaving a plate of cookies out in front of a roomful of third graders and feeling no need to put out a sign saying, “One only,” because, of course, they would want to share.
Which analogy is probably unfair to third graders.
Still, there is a substantial difference between swallowing hard and declining to contradict your party leader — and let’s pause to note that there is also a substantial difference between a Prime Minister and a President in that “party leader” regard — and, as Mike Peters suggests, advancing a clear and obvious but self-serving fraud upon the public.
Loyalty to Trump is understandable.
But this is disloyalty to the national interest, at a level that makes Neville Chamberlain look like Captain America.
The Republicans are not just ignoring the New Anschluss.
They’re not simply enabling it with our silence.
They’re actively promoting it.
Despite their insistence that the US, under Obama, only sent blankets, not weapons, until heroic Cadet Heelspurs leapt into action, which is either a deliberate lie or a further sign of depraved indifference to the truth.
And the Anschluss was a relatively bloodless move. There is a great deal of difference between ignoring a political takeover and ignoring an armed, actively opposed invasion.
Unless you feel that dead Ukrainians, like dead Kurds, are simply the price of friendship.
And so long as, as RJ Matson puts it, you agree with Devin Nunes that, no matter how deliberate the betrayals, no matter how absurd the claims, no matter how transparent the lies, truth is whatever Dear Leader says it is, else what’s the point of having a Dear Leader in the first place?
Other Stories, Other Days
Pat Oliphant also depicted a father reading to his child, on the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy, a cartoon I featured then on Comic Strip of the Day, in which I called it
(O)ne of the few JFK Assassination Anniversary cartoons that seem content to remember the moment. Yes, a fairy tale. But as true as anything else being said, and truer than most of what’s out there.
At the same time, my college friend and coffeehouse compadre Jim Moran posted a compendium of the songs which came from that sad turning point in our history, and it’s well-worth a look, as his blog always is, if you care about folk music as much as I care about comics.
I yield my Moment of Zen to him.
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