CSotD: Random Stuff

There’s no pattern today, so we might as well start with Paul Fell’s weather cartoon.

We’ve got our first real snow, though most of it passed us by and we only ended up with four or five inches. Doesn’t matter to the dog.

He’s agin it.

Ridgebacks can follow along with the horses for 30 miles in a day and bring a lion to bay in open country.

What they can’t — or won’t — do is get their paddies wet, and they will readily go 24 hours indoors if it means waiting for dry weather.

I’ve hired a dog walker while I rehab the new hip, and now that there’s snow on the ground, the dog is quite willing to let her daily visit suffice.

Know your dog. If he won’t come in, fine. I’ve seen huskies contentedly sleep under a deep snow blanket.

If he doesn’t want to go out, though, you should probably toss him out anyway but then wait for the scratch on the door and let the poor thing back in.

Or, as in this cartoon, go with him.

As a great poet once wrote, “If Sherman’s horse can take it, why can’t you?”

 

Turning to less serious matters, after sorting through a flood of impeachment cartoons, Clay Bennett‘s wiseass commentary gave me a giggle.

I really do find it astonishing that the Republicans are lining up with Russia, even if only Tucker Carlson is willing to actually say that’s where his ideals are.

I remember shouts of “Go Back to Russia!” a half century ago and was only a few feet back in one march when a can of red paint was flung from the sidelines.

But it’s our own damn fault.

We had an assembly in elementary school where a husband-and-wife team of Birchers warned us that, if we didn’t fight the Soviets, we’d end up in a world in which we had to carry identification and would be required to show it if we wanted to travel.

Being REAL ID-compliant is nothing to worry about. Essentially, the federal government just wants to make sure it knows who you are and what state you live in before you board an aircraft.

Well okay then.

 

And then there was that incredible letter that Trump sent to Nancy Pelosi.

It’s really given editors a challenge, because they don’t want to use words like “insane” or “bizarre” in a headline, but it seems inaccurate to just say “scathing.”

The Washington Post ran an annotated version, but couldn’t help being a bit snarky in explaining some of the more looney-tune passages.

I think this commentary from Liza Donnelly is both sufficient and accurate.

It’s not clear who said, “Speak when you’re angry and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret,” but, based on what we’ve seen so far and what is reported by “Anonymous” in the book “Warning,” I don’t picture Dear Leader ever having the kind of calm, detached aftermath in which to regret much of anything.

However, that linked Quote Investigator piece also attributes to Henry Ward Beecher the advice “Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry,” and that’s excellent counsel.

Minorities know that, when someone gets angry at you and drops a racial slur into their fury, there’s no backing off from it, no apology that cancels the fact that they’ve had it on their mind.

Anger simply drops the barriers of good behavior and lets you see what’s really inside someone.

And, goodness gracious, it doesn’t take much to expose the rage of Dear Leader’s prickly, bullying id. By all insider accounts, he flies into a fury without a great deal of prodding.

Whether that’s why his parents gave up and shipped him off to military school or it’s a result of that abandonment doesn’t much matter at this point.

What matters is that he says things his supporters are too wise, too well-governed to say, but that don’t lie far beneath their surfaces, either.

 

Which adds a bit of a chill to Mike Luckovich’s otherwise comical comment: They’re keeping him loose, catering to him as if he were the ace pitcher in their bullpen, which he seems to be.

Well, every sport has one team that tolerates outrageous, even criminal, behavior from its star players, as long as they win games, and Leo Durocher’s famous analysis of Mel Ott’s Giants may apply to our current two-team political league: “Nice guys finish last.”

 

Wrapping up

One of the annual tasks I don’t miss from my newsroom days is the look back at the year just past, which was a dreary thing to write and basically covered for the fact that there wasn’t going to be a lot of news being made, or a lot of people around to cover it, between Christmas and New Years.

That said, I enjoy best-of collections as long as I don’t have to assemble them myself.

The Washington Post has kindly assembled a collection of Ann Telnaes’s work from the past calendar year …

 

… as well as one with Tom Toles’s top cartoons for 2019.

Meanwhile, I haven’t decided if this is a year we should simply forget or one we’d damn well better remember.

Life used to be so much simpler.