CSotD: Strange Days Have Found Us

Bill Bramhall offers a devastatingly accurate appraisal of our current situation, as our president seemingly competes with himself to see what foolishness he can come up with next.

It is as if he were trying to gauge the loyalty of his Deplorables by seeing how clear he can make his incapacity before they finally break away.

Over the weekend, he adopted the Pee Wee Herman approach of deflecting his screwups by declaring “I meant to do that!’

He first applied it to his statements about using disinfectants and UV lights to treat the coronavirus, insisting that he was giving a sarcastic answer to a reporter.

This might have been more convincing if he had been answering a question from a reporter at the time, which he wasn’t.

 

And it might have been funny if, as Nick Anderson predicted, poison control centers around the country hadn’t seen a leap in calls about disinfectant poisonings.

Then the NYTimes ran an article about his lackadaisical work schedule, which I would note simply confirmed what has been reported in every book about the Trump White House since “Fear and Fury,” more than two years ago.

Well, someone must have read it to him, because he lashed out at the reporters.

Of course, as noted before, he left the White House several times in March. And, BTW, the Comfort was launched in 1987.

But his lickspittles came out to declare that he does indeed work very long hours, mostly proving that if you don’t back up the Tweets, you don’t stay in the job.

He also posted

When will all of the ‘reporters’ who have received Noble Prizes for their work on Russia, Russia, Russia, only to have been proven totally wrong (and, in fact, it was the other side who committed the crimes) be turning back their cherished ‘Nobles’ so that they can be given to the REAL REPORTERS & JOURNALISTS who got it right.

After which, stung by responses that he had (A) misspelled “Nobel” and (B) confused the Nobel Prize with the Pulitzer, he deleted the tweet — which may not be legal but let’s ask Hillary Clinton — and out came ol’ Pee Wee again:

Now he’s gotten to the point where he’s beginning to agree with himself:

Though someone else (sorry, it’s too deeply buried in the hoots of derision to find it now) asked what about Echo and the Bunny Men?

All of which would be very amusing, perhaps a bit scary and utterly irrelevant, since the Deplorables are likely to remain unshaken.

Except that he’s losing support among some people who were steadfast allies. I haven’t been surprised to see critical cartoons from Gary Varvel, Michael Ramirez and Bob Gorrell, because they are conservative but not unwilling to criticize.

 

But I had to look twice to see that Rick McKee had indeed penned this piece. McKee does not often disagree with a Republican president, or, at least, he doesn’t often put such feelings into cartoon form.

 

And, while Chip Bok doesn’t toe the party line quite to that extent, it was still surprising to see him mock Dear Leader’s thoughts about internal lighting.

None of this will budge the Deplorables, but there are plenty of other voters, and if commentary between now and November becomes more fact-based than partisan, it could be a good thing for public debate, however it shapes the final numbers.

Elsewhere on the funny pages:

The quarantine is getting real for Gene and Marylou in Arlo & Janis, and if you go to that strip for laughs, it looks like the start of an arc that may not offer many.

Their resourcefulness, independence and struggles have been a pleasant sideline to Arlo’s kvetching and Janis’s fretfulness, the usual laugh-providers in the strip.

A weekend visit with the kids has normally been an uplifting break, but this looks like a trip into reality instead.

Incidentally, it has occurred to me that, while deadlines forced strip cartoonists to come to the party late, there’s going to be a lag at the other end, where the mask and toilet paper gags will run for a bit when we’re not there anymore.

However things play out, I hope Gene and Marylou find a way to stay above the storm, but they’re sure not alone.

Which brings us to our

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Lola)

(Candorville)

I’ve been trying to figure out what age I was at what level of independence, because at nine, I was off in the woods and trucking around to some relatively distant friends’ houses, but I’m not sure how much freedom I had at, say, seven.

Then raising my own kids in the city was hard because I had no experience of the risks they might face.

For parents today, it doesn’t matter where you grew up because the game has been utterly changed anyway, even before the pandemic.

 

Speaking of parenting, I got an extra laff out of today’s Wallace the Brave because I’d just seen NFL Network reporter Aditi Kinkhabwala’s Tweet about doing an instant-deadline job from home:

Now that we’ve all reveled in the footage of @NFL GMs and coaches w/ their families during ?the #draft?, please allow me to share what working from home was like for me, at abt 12:15am Friday, when ?@nflnetwork? asked me to file a Day 1 report on the #Steelers. ? pic.twitter.com/KMblrRnCyF

— Aditi Kinkhabwala (@AKinkhabwala) April 26, 2020

She got massive kudos for professionalism on this, particularly since it’s widely known in the NFL that those cries came from the daughter who arrived seven weeks early in an emergency C-section while Pittsburgh-based Mom was in Cleveland to cover a Browns’ game.

She had a brilliant, serious interview about that experience, but all I could find is this bit of post-natal bravado:

Some moms are better cut out for chaos than others, and I think Aditi and Wallace’s mom could be good friends.

 

Meanwhile, back in the files:

A little help for Popeye fans, since King couldn’t find today’s Vintage piece in their archives.

And while I was digging around, I figured I might as well offer a few Ben Bolt and Buz Sawyer updates as well, since my guess is that whoever should fix things at KFS can’t address the server from home:

 

Plus this from 1960:

We’re onto you, Rowling.

And, finally

Matt Wuerker chats with Joel Pett, as part of a series of videos he’s doing at Politico.

Can’t embed it. You’ll have to click this link.