CSotD: Perceptions, Exceptions, Deceptions

Adam Zyglis sets the stage for today’s ruminations, though his cartoon from a few days ago is slightly spoiled by Dear Leader’s sudden realization that his refusal to acknowledge the Covid-19 issue was costing him votes.

However, going on TV and noting the importance of masks doesn’t undo the fine job his administration has done of setting up a Mask/NoMask loyalty test.

Nor does his notion of getting kids back in school, and I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up on the disconnect between his insistence that school kids can neither be harmed by nor spread the virus, given that he also blames the Covid surge on young people who gather in the streets to protest or congregate in bars and beaches.

Obviously, his Covid-immune high school kids are only a year or two younger than those virus-ridden college kids, and I’m not sure where that leaves middle schools.

But wotthehell, we’re well past logic these days.

 

I like Matt Wuerker’s take on the deployment of the SS thugs into cities with Democratic mayors, starting with Trump’s outrageous blatancy in phrasing it just that way.

It’s as if Democrats will shortly be accused of burning the Reichstag.

But I’m challenged by Wuerker’s having Barr give stage directions to the antifa players in this drama.

Nobody is, at the moment, seriously suggesting that Dear Leader has set agents provocateurs loose on the streets, but there are some of us old enough to remember Tommy the Traveler and his ilk.

There was no need to plant these people, then or now, because there are plenty of believers in absolutes, people who believe that things are all good or all bad, with no room for nuance.

One of the most genuinely radical people I knew had, according to a mutual friend who knew her then, come into college as a prim little well-dressed honor student “who wouldn’t let me copy off her paper.”

But once she discovered that the system was not all good, she declared it all bad and assumed that SDS and more radical groups were the antidote.

These are the fringe knuckleheads who make outrageous speeches and break windows while the mass of protesters are simply trying to peacefully raise an opposing viewpoint.

But, in fairness, you’ll find the same extremists at the other end of the lunatic fringe, writing hateful fascist columns and propping up the Bill Barrs of this world.

And they’re not all prominent Bill O’Reilly clones; some are the prissy little well-dressed former honor students who ask puffball questions for OAN, or who stand at the podium and answer them.

Which brings us in a kind of roundabout way to our

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Bill Bramhall)

 

(Mike Lester)

These two cartoons are only joined together at the crotch, but I can work with that.

Trump’s odd response at Tuesday’s press conference to a question about Ghislaine Maxwell has already caused a stir.

I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly, I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach, but I wish her well, whatever it is.

Trump has downplayed his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, as I suppose everyone who knew him has, though they aren’t all on record as having said that he “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Which makes it hard to believe Dear Leader hasn’t given Maxwell’s potential for disclosure a fair amount of thought.

But Bramhall does well to play upon the disgust over his wishing her well without getting into conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death and the concomitant speculation on Maxwell’s safely.

Selectivity is more problematic for Lester, because the complaint against Fox also lists violent rape accusations against Ed Henry, but he’s quite right to call out those who are giggling over what has been revealed about Carlson and Hannity.

It’s thin gruel, at least in comparison to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ed Henry.

They made clumsy, tone deaf, inappropriate attempts to get young women to come to their hotel rooms, and if it weren’t for their superior power in the workplace, their ineptitude would be laughable.

Which I say after having spent four years at a Catholic college in which a lot of students were high achieving in the classroom and not so capable outside of it.

The real question being not what they did but how management managed to ignore it, and you could have (should have) asked the same question when Matt Lauer was disappeared.

Lester throws in some insulting visual imagery, which is his style, and ignores the chortling from his own side of the aisle over, for instance, Senator Al Franken being forced out of office over a stupid joke, not to mention the millions of dollars spent by rightwingers to examine Bill Clinton’s zipper.

Still, the game should be played for justice and for gender equality, not to eliminate political rivals.

All of which, party affliation aside, adds up to this: The movie “Idiocracy” posits a world in which intelligent people have rationally, deliberately chosen not to have large families.

I’d have rewritten it to emphasize the underlying notion that, when you throw a bunch of prissy former honor students together, it’s amazing that they manage to reproduce at all.

 

All Pots and Kettles Matter

Finally, in our examination of selective outrage, Tom Stiglich is one of a couple of deeply conservative cartoonists furious that the NBA is backing BLM when they have strong business ties to China.

But the dust-up over the NBA’s marketing in that country happened nearly a year ago, at a time when Hong Kong demonstrators were still being tolerated by Beijing.

It’s only recently that the central government sent federal forces to stifle protesters under the pretense that local governments couldn’t handle it, tyrannical jack-bootery no American conservative could ever tolerate.

We should send those poor people a shipment of MAGA hats.

Or, y’know, just tell the factory to distribute them locally.