CSotD: You only are what you believe
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Tom Toles (WashPost) gives a warning about the scary times to come in the next two and a half weeks.
Facing what appears to be total disaster, Dear Leader and his acolytes have thrown caution and taste to the winds in a desperate attempt to do something or other.
It’s not clear what.
Mike Thompson (USA Today) cites the suicidal loyalty, not of the Deplorables, but of the well-dressed GOP faithful, which is harder to parse.
The Deplorables have been snookered, taken in by their understandable distrust of a system that has let them down.
Not sure why the fat cats have not jumped ship, though, again, I will point out that “rats leaving a sinking ship” refers to a sailors’ superstition that rats somehow knew when a ship was doomed and would leave it while it was still in port, as in this 1951 Russell Brockbank cartoon from Punch.
I suppose anyone who didn’t see the endgame four years ago can be forgiven for not being able to see it now.
Or maybe they’re just calculating the odds of clinging to some flotsam vs the odds of being able to swim to an increasingly distant shore.
The stench of desperation is becoming overwhelming. Last night, Trump indicated his endorsement of an insane terrorist plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan by approving his crowd’s chant of “Lock her up” and adding his own insults about her.
It’s one thing to fail to denounce terrorism. It’s another to proclaim your approval.
And it’s something else entirely for his fellow Republicans to let this astonishing call to terrorism go unchallenged.
The latest desperate gambit is the NY Post’s publication of what appears to be Russian disinformation, filtered through a compromised Rudy Giuliani. Michael Ramirez (Ind) is only one of several conservative cartoonists crying foul because Facebook and Twitter declined to help spread the dubious accusations.
First of all, of course, it’s no more “censorship” than it would be for Sports Illustrated to reject an article about soybean cultivation. Private companies are not governmental agencies.
More to the point, while this Forbes story outlines the doubts about the Hunter Biden accusations, Senator Chris Murphy offers an even more informed insider perspective.
The strategic benefit of inundating people with 20,000 lies over three and a half years has been that “alternative facts” no longer need to pass the whiff test to be accepted.
As Dear Leader told Savannah Guthrie the other night, he doesn’t bother to check whether the things he tells people are even plausible, passing on obvious lies and claiming they are just “opinions” that people should evaluate for themselves, while making common cause with Q-Anon because he, too, thinks it’s wrong for Tom Hanks to kill and eat children.
Or something.
The question of “What did the President know and when did he know it?” has gone from tragedy to farce.
Meanwhile, the firehose of desperate distractions puts us at risk of missing the actual news, such as the story in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Biden has declined to make a definitive statement about adding to the Supreme Court in order to restore balance, but, as Sorensen and Heller point out, Republican criticism of the potential move is clearly a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Prior to the 2016 election, liberals warned their purity-obsessed perfectionist allies that neither Jill Stein nor Gary Johnson were going to get to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court, but that Donald Trump just might. The warnings fell on deaf ears, but I don’t think anyone had anticipated that Mitch McConnell would get to ram through three justices in a single Presidential term.
Not to mention all the judges McConnell had blocked throughout Obama’s time so that he could stuff the federal courts with conservative justices during Trump’s administration, and let’s be clear: It no more mattered who was president in this matter than it did when we invaded Iraq. Any compliant figurehead will do.
Which is another reason why it is irrelevant to speculate about what Biden would do if elected. Trump may well be toast, but, if the Democrats don’t take over the Senate, McConnell will remain the most powerful politician in the country.
Which is why, as Clay Jones (Ind) points out, the Republican Party has been setting out fake ballot boxes in California and otherwise attempting to make it more difficult for people to vote.
You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
I mean, even Aleta worked in a sharp jab in this morning’s Prince Valiant.
Even a medieval monarchist — like all those present-day Republicans who have joined the Bulwark, the Lincoln Project and other attempts to reclaim the nation — can tell when people have grown lazy and timid and lost control of their destiny.
(Speaking of historical literary references, I’m currently re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo, and it’s odd to see references to a time when it was “republicans” who wanted to snick the heads off arrogant, unresponsive aristocrats.)
And, yes, the whole world is watching, and not just watching. Graeme MacKay (Hamilton Spectator) offers this sardonic view of Dear Leader and his dear lady among their natural allies, as part of a cartooning project on Twitter, hashtagged #DrawDonaldTrump, though, to be fair, it appears the original call to pens came from Martin Rowson, who — ethical disclosure — bought me a pint three years ago.
Or maybe I bought him one. Or maybe we had two.
In any case, it left me irredeemably compromised.
Or possibly it was the cartoons he showed us that evening that did that.
You have to remember that, back in 2017, most cartoonists on this side of the Atlantic were still being somewhat polite.
And you can see where that got us.
This war is nearly over now, but the mopping up is going to require dedication, and it won’t be pleasant.
Vote. For god’s sake, vote.
Then roll up your sleeves and let’s try to be kind.
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