CSotD: What do we do now?
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Morten Morland (London Times) provides a pretty good picture of what Joe Biden is facing. Between things that never happened and things that never should have happened, this isn’t going to be a matter of quietly continuing but of a massive cleanup.
The good news is that, having been a vice-president who was genuinely consulted and kept in the loop, Biden has a pretty good idea of how things work. There’s also the possibility that, instead of throwing away all the briefing books they’d been left by the Obama administration, Trump’s staff squirrelled them away somewhere unread.
And perhaps will even permit access to them.
Still, he’s been left with a mess, and part of getting back into things like the Paris Accords, the World Health Organization and the Iran Treaty will depend on what simply involved issuing an executive order and stomping out of the room and what tantrums will take actual Senate action to undo.
But the world seems eager to welcome us back, or at least to be rid of Trump, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Anupoju Apparo — Brazil via India Cartoons)
(Jorge Sanchez Armas — Peru via India Cartoons)
We’ve lost a lot of credibility in the world, but perhaps, if we demonstrate a real cleansing, they might even be impressed with our resiliency, though I suppose it may be overly optimistic to expect anything more than a cautious, arms-length acceptance until we’ve genuinely proven ourselves.
Monte Wolverton (Cagle) may be a bit overly optimistic in his take, but I think he’s reading the tea leaves right, if we ratchet his enthusiasm back a bit to simply mean that we get a second chance.
Besides, it would be not simply naive to think that things will snap back into place but against our own history to think that that would make everything perfect.
For instance, the trade war with China and other protectionist acts have damaged our economic standing to the point where, while we are far from a lesser power, we no longer stride into the room as a giant.
Being an equal will take some getting used to.
Nor, despite Ed Hall (Ind)‘s optimism, should the tumult of the past four years lure us into a haze of nostalgia.
Hall’s absolutely correct that Trump’s embrace — and even hiring — of white supremacists, plus his racist attacks on rapists and murderers from shithole countries, allowed some real scum to climb out from under that rock. But his absence will not make them disappear.
I saw a clip on social media of a young African-American woman who pointed out that, before Trump, she was marching in the streets to protest the death of Trayvon Martin, after all.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we had George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to make plain what had previously been sugar-coated and explained away with what Yeats called “polite, meaningless phrases,” in the sad, furious poem that demanded people stop being polite and meaningless in the face of crisis.
Cleaning up after Trump is only part of the challenge and, if you can get past the paywall, you can read an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on what comes next for progressives, now that a combination of oratorical restraint and massive shoe leather have restored the White House.
The alternative to being demonized as socialists cannot be to find yourself patted on the head and dismissed by the Democratic heirarchy, she insists.
These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.
It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.
However, we’re not there yet.
Dave Whamond (Cagle) echoes the words of Gerald Ford and the sins of Richard Nixon, as well as reports that the disgraced president wandered the White House halls at night, talking to the portraits of his predecessors.
A quiet Gerald Ford-style interlude could be a good thing, but one must question, in retrospect, whether his attempt to restore order by pardoning Nixon didn’t simply embolden the hard-core scofflaws and power freaks who continued to defend, and emulate, the Chief.
Bearing in mind that, while many of his crew did time for their crimes, Gordon Liddy, the least repentant of them all, became a conservative talk show host, paving the way for Oliver North and other felons to be embraced as patriots and heroes.
Moreover, Dear Leader is not fading into obscurity or even accepting the plain, obvious outcome of the election, as seen in this gloriously depressing piece by Ann Telnaes (Washington Post):
The punchline being, of course, that the final stage is supposed to be “acceptance,” and we’re unlikely to see that happy outcome.
Word on the street says sentiment even within his own circle is that Dear Leader should accept the election and show some class, with only his hardcore loyalists urging him to fight on.
The latter apparently not including the reluctant FLOTUS he dragged out of Manhattan.
Still, despite Biden’s excellent debate and town hall performances as well as his gracious and articulate speech accepting the outcome, Steve Kelley (Creators) and other rightwingers continue to replay the Trump campaign’s partyline attack on his mental capabilities.
And Gary Varvel (Creators) doubles down on the “feeble old man” insults, adding and perpetuating partisan, paranoid claims that the media and social platforms were prejudiced against conservatives.
Depicting Zuckerberg is a particularly egregious act of ignoring both his actions and a Republican investigation, but the effort will help perpetuate “alternative facts” in which truth is hostage to partisan loyalties.
We’ll see who ends up in jail, who ends up with a show on Fox, and who gets both.
Meanwhile, here’s where we’re at now:
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