CSotD: Two Legs Better
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Leading off with a graphic summary by Graeme Bandeira (Yorkshire Post).
A slight criticism: I think the caption detracts from the impact, but, then again, viewing us from across the Atlantic likely makes our willingness to execute people seem part and parcel of an uncivilized character.
Paul Thomas (Daily Mail) being perhaps a bit more direct in his assessment.
I like the little flaming lapel pin, because it goes back to a more fundamental matter in this whole mess.
In the wake of 9/11, a lot of what the Brits call “newsreaders” began wearing flag pins, and I like the term “newsreader” because, well, that’s pretty much their function, though they are supposed to be journalists.
The pins, however, proclaimed them as patriots, which is a term that has never really connoted neutrality, though it’s sometimes applied to rebels and sometimes applied to lackeys and sometimes those are the same people.
Certainly, while Dear Leader has been the chief focus of all this sedition, he has not been, and could not have been, alone in his work, as David Rowe (Financial Review) points out.
The nice thing about Watergate was that it was almost entirely confined to the White House and so, while John Dean was correct that it was a cancer, it was a cancer in the form of a tumor that could be neatly excised.
By contrast, after being set upon by a mob that included people specifically intent on binding and murdering members of Congress and the Vice President, who is a member of their own party, a distressing number of Republicans still voted in favor of overturning a fair and accurate election.
That’s pretty systemic.
Now there’s talk of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, and I’m not against either, but the notion that ousting Trump will solve the crisis is gaping foolishness on a shameful level.
What to do? What to do? Kal Kallaugher (AMS) disputes the equally foolish notion being advanced by a number of GOP lickspittles that we should do nothing for fear of upsetting people.
Granted, when you begin denouncing traitors, you set a dangerous precedent, but, then again, when people are permitted to spread clear and obvious seditious lies to undermine public faith in our nation and its Constitution, allowing them to operate freely also sets a dangerous precedent.
And when attempts are made by private industry to rein in this untrammeled flow of paranoid misinformation, the President’s allies scream “censorship,” with Gary Varvel (Creators) mistaking Twitter for a government agency, either purposefully or because he genuinely doesn’t understand the difference.
Though it has been pointed out by more than one observer that the people who are screaming about Twitter and Facebook exerting ownership of their platforms are the same who insisted that a baker had the freedom to refuse service to a gay couple and that Hobby Lobby was justified in limiting health services to things that fit the business owner’s religious views.
Nor are they far from the mob that insists our schoolchildren should recite the Pledge of Allegiance on a daily basis, though Andy Marlette (Creators) wonders what it is we’re teaching them to be loyal to.
Not that this will be the only times in their lives that they learn “Do as I say, not as I do,” or “Four legs good, two legs better.”
And let me once more run this classic You Damn Kid strip on the topic of the widely accepted, oft-cited rumor that kids no longer say the Pledge in class.
Kids are neither blind nor stupid. They see when mobs of “patriots” run through the Capitol smashing windows, breaking through doors and posing with the fruits of their trespassing, vandalism and theft.
Nor are they unable to recognize that, while people marching to demand equal treatment by police are beaten and gassed in the streets, there was no such show of force against a mob, but, rather, that certain of our leaders twisted the story to make the two events equal without explaining why these allegedly equivalent uprisings were obviously treated differently.
Leigh Rubin didn’t intend today’s Rubes (Creators) to be political, but he touches upon a personal sore spot.
We didn’t have to learn the battles of the Peloponnesian War, but we did learn about the war itself.
Sort of.
We learned that Athens was the birthplace of democracy and that it had a wealth of great drama and art, while Sparta was a brutal, warlike city state in which young boys were turned out to live on their own in order to polish their skills as brutes, thieves and bullies, which was only kinda sorta true, and that Spartan mothers told their sons to come home carrying their shields in victory or being borne dead upon them, which might well have been the case.
What we really didn’t learn and should have was that wise, democratic, wonderful Athens lost that war to brutal, fascist Sparta.
Which at the moment seems awfully damned relevant.
History teachers should repeat it so that the history itself doesn’t have to.
Though perhaps we’re too late, if Ed Hall (Ind) has things right.
My repeated insistence that people should read “Animal Farm” rather than “1984” may seem like beating a dead horse, but let’s talk about dead horses, because Boxer, the most loyal and hardworking and unquestioning citizen of Animal Farm was sold to a rendering plant as soon as he was no longer strong enough to be productive.
Orwell never specified what the pigs were discussing with the neighboring farmers in that final scene, but it didn’t bode well for the rest of the animals.
As said, it’s not enough to stifle Trump, but Steve Sack (Star Tribune) notes that, thanks to the seditious votes the other day, voters can identify the rats in their own congressional delegations.
The question is whether they want to do anything about it.
Or if, instead, they’d storm the school board meeting if a teacher taught like this:
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