CSotD is two – two – two sites in one!
And, at this fraught moment, there are enough humorous political cartoons that we can do a whole posting of nothing but.
We’ll start things off with a bit of pure stand-up schtick from Drew Sheneman (AMS), who draws for the Star-Ledger in Newark and thus has both standing and the institutional memory enough to mock NYC’s former mayor while taking a shot at NYC’s favorite braggart, bankrupt and slumlord.
For those too young or too far from the Center of the Known Universe to appreciate it, Rudy led a successful effort to bust the mob and, as mayor, he did clean up Times Square.
Granted, his stop-harass-and-search policing policies did not go unnoticed in the minority community, but the Rest of Us didn’t realize he was nuts until he halted his Senate campaign to announce his pending divorce and introduce his next wife, which was the first his current wife had heard about it.
All of which may explain how he and The Donald became such fast friends.
Though, speaking as we were of stand-up schtick, there’s an old wisecrack, “He has friends he hasn’t used yet!” and apparently The Donald is getting to the bottom of that voluminous sack.
At least Patrick Chappatte thinks so.
Ah, it’s a reminder of Aesop’s fable of the dying lion who is kicked by a passing jackass and remarks that it’s not the pain so much as the humiliation.
Dear Leader promised us we’d get sick of winning, but, then again, he promised us that he’d be too busy to play golf. And, as far as being kicked by jackasses goes, we don’t know what dark nights he went through in his bankruptcies, but Daddy bailed him out of the early ones and he bullshat his way out of the later ones but, golly, he sure seems to be running out of that latter remedy now.
Maybe, Peter Brookes (Times) hints, Joe can reach in there and find him some, or at least find out what’s clogging up the works and leaving him in such distress.
Brookes is right that most Yanks learned about the more immersive aspects of large-animal veterinary practice from watching that BBC serial, but YouTubers had already made the political connection, their wisecracks referencing a more symbolically correct patient.
It’s getting difficult to keep ahead of the memesters.
It’s also getting difficult, as Steve Breen (Creators) points out, for Dear Leader to spread his message, which includes turning his back on his own vice-president, yet another of those “friends he hasn’t used yet” thingies.
We do have to suspect that the Pence partnership is breaking up, given how Trump’s Deplorables are attempting to enforce a death sentence on him for disloyalty and Dear Leader isn’t stepping up in his defense.
Not that Trump is utterly abandoned. Graeme Keyes (Daily Mail) makes a joke about it, but several rightwingers are seriously proposing that there was a Moon-Landing scale conspiracy by Antifa and BLM to fool us all into thinking that the crazies in the Capitol were who they said they were.
Meanwhile, Trump himself has become uncustomarily quiet, but Stuart Carlson (AMS) helps him express himself in his native tongue, braggadocio.
By the way and speaking of sudden silence, the oxymoronically-named “American Thinker” has joined the ranks of media companies who have suddenly realized that, by golly, it turns out Dominion voting machines are not only accurate but amazingly, wonderfully, admirably so.
Not even waiting for the head of Sidney Powell, Esq to actually be mounted on a stake as a warning.
Well, as Napoleon almost said, it is but one step from bullshit to chickenshit.
Meanwhile, a less humorous but equally satisfying
Juxtaposition of the Day
I pondered whether to run these as a Juxtaposition or in a series with interspersed commentary, but decided that they were more powerful stacked together, particularly since they seem to answer one another without outside help.
There has been public distress over the spectacle of military in the streets of the capital, and within the halls of the Capitol, but my response to that fear is that maybe we have to bring back the draft (on a non-sexist footing this time and with fewer class distinctions) so that people see citizens in that cammo, and so that our armed forces are more representative of our people.
The rumors are true. There are plenty of rightwingers in the military.
But I had a son serve and I’ve got a grandson-in-law currently in. They’re liberal, but, while it’s uncool to make speeches below decks, neither ever felt that their shipmates didn’t know where they stood.
The idea that the armed services are a goon squad is more prejudice than fact, perhaps amplified by the ones who carry their views as well as their rank on their sleeves.
And so the soldiers in Zyglis’s cartoon seem angry, but the caption makes it a sort of Joe-and-Willie anger at the fact they have to be there, not hostility towards the people they have been called upon to protect.
Which emphasizes the naivete implicit in Thompson’s piece: It may seem incongruous to have armed military on the streets of the Free World, but, as Danziger’s GI notes, their mission is to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Note that “… and domestic” is part of the oath and not a tradition or something recently added on. It’s part of the mission.
Note also that the pledge to obey the orders of the President and of officers is “according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Their top command has already clarified this.
Which clarifies a question I have posed several times over the past few years: I suggested that the Trump administration might end with tanks surrounding the White House.
My question was which way the turrets would be facing.
So far, the answer, given the times, seems comforting.
(You were expecting “Hail to the Chief”? So was he!)
Here’s another
https://youtu.be/wPO8PqHGWFU