CSotD: Well-intentioned failures, plus those others

I’m often impatient with Gary Markstein (Creators). He keeps up his partnership with Tony Rubino at their daily strip, “Daddy’s Home” consistently, but posts his own political commentary so rarely that I’m sometimes tempted to drop him from my GoComics lineup.

However, it’s paid off this time around, because he posted this one January 12, only six days after the attempted coup, and so it sat there for more than a month, until just now, when congressional hearings transformed it and made it current.

Thing is, I passed it over when it was fresh because I thought it was too obvious. We all knew there were massive, huge, universal indicators, not about precisely what would happen Jan 6, but, certainly, that all hell was about the break loose in DC.

Having dealt with both the feds and locals in the 60s, I’m aware of their tone-deafness, but come on, man.

 

It’s different than the incompetent response of DC police in 1913, when a procession of suffragists was set upon by onlookers, leaving several women in local hospitals and requiring the US Cavalry — in town for the next day’s presidential inauguration — to intervene when the police would not.

For one thing, while the police had refused requests for protection when the parade was being planned, once all hell broke loose, nobody told the soldiers not to step in because it would look bad.

And nobody had the gall to defend the subhuman thugs who had tried to break up the pageant, or to pretend that the violence was staged by suffragists in disguise.

And the women’s suffrage movement picked up support, if only because people didn’t want to seem to be on the side of the rioters.

And the DC chief was fired rather than stepping down, because it really was a hornet’s nest that touched off a damning Congressional investigation.

 

My, how times have changed.

As Jack Ohman (WPWG) indicates, we are now treated to self-righteous posturing by the very people who encouraged the riot, ignoring their own part in the attempted coup and inventing ridiculous explanations for what other observers have classed as a dress rehearsal for the next time.

One benefit we had in 1861 was that, while a strict North/South division is oversimplified mythology, the nation was indeed roughly divided by geography, and the places where the rebels were concentrated were able to secede.

Today, rebels and patriots are intermingled, such that people who openly advocate the overthrow of the government are sitting in Congress, having taken an oath to uphold and defend the document they have promised their constituents to defy.

 

And, as Ward Sutton says, anyone who thinks a defeated Donald Trump is now out of the picture hasn’t been paying attention. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

 

John Deering (Creators) celebrates his Republican governor having said that he would not support a Trump candidacy in 2024, and Hutchinson is a relatively prominent party member.

And Liz Cheney has publicly pushed back against Trump loyalists.

But we’ve heard that song before.

In 2013, following the Obama/Romney debacle, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the Republicans not to be “the Party of Stupid.” However, he got better.

Although not so much better that anyone younger that 30 even knows who he was. The GOP tossed him into the oubliette, which makes you wonder how long it will be before voters no longer know about Hutchinson or Cheney?

Or Winston Smith?

 

Ah, well, history is for pencil-necked eggheads. As Bill Bramhall (NYDN) puts it, the GOP has less serious concerns on its mind than threats to democracy and the Constitution, like scary scary diversity training in soft drink factories.

 

It is, Michael de Adder (Counterpoint) explains, a matter of priorities.

As noted in yesterday’s CSotD, the GOP is focused, de Adder points out, on maintaining a tradition of controlling who votes in order to control who wins.

It’s not a terribly complex strategy, and, if properly combined with a systematic program of gerrymandering, voter suppression can help maintain stability in government.

As for the frantic distraction over that diversity training, the whole thing was as easy to see through as the Capitol riots were easy to predict.

Snopes is waiting for an official response from Coca Cola, but has already established that the training in question wasn’t part of Coke’s own diversity program and that the woman who wrote that program meant her words very much along the lines I suggested yesterday.

Here’s how she explains being “less white”:

Which I point out not to say “I told you so” but to say “Anybody who gave it five minutes of honest thought could have told you so.”

That’s not just a couple of decades of journalism speaking, though any competent reporter knows the value of getting a second source (if only to keep the editor from yelling at you).

Simply a decent education should teach you to consider context and sources before you go blathering off about something.

 

Finally, Lalo Alcaraz (AMS) brings up a more complex issue that I’ve been trying to process, because he’s right, but, then again, there’s a lot more to it.

Once again, this is not some brilliant insight on my part.

First of all, there certainly are unfair processes of getting the vaccines out. Wealthy neighborhoods get the vaccine; poorer neighborhoods do not.

But it’s not like the Jim Crow days of two water fountains, one marked “white” and one marked “colored.”

If you’re a wealthy Black or Latino, you can step right up in line next to your friend from the country club.

But you aren’t, are you?

It’s a stark indicator of how wealth and opportunity in this country continue to fall along racial and cultural lines.

We need to address both today’s immediate emergency and the on-going, long-term crisis. Different problems, but completely interlocked.

Meanwhile, I wish every anti-masker, every anti-vaxxer, every inequity-denier,
could be forced to see the problem from a nurse’s perspective.

On behalf of the health workers in my family and throughout the world, please watch that stunning video yourself.

And pass it on.