CSotD: Installing the White Queen

The Red Queen, who was running as fast as she could just to stay in one place, has been taken from the board, to be shortly replaced by the White Queen, who can believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Yes, I know: Ann Telnaes has drawn her in good Republican red, but Elise Stefanik is pure white in every other respect, and, as noted here the other day, she is the consummate teacher’s pet and shameless suck-up.

Stefanik came to Congress as a throwback Republican conservative and was critical of Trump.

Until, it seems, she realized that disloyalty to Dear Leader might cause her Nationalist Honor Society application to be rejected, at which point she found that she could believe impossible things after all.

And it’s fun to compare her to the White Queen and laugh, but we’re not in a children’s fantasy, and, in our adult drama, she’s more like Louis Renault, the corrupt French police chief in “Casablanca” who solicits bribes and extorts sexual favors from desperate refugees.

And is willing to play footsie with the German Major Strasser, who is in town to recapture an escaped resistance leader:

Note that Stefanik has not, as I write this, been voted into position as the GOP’s #3 toadie, but it seems inevitable, since Lauren Boebert is a Palinesque nitwit, while Marjorie Cracker Greene is emerging as unhinged and physically dangerous.

Stefanik, by contrast, conducts herself with dignity if not honesty.

Which may make her more dangerous to the country, since the real peril we face is the left taking its collective foot off the gas pedal.

At the end of Casablanca (spoiler alert) Rick Blaine walks off towards the Free French garrison in Brazzaville with a reformed Louis Renault, but not everyone who opposes the GOP today is so welcoming of reformation, which brings us to our first

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Rob Rogers)

 

(Mike Thompson)

Wyoming is underpopulated enough that it doesn’t take a lot to become well-known, but there’s no doubt Liz Cheney got a boost towards office from being the daughter of the former acting president.

There’s also no arguing that she is a conservative and has, in the past, voiced conservative views and voted along conservative lines.

For instance, her comments on the New Green Deal could be brought up as proof that her commitment to truth and facts is, at best, a recent conversion.

Still, an ally is an ally, even if they aren’t allied on every point.

There appears, however, to be a sizeable contingent among progressives who believe the expression “politics make strange bedfellows” must be rejected as part of the #MeToo movement.

Perhaps they could be persuaded to adopt, instead, the motto, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” this being a Throwback Thursday photo of some old-school Antifa.

The peril not being simply refusing to make common cause on some policies with people who disagree with them on others, or even that they are repulsed by Biden’s comment that he was able to be friendly on a social level with people whose views on civil rights caused him to be utterly opposed to them on a political level.

But they exemplify yet another political saying, “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” and their rejection of Biden’s legislative victories because he has not enacted his entire package of promises creates a genuine threat.

They may be a small group, but it won’t take many defectors to hand power back to the GOP in 2022.

 

Meanwhile, Rick McKee (Counterpoint) provides a laugh as well as a comforting sign that it’s not only liberals who recognize the Big Lie and the Big Liar.

He’s not the first to play on the Emperor’s New Clothes theme, but he may be the most conservative cartoonist to join Cheney in rejecting Dear Leader and criticizing those who continue to empower him.

 

Another laugh came from Steve Breen (Creators), who tends to lean slightly rightward, and this sauce-for-the-gander twist made me laugh, but the joke is based on the fact that she is being punished for believing votes matter.

There is an old thing about how, if someone had snuck up behind Hitler at one of his early speeches and yanked his pants down, he’d have never come to power.

It fails because it assumes Hitler was the only person who could rally people to the Nazi banner. The German people at that point in their history wanted what Hitler — or someone like him — offered.

We should worry about what the American people, at this point in our history, want.

I doubt pushback from the moderate right could send their followers to the polls in 2022 to vote Democratic, but a chorus of criticism might keep the rightwingers home, and that would be just as good an outcome for the Biden team.

 

The Big Lie is only the largest part of a series of lies, and Nick Anderson (Tribune) is right that the attack on Cheney is indicative of the hypocrisy of the “Cancel Culture” whining coming from Republicans and their media allies.

But he’s likely preaching to the choir: Social media has been full of furious examples of how the right “cancels” those with whom it disagrees. If it were going to have any impact, it would already have done so.

Those on the right continue to accept the lies, and to define “mainstream media” as anyone they disagree with, exempting from that definition the Fox empire and newspapers that follow suit.

 

Ward Sutton provides a State of the Union cartoon, and he’s unsparing but he’s also accurate.

There will come a time when today’s grandchildren will be asked by their own grandchildren how anyone fell for this hateful claptrap.

Our best hope is that it will be asked as we asked our grandparents about the Red Scare and Joe McCarthy, not the way German children frame the question to their grandparents.

2022 will tell.

 

Because, as Kevin Necessary (AMS) points out, the rightwing of the Republican Party is not even trying to be honest, and there are few among their associates who dare to stand up and bring them back to reality.