CSotD: Oh, What a Lovely War!
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Michael Ramirez (Creators) paints as good a picture of our current situation as anyone.
He’s not the first political cartoonist to depict Moses coming down from Mt Sinai to find his people in a state of idolatry, but he is more explicit in labeling their idol as conspiracies and bull and tying the delusion into Q-Anon. He’s also the first conservative cartoonist I’ve seen level the charge, and that’s significant.
Granted, holding up the Constitution means little in a country where a sizeable number of people are as delusional about what it means as they are about all that Q-Anon idiocy, but simply proclaiming a difference between what it says and what they believe is encouraging.
As Steve Greenberg points out, it’s not so much a question of what they believe as it is that their system of beliefs has no system at all and contradicts not just what their opponents say but what they themselves claim.
Some of his points are overly argumentative, but it’s certainly the case that their professed love of country is contradicted by their embrace of white supremacy and the way they misuse both “socialism” and “communism” while failing to denounce Putin.
As for their unquestioning worship of the flag, Michael de Adder points out the astonishing campaign rally for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, in which his supporters brought out a flag purportedly carried during the insurrection and pledged allegiance to it.
Granted, Youngkin was not at this rally, and, once his nose was pushed into it like a puppy who had peed on the floor, he denounced the bizarre attempt to link his candidacy to an act of treason:
Well, fine. But are you sickened enough to declare the results of the 2020 election fair and honest? Will you stand up in defense of the government and against the worshippers of that Golden Bull?
Or do you wash your hands, ask “What is truth?“ and accept the gift of their votes despite their treasonous views?
And, if you win, what will be expected of you?
If you don’t toe the party line, you might get to see that flag carried into the governor’s mansion.
And if you think this is about what might happen “some day,” you are as delusional as they are.
Juxtaposition of the Day
History is, by definition, retrospective, but there is also a way of looking back that asks “How could they not see this coming?”
How, for instance, could we watch the events of Bloody Kansas and of Harpers Ferry and not realize that we were on the brink of civil war?
We blame Buchanan, and, yes, he might have done more, but Buchanan didn’t act — or fail to act — alone. An entire nation sat on its collective thumb and let itself be ambushed by the obvious.
And here we are again.
Darkow and Jones point out the clear, orchestrated move to disrupt local governing of our schools, while the rightwing denounces any attempt to look into the increasing mob uprisings that are shutting down school board meetings and other government functions.
Well, why not? They’re also condemning, and obstructing, any investigation of the January 6 insurrection.
Let’s recognize it for what it is: Failing to see these astroturfed uprisings as part of the same brown-shirt activism seen in Charlottesville and on January 6 is not simply naive.
It is collaboration.
Again, it’s not just that they believe things a reasonably bright sixth-grader would know are not true.
As Nick Anderson points out, they don’t even attempt to make their own statements and policies line up with each other.
Meanwhile, they shove laws through their compliant, bull-worshipping state legislatures that would make Big Brother blush, such that an educational consultant, attempting to brief teachers on the new requirements, ends up handing out this advice.
Granted, she didn’t offer a perfect example, but the notion that you can’t teach history without also teaching anti-history is the purpose of that law, and when you can’t teach about Jim Crow in a state that practiced it, you can’t teach history.
And when you can’t let school children read books about kids who aren’t white, you can’t teach reading, either.
Now Ruben Bolling points out the obvious: The troops are already gathered for the civil war.
Those old enough to remember the full-page comic book ads he mocks may also remember that those collection of toy soldiers were a rip-off. We expected them to be like the two-inch, 3D toy soldiers we bought at the dime store, but they were small, flat and virtually indistinguishable one from another.
The difference here is that, while those toys weren’t worth the money, this set is going to be far more expensive than advertised.
Especially in a country where it’s not only communism to raise taxes on oligarchs, but, as Lisa Benson (WPWG) points out, it’s jackbooted thuggery to even set up a process of collecting the taxes we’ve already enacted.
Which isn’t true in the sense of being true, but we live in a world of alternative facts. If we can interpret science to mirror our superstitions, we can certainly interpret the law to do the same.
This toxic combination of paranoia and authoritarianism is being spread on all levels.
For instance, the State of Missouri set up a webpage that allowed the public to search for teacher certifications and educational backgrounds, but a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noticed that, if you pressed CTRL-U, the source code would reveal 100,000 teachers’ Social Security numbers.
The paper held the story while they informed state government, so they could fix things before the public learned of this astonishing security breach.
In response, Gov. Mike Parson is suing the reporter and newspaper for “hacking” the website.
Yes, by simply pressing CTRL-U.
One more volley in the war against those who spread truth.
As Ed Hall points out, we’ve had 25 years of Fox News misinforming the nation and building up troop levels for the civil war.
It’s not just them, but it certainly is them.
And, like their fellow fifth-columnists, they not only don’t make their statements agree with the facts, they don’t even bother to make them agree with each other.
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