CSotD: Loyal to Your Own Opinions
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Pearls Before Swine (AMS) sets the mood for the day. Rat seems to have caught on to the fact that confrontation simply doesn’t work in a world in which team loyalty is more important than logic.
Pat Byrnes (Cagle) is right: The current crop of Republicans would absolutely reject Abraham Lincoln’s stances, though they’re proud to call themselves “The Party of Lincoln” because he’s on the five dollar bill and a lot of things are named after him.
They’re loyal to him because he’s famous, and certainly not because of — and perhaps despite of — his efforts to unify a fractured nation and to uplift an exploited minority group.
Hey, they’re also loyal to Jesus Christ while not so much rejecting his policies as totally ignoring them.
But he’s famous, too, and they like aligning with him for that reason, even sending out cards celebrating his birth and showing their children festooned with guns.
“Prince of Peace” has nothing to do with it. The message they want to send is that they hate other people and hope to make them feel bad, because that kind of tough-guy talk will draw other people to them.
If you’re on Our Team, you can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote, or you can shoot several people in Kenosha and become a hero.
But let a minority figure have a mental breakdown and stage an attention-seeking incident, or let a well-known liberal actor be involved in a tragic accident on a movie set, and watch the lynch mob gather.
If you think fame isn’t the candle that draws these insects, consider this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Mehmet Oz’s campaign for a Senate seat is so patently absurd that cartoonists have had a field day ridiculing both him and the political party he rode in on.
Randy Bish even came back for seconds.
On the one hand, this demonstrates the aforementioned divide, with liberal cartoonists hurling insults at the Other Team.
But, while Bish is largely making fun of the candidate, Granlund simply notes his astonishing lack of credibility and suggests that it’s not so far out of the norm, with Cole falling somewhere in the middle.
If the Republicans want to stop people from making fun of their candidates, they might start by disciplining the nitwits, cranks and bigots already in office.
However, mockery isn’t a bad thing: It inspires defensive loyalty.
We’ll see how Dr. Oz does, but don’t expect voters to care that he was denounced as a quack well before he became a candidate, or that he has done a 180 degree switch of his views on abortion in order to toe the GOP line.
Meanwhile, even if nobody takes his candidacy seriously, TV stations that serve Pennsylvania have taken his show off the air, not because he promotes quackery, but because they don’t want to be forced to give other candidates equal time.
The days of discounting candidates because they appear totally unqualified are long past.
Self-assured incompetence is beginning to look like a requirement.
Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?
I’m not sure this qualifies as “more pleasant,” but the Lockhorns (KFS) brought me up short because we paid $23,500 for our first house and, if you want to buy a car for that amount, you’ll have to look at the lower end. These days, a Mustang carries a MSRP of $27,205.
The memory sent me to Zillow for a look at that little post-WWII-chicken-coop and, to be fair, at least automobiles have added a lot of extras since 1972 to justify higher prices.
My old place still hasn’t even got a second bathroom.
Granted, we lived awfully close to the bone: A big Friday night was, literally, pooling our change to buy a quart of Millers.
Even so, I don’t see very many 22-year-old couples today coming up with the scratch to buy a $468,000 home, and then being able to pay that $2,414 mortgage with one working at a starter job and the other staying home with the baby.
Okay, that wasn’t more pleasant after all. Not everything is.
This Non Sequitur (AMS) spurred a couple of different thoughts beyond the obvious “You really don’t want to know what’s in there.”
Mainly, it was a reminder of a Ben & Jerry’s stockholders’ meeting several decades ago, at which someone asked why the ice cream cartons didn’t carry nutritional information and the answer was that they didn’t think anyone was eating it as a health food.
Well, that’s changed as it should, since people have a right to know what they’re putting in their bodies and some people really need to know.
Also at the same meeting, the company proposed a poison pill to avoid a corporate takeover, but the stockholders voted it down and now Ben & Jerry’s is owned by Unilever. The people had spoken, damn them.
So much for the Good Old Days. Those stockholder meetings were a brief pause in a day-long festival, and once we adjourned, we went out for free ice cream cones and a concert on the hillside with Maria Muldaur.
It was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Juxtaposition of Fruitcakes That Aren’t Running for the Senate
This will serve as my annual defense of fruitcake.
When I was little, I didn’t much like it, but we always got some of everything on the family menu, even if we didn’t like it.
My mother’s response to complaints was “More for the rest of us!” which planted the idea that we were being fussy babies and that, when we grew up, our tastes would mature as well.
I did grow up, become more sophisticated and began to like fruitcake, but just about then, real fruitcake became hard to find.
Most makers of the stuff realized strong flavor was a no-no for a lot of people and began making a kind of yellow, gelded fruitcake that didn’t fool the people who hate the stuff but also didn’t appeal to those who like it.
Sigh. In today’s world, if you proposed a fruit cake recipe that included bourbon, they’d ask “What flavor?”
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