CSotD: First the sports, then the news
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Juxtaposition of the Day
The deaths of Nichelle Nichols and Bill Russell may leave me without a lot of material to work with over the next little while, since their obituary cartoons seem a large portion of everybody’s current production.
I’m not much on obituary cartoons, and most of the Nichelle Nichols tributes were largely caricatures, tributes to her influence on race and women in television having been stated in social media posts rather than cartoons.
Russell’s legacy has been better represented, but I was struck by the difference in these two cartoons, because Marlette, a political cartoonist, drew him as an athlete, while Litton, a sports commentator, emphasized his work in civil rights.
I suppose following him in sports led to keeping up with who he was, and who he became after he left the game, but he showed up at a lot of events that didn’t involve basketballs.
You didn’t have to be a basketball fan to know that, any more than you had to follow boxing to recognize Muhammed Ali, though Russell was far less flamboyant.
He was there and he mattered.
Kevin Siers did, IMHO, the best job of combining why we knew him in the first place with why we should have been paying attention to him all along. There are certain people who transcend their initial milieu and make the world a better place for it.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
A less cosmic but still significant sports story has been playing out in England, where the women’s team brought home the Euro Cup to a nation that hasn’t had a champion since the men’s team took the World Cup in 1966, a contrast both Schrank and Venables celebrate in these panels.
Fans packed Wembley for the final and thousands turned out to celebrate in Trafalgar Square, but beneath the celebration itself was a strong signal that British women, long discouraged from playing sports, have emerged from under the men’s shadows in a football-mad country.
It’s reminiscent of the influence the Mia Hamm-led Americans had on little girls in this country a quarter century ago, right down to a replay of the Brandi Chastain gesture by Chloe Kelly after scoring the winning goal in extra time. As reported by The Indian Express, Chastain didn’t miss the parallel with her 1999 moment:
Elsewhere in the News
In less inspiring news, as most of it is, Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint) squeezes a good laugh out of Russia’s continuing adventures in diplomacy.
The Ukrainian invasion was only supposed to take a week or so, and, between the impact of the sanctions and the bloody stalemate on the ground, there must be a lot of people in Putin’s circle like those in Molina’s cartoon, wishing they could just pull the plug on this disaster but afraid to anger a man who has built a system to guarantee his triumphs at home if not on the battlefield.
Mind you, he’s still got the support of his BFF in this country, who has bravely come out against Britney Greiner and wishing that Ukraine had surrendered before the invasion.
Trump has largely dropped any pretenses lately, and Ann Telnaes needed only to dress Gaetz and Stone in appropriate mobster garb and then quote them accurately.
It does make you wonder if, when he was calling Zelensky for help in undermining the Biden campaign, Trump ever actually said, “Nice country you’ve got there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Still, we did hear him say that only criminals take the Fifth, and refer to people who agreed to testify as “rats.”
Steve Brodner managed to capture the Diaper Don’s purported ignorance of 9/11, as he pocketed the money from playing golf with the Saudis, alongside the smoking remains of the architect of that attack.
Leave the 3,000 dead. Take the cannoli.
And then Joy of Tech offers a very skeptical view, as do we all, of Secret Service agents who accidentally delete material from their phones, but they add a level of technical analysis that makes it seem really strange.
Kind of like the dog that didn’t bark.
And those other dogs that didn’t bark.
And those other other dogs that didn’t bark.
Hey, people forget things. Whatcha gonna do, eh?
Meanwhile, Adam Zyglis suggests that the sudden rapprochement between Joe Manchin and the rest of the Democratic Party, and the resulting (expected) passage of the reconciliation bill, could be the spark that revives the Biden presidency.
Which perhaps it could, though it should be noted that, within minutes of the announcement of the death of al-Zawahiri last night, Fox had begun undermining and diminishing Biden’s role in it, and it’s foolish to expect any reversal of their intention to boost the GOP back into the saddle.
As Kal Kallaugher (Counterpoint) suggests, the fact that Murdoch has lost his love of Trump is hardly a sign that he’s going to henceforth devote his media empire to fair reporting.
However, it would be nice if the major networks that aren’t being controlled by the octopus would give Biden a little credit that isn’t backhanded. Praising him for being less of a failure than previously reported is what we call “damning with faint praise,” but it’s all that seems to be on the table these days.
I was wondering, the other day, how Biden’s caretaker administration would be faring if his predecessor had conceded defeat and shuffled off to play golf or write books like every other president in the modern era?
Ford failed to gain election on his own, but he was seen as an extension of the Republican White House, and his pardon of Nixon hardly helped boost his popularity.
Still, he was, at least at this point, above Biden in popularity, and I suspect the fact that Nixon was off in San Clemente keeping quiet — and that unbridled talk radio wouldn’t be unleashed for another decade — may have been a factor.
Can’t you close with something more pleasant?
Indeed I can. And we’ll see you ladies next year Down Under.
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