Rob Rogers’ cartoon is a good starting place today, because it’s not dishonest, but it’s definitely over-simplified and feeds into the “Biden the Failure” subtext that runs through a lot of commentary.
Certainly, Biden would like the economy to improve. So would I. Rogers doesn’t specify that the actions of the Fed and the passage of Biden’s economic bill into law are the “pushes” he’s giving, and you could even argue, in Biden’s defense, that the economy is just that close to cresting the hill.
Still, it seems unfair to blame Biden for failing to stem the inflation, supply problems, fuel shortages and other factors that have ground economies to a stand-still not just in the United States but throughout the world. In an interconnected global economy, one national leader can’t turn things around alone.
And Rogers hasn’t been particularly hard on the president. Still, as the caption says, “Come on, man.”
Marty Two Bulls may have inadvertently stumbled onto truth while attempting to be cynical. Or perhaps he’s commenting on the greed and short-sightedness of those who have ignored climate change.
But there’s little sarcasm here, because politicians in states with significant oceanfront exposure have, indeed, openly mourned not the death of communities but the loss of upscale property taxes.
Cartooning for an indigenous audience, Two Bulls tends to look upon these things with a jaundiced eye, but, in this case, he also saw what is going on. The only flaw in the cartoon is that it seems more an illustration than a commentary, and, of course, that’s on us, not him.
The latest in the “Biden the Failure” flood is variations on this Robert Ariail cartoon, which mocks the president for saying “We still have a problem with COVID, we’re still doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over.”
It’s a hard one to judge, because there are people, particularly in pockets where infection rates remain high, who are sincerely concerned, but, then again, there are people who are strongly invested in maintaining the idea of a pandemic. Who’s who?
Mox nix. People still get the flu, but the Spanish Flu Pandemic ended a century ago, and people still get polio, but that pandemic ended in the 50s.
Anybody with a dictionary can know that pandemic has an actual meaning, and it doesn’t mean “the disease is extinct.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
File this pair under “Be careful what you wish for.”
Trump’s request for a Special Master led to dropped jaws throughout the legal community, in part because it came weeks after it should have and well after the FBI and DOJ had time to sort through his boodle, and in part because the rookie judge’s response was all but written in crayon, with errors and clumsy phrasing so inept that former Solicitor General Neal Katyal wrote “Frankly, any of my first year law students would have written a better opinion.”
To compound things, both sides nominated their choices for Special Master, but then DOJ quickly agreed to accept one of Trump’s proposed masters, which sounded a lot like “Please please don’t throw me into dat briar patch.”
The result is a head-spinning bout of foolishness in which Trump’s lawyers are protesting their hand-picked Special Master for acting like a special master. Not only is he asking them for relevant information — the bastard! — but he’s moving forward at a pace that is nothing like the La Brea Tar Pit process they were clearly hoping for.
Meanwhile, several people have noted that, while Trump’s minions continue to claim on television that he declassified things, they aren’t saying it in the courtroom.
Can’t lose your law license for lying on TV.
And, as Darrin Bell (KFS) points out, you can’t lose your Ex-President license for lying in Ohio, where Trump proved the other night that he will say absolutely anything to keep the raw meat flowing to his devoted cult members.
He’s moved from interesting, unproveable lies and fibs to adoption of Q-Anon principles, culminating in that ghastly sieg heil moment when they all threw up their arms in a Q-Anon salute to the Führer.
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast reports that the rightwing Daily Mail scrubbed a story by their own reporter that described the crowd as “uncharacteristically thin,” which had offended Dear Leader. Hardly surprising, considering that he began his administration with an outrageous lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
If I were editor of a paper where Trump was holding a rally, I’d assign a reporter to check license plates in the parking lot. I have a sneaking suspicion his crowds are like Dead Heads, a coterie that follows him around the country. But I’d accept the count if it disproved my theory.
Unlike this WSJ writer who is pretty sure facts are a sneaky libtard plot. If it’s any comfort, most of those 5,666 comments were from people mocking his transparent fallacy.
On a related note, there are still rightwing cartoonists like Mike Lester who continue to justify Ron DeSantis’s election year kidnapping stunt, though at least Lester is using the proper term “migrant” in place of “illegal alien,” given that the people scammed into getting on the plane were in the United States legally.
And scammed they were. If you’re going to trick people into getting on a plane, don’t hand out bogus flyers, promising them benefits they can’t qualify for. We call that “evidence.”
And if you’re going to hand out bogus flyers, at least learn what the state flag of Massachusetts looks like, since the Venezuelans probably won’t know but law enforcement probably will.
Perla, you naughty, naughty girl!
However, Lester is correct in saying that Joe Biden also transported migrants on airplanes, but don’t read this, because examining facts makes Stephen Moore cry.
Still, it was perfectly legal, it was a continuation of a long-standing policy that Donald Trump also followed and not all of the flights took place at night.
Also he didn’t lure them aboard with lies and he didn’t dump them off in places where nobody was expecting them. And he wasn’t doing it to show off.
But, hey, maybe they shoulda been deported anyway, y’know?
Regarding the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd, I assume his comment on at the queen’s funeral is “There’ll be more people celebrating at mine.”
Well, the local news was abuzz yesterday that DeSantis was sending a planeload of immigrants (from Texas) to JRB’s summer home near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (also the summer home for many DC politicos of both stripses). Nothing happened though, perhaps because there are no airports the could handle even mid-szed corporate jets near Rehoboth, or maybe because awy from the beaches, southern Delaware is the heart of the local MAGA community, or maybe because the local poultry industry alredy employees several thousand Latin American workers and a few dozen more would not really have any effect on the local resources.
@Harris: That’s a good chuckle to begin my day. Thanks!
And yes, he’s pissed off he wasn’t invited . . . he put out a few tweets about President Biden sitting with heads of ‘Third-World’ countries and that would NEVER have happened if HE’d been there (as POTUS, of course). I remember he pushed someone out of the way at a meeting of heads of state to get to the front row . . . I could just IMAGINE him plopping himself down next to King Charles and refusing to move, and maybe put the make on the Princess of Wales during the ceremony.
There is no low to which he will not stoop.
@Harris: Yes, DEFINITELY celebrating, and there’ll be a LOT of people exclaiming, “I just want to make sure the SOB is dead.”
Remember, the Republicans lost the last election and midterms are coming up. You can play to the base, but the base has gotten smaller not larger.
Republicans have pissed off Woman voters and those who support them, veterans, the blue line, those with long lasting health problems and expensive prescription medicine, seniors on Social Security and Medicare, educators, librarians, parents, when they were short of baby formula, non-Christians, and LGBTQ+ voters and their families- NOW they’re adding recent immigrant citizens to the list of those unlikely to vote Republican.
And when they can’t garner enough votes to win federal elections, they’ll double down on the “it was stolen” conspiracy.
We are always impressed by the breadth of Peterson’s work.
We are so disgusted by the fact that if the kidnapping, human trafficking, and theft of classified documents have not already resulted in prosecution of the privileged. But if it were done by one of the populace, they would already be in jail.
Bob, some people say that it was Red Skelton who said, about the large crowd at Louis B. Mayer’s funeral: “See? Give the people what they want and they’ll turn out!”
Not sure if this link will get you behind the Globe’s paywall, but there’s a very interesting story about the fake image of the Massachusetts flag that was used on the fake brochure:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/21/metro/how-did-an-image-fake-massachusetts-flag-end-up-brochure-marthas-vineyard-migrants/