CSotD: All Trussed Up And No Place To Go

Well, that didn’t take long, though, as one wag noted on social media, Liz Truss served two monarchs.

Still, as Ben Jennings depicts it, she was tossed out like yesterday’s trash after 44 days. Even poor Ann Boleyn managed to stick for 1,000.

 

Juxtaposition of Juxtapositions

(David Rowe)

(Matt Golding)

Rowe and Golding chimed in from Australia with a pair of artistic adaptations, Rowe of Henry Fuseli’s “Nightmare” with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt perched on Truss’s agonized body, and Golding of Banksy’s “Rage: The Flower Thrower,” swapping the famous head of lettuce for Banksy’s bouquet.

 

Juxtaposition of the Python

(Walt  Handelsman)

(Chip Bok)

And a pair of Yanks also tied her downfall to a piece of classic art.

 

Guy Venables posted this commentary, which not only encapsulates the Short Reign of Liz Truss the First, but perhaps foreshadows the fate of whoever is fated to next head a collapsing Conservative Party.

And Matt invokes Guy Fawkes as the British government falls nearly as fast as the British pound without any outside intervention required.

 

Meanwhile in a former colony …

(Mike Smith — KFS)

(Ann Telnaes)

This is an interesting juxtaposition, because, while they both make the same argument, Smith lays it out plainly, in words. while Telnaes lets the graphics carry the message.

The argument in favor of Smith’s choice is that he fills in the gaps for anyone who hasn’t been following the story, while the Telnaes argument is that everybody knows the story and the rats in the smashed pillar make a more forceful argument than a series of talking heads.

I certainly think she’s right in that anyone who doesn’t understand the stakes can’t be reached at this point, but Smith suggests a more patient attempt to reach that person who hasn’t really thought it over, even if it may be futile in 90% of cases.

Which brings us back to what Marc Murphy said in that AAEC panel earlier this month:

At this stage, the goal may not be to convert anyone anyway, but, rather to inspire people to vote, which includes chipping away at despair and defeatism by building that sense of solidarity.

Either approach — Smith’s didactic explanation or Telnaes’s depiction of potential doom — can help rally those who hang back, the ones Thomas Paine condemned, saying

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

 

Paine used the word “try” not in the sense of stressing something, but of assessing the value of a mineral sample, and Steve Brodner puts the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots to the test by comparing them to the generation who fought and died to resist authoritarians and racists.

I greatly admire his fury, but, again, he’s not going to get the selfish, indolent uninvolved doofus out of his Barcalounger.

But Paine was not addressing that slothful lump either, but shaming the “summer soldier” who went home as soon as his one-year enlistment was up, and the “sunshine patriot” who was all for Washington as long as we were winning battles, but disappeared when the true patriots were hunkered down on short rations and dubious fortunes in the cold of Valley Forge.

Shaming people for being rural or poor or not having Ivy League degrees is counterproductive and simply hardens our divisions. But Brodner, like Paine, asks “Which side are you on?”

That’s a valuable question. Making it clear that you are on one side or the other can make the fence-straddlers choose, and Brodner lays the situation out clearly.

 

(Kirk Walters — KFS)

(Paul Fell)

Walters and Fell point out that, for all that the GOP has hammered Biden over inflation, they don’t seem to have a proposal, beyond — as Walters suggests — continuing to “own the libs” by assailing Hunter Biden.

What little they have actually proposed is quickly watered down, like Rick Scott’s Rescue America tax hikes, or contradicted, as with Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal antiabortion law.

 

While Pat Bagley points out that inflation is a global phenomenon with a vast number of causes, only a handful of which are under Joe Biden’s control.

It is, of course, standard practice to heap accusations on the opposition, and incumbent presidents invariably get blamed for things they couldn’t have changed, but there’s a point at which “spin” becomes “gaslighting,” particularly when GOP candidates become more and more reluctant to engage in debates with their political opponents.

 

Dana Summers (Tribune) walks a fine line with this criticism of Biden’s release of oil from the reserve. Democrats can raise a credible argument that this is exactly what the reserve is for, while the response is that we need to keep that oil for a real crisis.

Though, if OPEC’s revised production goals and Russia’s stranglehold on European energy aren’t a real crisis, why is the GOP complaining so much about high gas prices?

Summers’s advocation for the Keystone Pipeline is beating a dead horse, and, even if it went through, the 800,000 daily barrels of tar sand oil would barely be noticed amid the 94 million daily barrels American refineries currently process.

As for leases, the President has eased up and entertains even more of them. The oil companies simply aren’t applying for them, as CNN reports:

New exploration for oil and gas has fallen sharply worldwide this year. Still bruised by an oil-price crash prolonged by the covid pandemic, fossil fuel companies are now focusing on areas they know will make money, and far less on exploring for new locations to drill.

Fracking is also something that Biden only proposed curtailing, but has not.

 

And if Summers brought a nearly empty quiver to battle, Gary Varvel (Creators)’s attack on Biden’s pardon for simple possession and his order to re-examine federal marijuana laws is incomprehensible.

Legalization would end the profitability of smuggling and illegally selling marijuana.

Varvel might as well have depicted Dutch Schulz and Al Capone celebrating the end of Prohibition.

Come on, man: I’m mad, but I’m not crazy.

If you’ve never seen “Gaslight,” you really should. It’s well worth Amazon Prime’s $2.99 rental.

Though, as Madge used to say of Palmolive, “You’re soaking in it!”