CSotD: Mediacrity

Social media has been full of people complaining that neither the Washington Post nor the NY Times led their front pages yesterday with news of Trump’s declaration that the Constitution should be overturned in order to make him president, but I think Gary Markstein (Creators) may have the most cogent analysis.

Trump wants to hack up the Constitution, which he’s never read, never understood and certainly never respected, and the story is not that he continues to be narcissistic and divorced from reality but how the Republican Party responds, which the Washington Post covered at some length, having taken the time to ask around. (The NYTimes also ran a reaction piece, but I’m not a subscriber so can’t read or gift it.)

 

Markstein’s piece simply says “There he goes again,” but Marian Kamensky (Cartoon Movement) captures more of the response, a combination of horror and cowardice, and I think both are valid commentary.

That is, I’m not sure what kind of “news story” anyone could have gotten out of the announcement itself: The problem is not that there exists a narcissist with an irrational sense of his own place in the world, but, rather, his ability to gain power in that world.

A news story couldn’t have done more than Markstein did: “There he goes again,” which makes a good cartoon but, in print, could only be stretched to maybe 75 words. The story was in the response, which took time to gather.

The statement itself was so in character that this morning’s cartoons suggest it didn’t get many cartoonists off the couch and to the drawing board on a Sunday, or at least it didn’t induce their gatekeepers to post the resulting commentary.

 

 

Steve Brodner does offer this response to the ongoing dinner controversy, and it serves to echo the wider “Why so surprised?” element.

Of course Trump consorts with racists. He and his old man were forced to settle in a case of blatant housing discrimination and it’s not as if we’d seen some grand gesture of reform in the years since.

To which I would point out that, while everyone gets all weepy and righteous about the slave ship captain who repented and wrote “Amazing Grace,” it’s rarely noted that, before he had his literal come-to-Jesus moment, he delivered the cargo. I kinda wonder if the folks who survived that trip ever knew, or cared, that he later regretted the whole thing.

But it’s not like he turned the ship around, is it?

We had four years of insider exposés about Trump in the White House, how he bullied his staff, worked minimal hours, wandered off in the middle of briefings and made such lunatic proposals that they took to sneaking papers off his desk so he wouldn’t sign them, knowing he had the attention span of a cocker spaniel and wouldn’t realize his wishes hadn’t been carried out.

It got to the point that, when excerpts from the next thrilling book came out, the response was “Yeah, I already knew that.”

At least, among those who wanted to know.

Which leads us back to why the press didn’t publish a “dog bites man” story but waited for the “dog bites man and dog’s owners don’t much care” coverage instead.

 

Meanwhile, Trump continues to deliver on behalf of bigots and hatemongers. Andy Marlette (Creators) jokes that the emergence of Ye Gawds is comparable to the staging of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers, but, of course, the gag there was that the producers were purposely attempting to put on a show that would fail, and people embraced it as satire.

In this case, by ghastly contrast, Trump embraces the premise. He’s not Max Bialystock, the corrupt producer, but, rather, Franz Liebkind, the demented writer who believed in the play.

And it should be pointed out that, while Ye is clearly and obviously out of his mind — and has said so — Trump’s other dinner guest is far less clearly crazy and far deeper steeped in Nazi philosophy and excited anticipation of a coming Holocaust.

 

But, as Bob Gorrell (Creators) points out, the real threat to our system, as pointed out by Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi, is that, during the 2020 campaign, before the election and before Biden was in office, his campaign asked Twitter to take down pornographic photos of the candidate’s son.

The apparent theory is that, had people been able to see pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, and a video proving that he was not a virgin, they surely would, instead, have voted for noted puritan Donald Trump.

 

While Gary Varvel (Creators) explains that the real scandal is that the Secret Service rented a car with a known, but uncorrected, safety flaw, which caused a fire after it was returned, which is similar to the President announcing that he was asking Congress for a law to prevent the rail strike nearly a week before that bill was actually passed and signed into law.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Disclosure: Insane conspiracies about the car fires came from both edges of the lunatic fringe. This may help explain why the mainstream press has found it difficult to find time or space to cover every paranoid eruption that troubles the nation. Or might trouble the nation. Or at least would like to trouble the nation.

 

Though the problem goes even deeper, as Joel Pett points out: We can’t even agree on what constitutes the media, but it seems to be anyone who tells us anything we didn’t want to hear.

The joke in this is that Fox seems to spend half its time condemning the Mainstream Media and the other half proclaiming itself the dominant medium and thus the true voice of the average American. If that’s not “mainstream,” I don’t know what is.

Well, never mind. The main point is to protect the public’s right not to know, and so far so good:

After three days of delayed viewing, The Masked Singer‘s Thanksgiving episode drew the network’s highest-rated Thursday original telecast in over six years.

And there’s winners, and there’s losers
But they ain’t no big deal
Cause the simple man baby pays the thrills
The bills, the pills that kill