CSotD: Life in the Alternative Reality

This is one of those “Where do I start?” days, but Eric Allie (Counterpoint) offers a segue from yesterday, in which I chided Bob Gorrell and Mike Lester for writing Title 42 cartoons before the fact arose that, rather than their expected flood of migrants with the demise of the act, the number of crossing were cut in half.

Egg-on-your-face happens, but there’s no excuse for Allie coming out a day later with this utterly unsupported accusation. There is no wave, and what the administration is doing — based, as it happens, on rules from the Trump administration — appears to be working as well as can be expected.

We still have a lot of immigrants hoping to come here, we still have a lot of “help wanted” signs on every street corner, we still have a major issue to work with.

But it’s not a particularly good attack point on the current administration, at least, not in a world in which facts have any meaning.

Wherever that might be.

There’s little we can agree on, and that’s not just a rhetorical point. Pat Byrnes points out an example that would stun and depress The Greatest Generation, but, as meme-makers have been noting for some time, those fellas that hit the beaches on D-Day were antifa, and we hate antifa.

Today, Tommy Tuberville says he doesn’t quite understand what “white supremacy” is, but, after it’s explained to him, he calls white supremacists patriots and good Americans and is happy to have them in our armed forces.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk says that just because a mass murderer is covered in swastika tattooes and wrote a massive manifesto explaining his neo-nazi sentiments, that doesn’t prove that he’s a neo-nazi.

In this world, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might be a squirrel, or a peacock, or an antelope.

Who are we to call it a duck?

Byrnes also contends that we seem a little confused about good guys and bad guys on a day-to-day level, as seen by both Donald Trump and Ron de Santis proclaiming Daniel Penny the new “subway vigilante” who deserves praise for choking an obviously mentally ill passenger to death.

Note that this is Daniel Penny, not to be confused with Daniel Perry, the fellow in Texas who made racist comments, drove his car into a group of protesters and then shot one, and, having been convicted by a jury, is awaiting Gregg Abbott’s promise of a pardon for his heroism. (Kyle Rittenhouse is also on his side.)

I have some sympathy for Penny, at least until we find out if he knew the chokehold was becoming fatal, though even a country cousin like myself knows that subways attract ranters and that most folks shrug it off. And that rolling around on subway floors should be a last resort.

He’s being charged with manslaughter, the degree of which will likely hinge on what he should have known. His fans might want to stop pointing out that he was a Marine, since it paints him red, white and blue but also suggests some expertise that won’t work in his favor.

Anyway, Geez-Louise, you need a scorecard to keep track of all the praiseworthy killers in this alternative reality of ours.

Bob Gorrell (Creators) provides a possible clue for all this confusion, since anyone who watches more than one channel knows that the airwaves have been full of coverage of the Durham Report, of the situation on the border and of the economy.

But we start with the odd contradiction between Fox fans claiming it has massive ratings (which it does) and their insistence that those other news services are the “mainstream media.” You can’t claim to represent a substantial portion of the public and deny that, in fact, you’re mainstream.

Unless, like the White Queen, you’ve learned to believe six impossible things before breakfast, which is funny in a children’s book but not helpful in the adult world.

Nor is it helpful, Paul Fell points out, to have a major news service decide to adopt a policy of “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

The jaw-dropping Town Hall was a symptom, though now CNN CEO Chris Licht admits he made some mistakes. They should, he says, have used more camera angles. I wish I were kidding.

Robert Reich has a substantial breakdown on why he thinks CNN has swung to the right, and while some of it stretches a bit, he notes, for instance, that Licht has told CNN reporters and anchors not to use the term “the Big Lie” because it sounds like a Democratic talking point.

Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who hired Licht, says he wants “”Journalism first. America needs a news network where everybody can come and be heard; Republicans, Democrats.” And Zaslav knows that one of his major stockholders is John Malone, who owns nearly a third of Rupert Murdoch’s news operations and donated a quarter million to Trump’s inauguration.

It’s not a conspiracy. But big corporations have to do some planning, after all.

Juxtaposition of the Day

On the other hand, looking at the world through a conspiratorial lens can distort things, and Deering has a reasonable analysis of the long-awaited Durham Report: He didn’t find much law-breaking; just some low-level schlub who lied to investigators.

Beyond that, his report is largely a gripe list of things he thinks the FBI and other should have done differently, which, as Deering says, amounts to feelings, not facts.

It’s frightening, not funny, that those who wanted him to find something will insist that he did. That’s life in a paranoid world of alternative facts and alternative reality.

But I got kind of a kick over Benson calling it a “witch hunt,” given that the term refers to false prosecutions of innocent women.

Which, BTW, falls in with James Comer’s breathtaking report on corruption in the Biden administration, which had to be postponed because, while they could find the whistleblower who said all these bad things happened, they seem to have lost track of the person who actually had the proof.

Which sounds like one of those urban legends that falls apart when you try to identify the friend of the narrator’s cousin’s college roommate’s brother-in-law, who actually knows the guy who saw it happen.

And who found his sweater folded neatly on a tombstone.