CSotD: The Company We Choose
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It was the Pig Fair last September
A day I well remember
I was walking up and down in drunken pride
When my legs began to flutter
And I fell down in the gutter
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
As I lay there in the gutter
Thinking thoughts I dare not utter
I thought I heard a passing lady say
“You can tell the man who boozes
By the company that he chooses.”
And with that the pig got up and walked away.
Adam Zyglis is one of several cartoonists to point out the hypocrisy of Lauren Boebert attacking others for setting a bad example for children and then being thrown out of a theater for vaping and for a mutual groping session.
The thing should speak for itself and Boebert, who barely held her seat in the last election, seems likely to lose it in the next. But let’s not count the votes before they’re cast, because there is a substantial portion of the population that sees piggish behavior as “independent” and “provocative.”
And Marjorie Taylor Greene is in no danger of losing in 2024, given the deep red nature of her district, having won two-thirds of the vote in her district in ’22.
I’ve known too many good, decent people who live in mobile homes to use the term “Trailer Trash” to describe this pair, but I’m perfectly willing to employ the old expression “brought up in a barn,” even though pigs generally live in a sty.
And when I read that Boebert had flipped off theater management and asked “Do you know who I am?” I immediately thought of this classic Fred Pegram cartoon from Punch:
Alas, the gag depends on an assumption that decent people wouldn’t even know who these vainglorious upstarts were, but a good look at the self-described “Freedom Caucus” reveals that — despite being called by its critics the “Clown Caucus” or “Toddler Caucus” — a good number of people not only know who they are but are favorably impressed.
The pig doesn’t get up and walk away but nuzzles in closer and votes to re-elect them.
Which, as RJ Matson suggests, leaves us with grim prospects for a solution to the budget crisis, a serious issue that the Toddler Caucus invented following an earlier agreement.
Even a conservative like Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) sees Kevin McCarthy’s inability to resolve the problem, though she seems to blame it on the entire Republican Party rather than a cadre of disruptive extremists.
But, then, she’s right. A well-functioning major party would not be held captive by a handful of nitwits, but the GOP seems unable to stand up to them, or to Senator Tuberville, and remains dutifully loyal to Dear Leader who has no reciprocal loyalty to them.
When the Whig Party self-destructed in the lead up to our previous civil war, it didn’t implode like this, but fragmented into a number of relatively sane and responsible splinter groups.
God knows they weren’t afraid to stand up for their beliefs and to criticize each other.
Despite the risk that the pig might get up and walk away.
And then there’s this fellow, memorialized by David Rowe, who has the advantage of having watched the evolution of Rupert into Lachlan from the vantage point of Australia, whose media is firmly in Murdoch’s grip but is a small enough country that they can identify the personalities at the top of the ladder.
As he predicts, it’s unlikely that switching from father to son will have any appreciable impact on the doings of their empire. It is, simply, the next stage in the process.
Darrin Bell (KFS) does a good job of not just capturing the family legacy but of pointing out the breadth of the damage already done.
There is speculation that when the “Chairman Emeritus” actually shuffles off this mortal coil, a family fight will break out and Lachlan will be forced to sell off the company in chunks, but that seems more of a vain hope than a serious prediction, and doesn’t address the matter of who would buy the pieces and what they’d do with them.
After all, as another Aussie, Glen LeLievre, points out, Rupert set a standard, not only for where he cast his line but for the success with which he did so.
The idea that the empire could split into parts is not out of the realm of possibilities, but the notion that the new ownership could shift things back into the mainstream and remain profitable, or even viable, seems more than far-fetched.
Before you make the pig get up and walk away, you’d better line up someone else to cuddle with. Whatever you think of his fanbase, Rupert built himself a huge audience that would be hard to replace with castoff bits of the mainstream networks.
Juxtaposition of the Day
It’s not hard to measure how far we’ve fallen, particularly after Kevin McCarthy refused to allow Volodymyr Zelenskyy to address a joint session of Congress, putting an exclamation point on the GOP’s efforts to unseat Biden by abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s butchers.
Now we have reports that Russian TV will be regularly featuring Tucker Carlson, the reincarnation of Lord Haw Haw.
And 28 GOP congressional members have sent a letter to Biden purportedly calling for a stricter accounting of our support but basically demanding an end to it.
Davies accuses the GOP of purposely ignoring Zelenskyy’s pleas, while Hall marks his appeal to the UN in stark terms. It’s a powerful combination.
Recalling the support America Firsters gave Germany’s National Socialist Party, there was at least the partial justification that they trusted Neville Chamberlain’s assurances and Lindbergh’s fanboy naivete.
But their ignorance appears deliberate enough that this well-known Dr. Seuss political cartoon appeared a mere two months before Pearl Harbor. They knew.
All you’d have to do today is change the title to “Putin the Wolf,” the rightwing having retained the “America First” slogan.
Here’s where we went wrong: As the Russians were executing bound civilians, raping women and young girls and bombing civilian targets, our journalists made a conscious decision not to show photos and video of the bloody atrocities.
We should have.
Better to apologize to a few triggered pearl-clutchers today than to the entire world tomorrow.
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