CSotD: Weekend Update

Today will be a combination of the absurd and the frightening, so we’ll start somewhere in the middle with Graeme MacKay’s commentary on the price of Christmas trees. The scout troop in our town square is selling them for $65, about the same price as the local co-op, but I haven’t checked prices elsewhere because, as an empty-nested hermit, I haven’t felt the need for a tree in several years.

The last one I bought was in 2007, an office tree for the paper I was editing in Maine, and that was probably an ethical lapse, since the tree farmer was a state senator, seen here swapping Droll Yankeeisms with Olympia Snowe, in front of a person “from away” who didn’t know that the point is to say the most ridiculous things you can without cracking a smile.

Snowe may be the most intelligent person I’ve ever met, which not only made spending an afternoon in her company very worthwhile but may also explain why she quit the Senate before other Republicans began to catch on.

Which takes us to the frightening part of today’s posting. Matt Wuerker (Politico) makes the point that many of Trump’s former cabinet members have come out in opposition to his re-election. It’s important because these are people who worked closely with him, saw how he operates and did their best to keep him from acting upon his worst instincts.

That worked for four years, including their doing things like sneaking papers off his desk so he wouldn’t sign them into law and working his name into briefing documents as often as possible so there might be a chance that he would read them.

Well, that was then and this is now, and if you want something to motivate you to show up at the polls in November or just to keep you up at night, Axios has a look at the likely make-up of the next Trump Administration, should there be one.

Trump has learned his lesson and has no intention of putting disloyal people on his team the next time around, and no doubt Steven Miller, the walking forehead seen here, will be among them, but the rest include the possibility of Vice President Tucker Carlson or perhaps Vice President Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And if that makes you laugh instead of shudder, you haven’t been paying attention.

Dropping out of the game at this stage no longer takes a great deal of intelligence, and Marty Two Bulls (AMS) caught departing Rep. Kevin McCarthy saying something so completely stupid that it deserved ridicule.

Obviously, an Ogallala cartoonist would pick up on McCarthy’s historic foolishness, but even if you don’t consider the Indian Wars to be wars, you have to question how a fourth-generation California native could be ignorant of how his home state became part of The Here United Ones, even if he didn’t know how we acquired Guam and Puerto Rico.

And he’s from the party complaining that our schools don’t do a good enough job of teaching kids.

Apparently, it’s been going on longer than we thought.

And while we’re on the topic of ignorant legislators, Ted Cruz (R-Cancún) has drawn attention from John Branch (KFS) for a bill he and several other fanatical hatemongers have introduced that would require people dealing with the federal government to use their legal names and the pronouns assigned them at birth on the relevant documents.

Here’s the text, and it’s not terribly complex, and yet it is so deeply flawed that everyone — supporters and opponents — seems to be getting it wrong.

Like nearly every Peterson in the world, I’ve been called “Pete,” and used the nickname from college through the next 20 years or so, just as Rafael Eduardo Cruz goes by “Ted” — a common nickname for Edward — and Nimarata Nikki Haley goes by her middle name.

But of course when I signed checks or contracts or other documents, I used my legal name, and I’d bet that Cruz and Haley do the same, just as Jack and Bobby and Teddy Kennedy likely did.

Furthermore, had I legally changed my name to “Eleanor,” that would have become my legal name and I’d have used that on documents.

Leaving nothing to quibble over but pronouns and I can’t think of a time I’ve used a pronoun on a document except possibly in my will, which I don’t think is going to come up before the federal government unless my fortunes suddenly take a dramatic turn for the better.

So it’s a stupid proposal that accomplishes nothing, but, then, that’s become the hallmark of the Republican Party, as seen here:

As Michael de Adder notes, there is so much evidence of criminal behavior by TFG that it is taking months and years to sort through it all, but the House Knucklehead Committee is determined to impeach Joe Biden despite the fact that every bit of evidence they discover blows up in their faces and makes them look like idiots.

Or like they count on voters being idiots. (So far, so good.)

Michael Ramirez (Creators), a steadfast conservative, has looked around and come up with a list of broken promises, empty threats and forgotten plans. The only thing Trump has managed to bag, kill and hang as a trophy is the Republican Party.

The Surviving Koch Brother has also realized how much damage a second Trump administration would wreak on the nation and has thrown his financial and organizational muscle behind Haley.

Ramirez doesn’t have much company, though. There are still plenty of political cartoonists intent on clinging to that floating door and humming “Nearer My Trump To Thee.”

Juxtaposition of the Nitwits

Ward Sutton

Paul Berge

We’ll see how loyalty, stupidity and bigotry balance out between now and November. As Sutton notes, the hardcore MAGAts will likely remain loyal to their Orange Leader, but there seems to be resistance forming to organized hate groups like Moms For Liberty.

Not only are fair-minded people starting to vote them off school boards, but — as Berge explains on his blog — they do self-destructive things like banning books that discuss sex while getting caught in three-ways themselves.

They grew up on this song, but as Swift wrote, “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”