CSotD: ‘Splaining

I’m starting the day with Nick Anderson‘s cartoon following the release of the Justice Department’s 600-page report on the May, 2022, school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

There have been several other cartoons, but, while I don’t expect a cartoonist to read all 600 pages in time to fire off a timely commentary, I didn’t find anything in the AP summary of the report that we didn’t know in the immediate aftermath of the event.

Aside from the cruel assumptions made at the time about the officer who was on the phone with his dying wife, there was a lot of shorthand blaming the Uvalde police department, and that assumption has continued to the present day, despite our knowing all along that there were some 400 law enforcement officers present, including not just local police but Border Patrol and State Troopers.

In fact, that was said then and confirmed in the DOJ report to be a major part of the failure: Nobody took charge and too many people who might have acted had no idea what was going on and no leadership to direct a response.

So Anderson gets credit for the label “Tx Dept. of Public Safety,” by default. Perhaps it’s ironic or appropriate that a whole lot of cartoonists have converged on the topic and mostly gotten it wrong, but I’m giving him props for noting it as overall failure of leadership and planning rather than local departmental cowardice.

I’m giving Matt Davies credit, as well, for not over-reaching. He does depict the police standing by, but does not identify their departments or comment on their motivations, choosing rather to point out the underlying cause of the murders.

I’d point out, by the way, that this is a problem we could do something about. We know why it’s happening.

If you want to criticize anyone for just standing around while people die, check your mirror.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Tjeerd Royaards — Cartoon Movement

Kevin Kallaugher

Still on the topic of standing around while people die, Royaards and Kallaugher address the apparent fact that we’re turning our backs on Ukraine and would rather think about other things. Royaards blames weariness, however, while Kallaugher is more specific about the MAGAts genuinely not giving a damn.

Swift’s advice to a young clergyman is often cited: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired: For in the Course of Things, Men always grow vicious before they become Unbelievers.”

It is likely fruitless to argue with people who want to believe, in the first place, that an influx of low-skilled workers is a greater threat than an armed invasion and that increased apprehension of immigrants at our border is sure evidence of an equivalent increase in their numbers.

Whether or not they are getting their facts straight, their attitude is reminiscent of another familiar quote, this one from Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

Or, put in concrete terms, a crisis is when people who speak a different language move into my neighborhood. When someone elsewhere is being killed and other countries are threatened with war, that’s their problem.

It helps if you are persuaded that we can’t possibly afford to step up, so long as you never find out how other people are responding:

The Whole World is Watching

Cathy Wilcox

Paolo Lombardi — Cartoon Movement

An interesting contrast: Wilcox employs sarcasm, suggesting that Americans are mistaking an impending disaster for a welcome improvement, while Lombardi cites the old truism that a man is known by the company he keeps.

Both the Australian and the Italian suggest a lot of apprehension from the rest of the world over the choice we’re about to make.

Ed Hall, by contrast, uses humor in repeating the trope of the Toddler-in-Chief, whose damaged hands, he suggests, might have come from his getting burned while reaching for Nazis. It is sarcasm; nobody excuses Trump’s excesses on the basis of naivete, despite how he pretends innocence, as seen in this

Juxtaposition of the Day

Adam Zyglis

Bill Bramhall

And, yes, I chose the order of these because of the phrase “Liberty and Justice for all,” though of course there’s little of either in the kind of cad who judges women in such a piggish way, and treats them consistent with that attitude.

And, to be fair, there are people who suspect that Trump hired an attorney of limited competence because she’s beautiful, which would not only be consistent with his string of adulterous betrayals of a sequence of wives but with another theory, which is that he doesn’t care how his trial over sexual assault comes out as long as it provides him with a stage from which he can campaign.

And judging by how successfully Alex Jones and Rudi Giuliani have ducked their court-ordered payments to victims, it amounts to free publicity.

We in the Granite State are enjoying our moment in the sun, though it is nine degrees out as I write this.

Tom the Dancing Bug proves that accurate reporting can be the sharpest form of satire, because he needs only to adjust the dialogue slightly to sum up the journalistic combination of laziness and looking for a predetermined story with which we live every four years.

Having been on both sides of the reporter’s notebook, BTW, I can attest that it isn’t hard to know when someone is genuinely interviewing you and when they’re simply looking for a quote to flesh out a story they’ve already written in their heads.

The story of the New Hampshire Primary will be turnout. Ballotopedia lists some Congressional primary candidates, but they aren’t on either ballot in either of our two districts. It’s all presidential.

The Republicans have three real candidates among two dozen listed, Christie and Hutchinson having dropped out:

While the Democrats have 21 candidates, with one prominent name missing:

About 4,000 Democrats have changed their affiliation to go mess with the GOP primary, but Joe Biden is punishing us for not letting South Carolina go first, so he’s not running here and we’re reportedly not going to have our delegates counted, though there’s a strong write-in movement that could boost him above Vermin Supreme.

Stay tuned.