CSotD: Elsewhere in the News

I suppose we should clean up a bit before attempting to move on, and Pat Byrnes offers this example of “They’ll believe anything.”

For those who missed it, in an interview on Fox, the recently convicted former president denied ever saying the phrase. He has also recently denied having met E. Jean Carroll or having had sex with Stormy Daniels.

He has also boasted of his prowess as a baseball player and of having graduated with honors from Wharton. None of it stands up to investigation, but, as Byrnes notes, it doesn’t have to.

Rick McKee seems to be emerging as a conservative with a conscience, and we could use more of those.

He’s right that the Founders didn’t anticipate an electorate that would vote for a convicted felon. Then again, plenty of good liberals have attacked the Founders for limiting the franchise to white male landowners, and they didn’t do that, either.

In the early days of the nation, there were plenty of places where both women and citizens of color were permitted to vote. The limits that followed were placed there by the individual states.

And remember: Aaron Burr was a popular and successful candidate, though his duel with Hamilton ended his political career, despite his never being charged with that crime and his being acquitted a few years later of treason.

So there are limits to what the public will accept and, as Trump himself has conceded, the real trial will come November 5.

Meanwhile, we’ve got other wrinkles in the Founders’ original vision to be ironed out.

It’s doubtful the Founders anticipated a Supreme Court in which justices hid behind their wives’ petticoats, a tactic which Deb Milbrath derides as farcical but which their fellow Republicans — and please don’t insult our intelligence by pretending Alito and Thomas are not Republican — are willing to accept.

Granted, the Founders did not likely expect to see women or POCs on that august board, but we’d have to go back in time and interview them to find out, because not only do times change but even back then there were individuals of stature and character who didn’t fit the average, and it’s not likely the Founders anticipated “average” people would be chosen to sit on that bench.

It’s even less likely that they anticipated that the position would be filled by weasels.

Clay Jones melds the MAGAt uproar over Judge Merchan failing to recuse himself because his daughter has done work for local Democrats with the lack of uproar from those pious purists over the highly political anti-government views of Thomas and Alito’s wives.

Well, we shouldn’t expect logical consistency from people who believe asinine Q-Anon conspiracy theories or that Wharton offered Future Dear Leader anonymity by not publicizing his fantabulous academic achievements at commencement.

What we should expect, as Ann Telnaes makes clear, is that the Chief Justice would step forward to take a position consistent with the Code of Ethics he wrote himself, and, at the very least, agree to confer with Congress to explain his views on why having spouses who are active supporters of a coup would not cause a reasonable person to question justices’ impartiality.

Meanwhile, over on the funny pages, it’s doubtful Mike Baldwin drew up this Cornered (AMS) in response to the Attorney General of the United States appearing before that very committee. Or one very like it.

ICYMI, this was the very serious, very important Congressional hearing which devolved into a discussion of Rep. Crockett’s eyelashes and Rep. Taylor Greene’s buff body.

We’re about one step away from another caning on the floor of Congress, which might be a funny crack if you didn’t know where the nation ended up five years later, and how many died. And if you didn’t realize that people in Kansas were already killing each other about the time of the caning incident.

And that those opposed to outcome of Trump’s trial have already begun floating similar ideas.

Meanwhile, in other other news …

President Biden has announced a plan to end the war in Gaza, which will take place as soon as Hamas agrees, or, as Tjeerd Royaards (Cartoon Movement) predicts, when Hell freezes over. Again.

It’s a lovely thought, but, even though Israel is said to have come up with the plan, Netanyahu is already on record as saying there will be no peace, even if hostages are returned, until Hamas has been wiped out, with which goal the IDF has cast an extraordinarily wide net.

And even if Netanyahu is ready for peace, not all of his coalition partners are, which raises the question of whether he would risk falling from power.

He wouldn’t be the first Israeli Prime Minister to make peace in the region. Yitzhak Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, along with Yassar Arafat, for signing the Oslo Peace Accords, though anyone attempting to interview him on the topic, as Major Strasser said in Casablanca, “would find the conversation a trifle one-sided.”

While, as Patrick Chappatte has noted, Netanyahu is already angry that recognition of Palestine as a country has widened to include Spain and Ireland, signaling the possibility of the EU adopting the policy as a group.

Despite the US blocking a similar move in the UN, 139 out of 193 countries there already recognize Palestine.

And Ella Baron is not alone in wondering when Ukraine’s purported allies will step up with more aid, though the US has now given Zelenskyy permission to strike across his borders into the invader’s territory and various European powers are rallying with whatever half-measures can keep things from collapsing entirely while diplomacy takes its own sweet time.

And in case active shooting wars aren’t depressing enough, First Dog in the Moon raises the issue of asbestos poisoning through the use of materials from demolished buildings as mulch throughout Sydney and Canberra.

Which is too bad for them and thank goodness it isn’t happening here, though I don’t know whether anyone has bothered to find out. But, in any case, experts say don’t worry about it and they’d hardly be experts if they didn’t know what they were talking about.

Anyway, Saturday was National Say Something Nice Day and I didn’t think of this song that whole time, so now you have to.