CSotD: Things that just ain’t so
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It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Things Mark Twain didn’t say
Here’s a cartoon that Scott Stantis most likely regrets, though it did pop up on the Intertubes last week.
But it’s gone now, most likely because Jimmy Carter isn’t. As Twain really did say, “the report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Several cartoonists probably have a Dead Jimmy cartoon on their hard drives, ready to post, which reminds me of the Mary Tyler Moore Show episode in which Mary and Rhoda pull an all-nighter updating WJM’s in-case-of-death obituaries.
They get punchy and produce a hilarious satire. You can guess the outcome.
Such disasters are why broadcasters don’t cuss in the studio, even when the mics are not supposed to be on, and why print people don’t type anything into the system they wouldn’t want to read over coffee in the morning, though it’s usually pretty innocent, like the day the agate sports listings in our paper ended with “that’s all I could get, Bob.”
In Stantis’s place, I might have done a little mea culpa over the gaffe, but if he did, it’s gone along with the cartoon, which you might not have even seen except that now you have.
And I suppose you’ll see it again at some point.
“So it goes,” as Billy Pilgrim and Linda Ellerbee would say.
I wish that sort of thing were always as innocently, transparently mistaken.
For instance, it’s not unusual to see some both-sidesism on the editorial page, and that’s nothing new. When Nixon’s massive bribery, burglary and political malfeasance sent many of his staff to prison and him out of office, there was a fair amount of “everybody does it” bandied about.
The difference being that such things were part of the fringe, not part of serious, well-regarded discussion. Today, Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) has a much larger platform for, as Lemuel Gulliver politely phrased it, “saying the thing that is not.”
It’s true that the Bidens have objected to weaponization of the legal system and the partisan attacks on the President’s son, but he’s been pretty standup about the rough patches and bad decisions in his life.
Benson’s take is her opinion, but she stretches things.
By contrast, Bob Gorrell (Creators) uses his collection of clip-art to advance a charge against “The Biden Crime Family” that has never been seriously proven.
If the Bidens were private citizens, such dubious accusations could result in libel actions, which makes it kinda funny that their opponents want to make it easier for famous people to sue reporters and commentators.
Hunter will probably serve no time over one minor violation. It’s not as if he bought 34 guns.
Trump will almost certainly avoid jail time as well, but the constant drumbeat of “It’s all fixed!” and “They’re not fair!” has undermined faith in the electoral process and is working well to destroy faith in the justice system.
Meanwhile, the laptop thing Gorrell references may have a smidgen of fact, but so far is mostly rumors, bogus testimony and possible foreign disinformation.
Asha Rangappa writes:
Of course, the people who need to read it won’t, leaving her to comfort the afflicted without being able to afflict the comfortable.
Still, getting truth out matters, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two cartoonists tear apart the wonderfully amusing bogus story that Red Lobster’s bankruptcy is due to an all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion rather than to the short-sighted, profit-taking greed of vulture capitalism.
I’ll admit to having a dog in this fight: My hometown mines were shut down a generation early because of vulture capitalist exploitation, then another company bought the paper mill in the next town to acquire a valuable patent, whereupon they shut it down, killing the rest of the jobs in our area.
Then I went into the newspaper business and watched the same thing happen there.
It’s never the shrimp. It’s the greed.
Because once the chains have driven all the local diners and bookstores and drug stores out of business, they’ll turn inward and cannibalize themselves, like Red Lobster, until not only will you have no place to shop but you won’t have a paycheck to spend there anyway.
Drew Sheneman rejects the happy-talk nonsense that preaches a cheerful but inoperative theory of how the business world works. You might as well take a spade and dig for oil in your backyard as put in your time on the treadmill in hopes of making it into the executive suite.
BC (AMS) nails it: Laughing over shrimp promotions is a trick to distract the rubes while the pickpockets work the crowd.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Sorensen returns to expose the double-standards applied to minorities, while Deutsch and Scholtes point out how far afield bigots and crackpots go to preserve the steady beat of fury and discontent that fuels their unpleasant lives.
Though, again, it’s nearly impossible to get through to those who might change. As Swift said, satire is “a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
Still, it is important to comfort the afflicted, to reassure them that they are not the crazy ones.
Ooo! Ooo! I know this one! We did this in Colorado Springs in the late 80s, just before the market crashed completely!
Ours was a little different than what Dave Granlund outlines, but the effect was the same. Builders offered an adjustable rate mortgage that began 5 points below par, then the next year was 3 and then 1, so that you had three years of lower payments, the cost of which was included in the purchase price.
It would be years before you’d covered the cost of that bargain rate, never mind reducing the real principle of your loan. If you tried to sell your house, you’d find that you owed more than it was worth.
The HUD Repo book went from a stapled comic-book size to a thick perfect-bound publication filled with listings of houses and condos that people had had to walk away from.
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