CSotD: How stubborn are donkeys IRL?

I will confess that my appreciation of RJ Matson’s cartoon is tainted by my lack of knowledge about donkeys. I know they have a reputation for being stubborn and my understanding is that it is well-earned.

However, I have some knowledge of horses, and I know that if you face a horse and pull on the lead rope, he is likely to dig in and count on being more than you can budge. However, if you turn around and start walking, he’ll follow you. Granted, it helps if you did that before it turned into a contest.

However well this applies to donkeys, I’m pretty sure that it’s a wiser approach and I wish, at this point, that the whole stubbornness thing hadn’t become an issue, because I’m also pretty sure that a 178-pound man can’t drag a 500-pound donkey by sheer force and would do better to take hold of the lead rope and just start walking.

Mike Luckovich takes a different approach, showing the donkeys fighting each other instead of turning their attention to the dragon they ought to be attacking.

This suggestion of wasted energy persists between the two cartoons, Matson focusing on party matters while Luckovich addressing the overall threat to the nation.

I do know, by the way, that donkeys do not have cloven hoofs. Perhaps Matson was thinking of the fellow in Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint)’s cartoon, who does. (The little red one, I mean.)

Matt Davies says that whether you see it as a dragon or a devil doesn’t matter as long as you see it, and that all the fiddling over Biden’s nomination seems a petty distraction at a moment of peril.

Davies does well to list a couple of Project 2025’s priorities, since simply citing the name comes across as partisan bickering.

“Elephant in the room” refers to matters people should be addressing but prefer to ignore. The remedy is to educate the public, which requires rising above generic labels and vague accusations.

As several observers have said, the key to resolving the Biden nomination issue is to focus on the greater choice, that this election isn’t about Biden vs. Trump but whether we continue the traditions of the past 248 years or switch over to a Christian nationalist dictatorship.

At which point we may look at Britain, where they conducted a national referendum not on party preference but on a single major question: Should the United Kingdom continue to be part of the European Union?

We all got to see how that worked out: The people who assumed it was a foolish question and that of course they should remain stayed home and the angry people who wanted out went to the polls and ended up getting their way, much to the chagrin of most British people who are now attempting to undo the damage.

On this side of the Atlantic, people who think Trump is a loudmouth, a clown and a dictator-wannabe have already seen how assuming he couldn’t be elected worked out in 2016. The question before them in 2024 is whether they learned anything from the experience?

Their response, as noted here the other day, seems readily impacted by cartoonists and late-night comedians.

It doesn’t matter whether Al Gore really claimed to have invented the Internet so long as everyone got a good laugh out of calling him a liar, though 4,000 American soldiers and a horrifying number of Iraqis may not have found the end result all that hilarious.

And at the moment, the “Old Joe Biden” stuff is coming from both sides. Who’d’a thunk you’d ever find Clay Bennett (CTFP) and Donald Trump, Jr., cracking essentially the same joke?

 Raise your hand here! If Joe Biden showed up to pick you up in an Uber, would you get in the car? Would you let a friend get in the car? Would you let your worst enemy get in that car? Maybe. Maybe. Dumb way to die, right, folks? — Donald J. Trump Jr., Doral Rally, July 9, 2024

There is beginning to be some pushback against the one-sided attacks. Over at Esquire, Charlie Pierce found plenty of laughs at Doral, not at Biden’s expense but straight from the mouth of Donald Jr. Trump, Sr.

Jimmy Margulies (KFS) also points out that the Republican nominee-to-be is hardly faultless.

And, in a column at the Washington Post, Dana Milbank discussed Trump’s Doral Rally, saying “Were the nation’s focus not on what is going on between Biden’s ears, voters would be hearing more about the truly batty things coming out of Trump’s mouth, and those of his top allies.”

Nor are they the only ones declaring that sauce for the goose serves also as sauce for the gander: Walt Handelsman connects Biden’s stumbles with Trump’s outrageous lies, while Ben Meiselas pointed out Kristen Welker having gone after Biden for mixing up names and then herself referring to him as “President Trump.”

Gary Markstein (Creators) takes the Rashomon approach, theorizing that people took from the Biden press conference whatever they came to it expecting to see.

That’s true in every political race, but it’s particularly important when attention is focused on whether Al Gore lies or Sarah Palin claimed to be able to see Russia from her house or whether Joe Biden’s well-established tendency to misspeak has increased recently.

Clay Jones raised a crucial question just as the NYTimes backed away from its crusade to make Biden drop out and finally declared Trump unfit for office, the difference being that the Times editorial is long and over-laden with enough graphical doodads to make it unreadable, while the essay accompanying Jones’ cartoon contains an exhaustive but compact and compelling listing of Trump’s shortcomings.

While over on social media, Jojo from Jerz got to the point:

She’s on target, particularly with the Washington press corps complaining about how few press conferences Biden has had.

Given that Trump never met a camera he didn’t love, why not stop recording his rally speeches and pin him down on some specific policy proposals?

Bill Bramhall captures the very real threats we face and does it with few frills, but, alas, Tom the Dancing Bug captures the national mood in this moment of crisis all too well:

As a wise woman once said, “Be best.”