CSotD: Comics I Don’t Understand

I borrowed today’s headline from an old website run by the late Bill Bickel in which he used to mock comic strips for not coming up to his standards. It was one of a couple of similar sites that motivated me to launch Comic Strip of the Day in 2010, because I thought it better to praise the people doing it right than to pour scorn on the hacks.

However, I happen to have come across a number of puzzling things today, and we’ll start with this piece by Steve Brodner, who very much does do things right.

In this case, he’s commenting on a bizarre situation in which CNN assembled a panel of undecided voters, one of whom turned out to be a dedicated Trump supporter.

Bonehead mistakes happen. Until I got into the details — and that linked article is full of them — it reminded me of a situation several decades ago in which a Texas paper assigned a rookie reporter to interview people about Obama’s Affordable Care Act. She was bushwhacked by anti-Obamacare activists who volunteered as regular folks to announce how much they hated the proposal.

This is different. According to the fake “Undecided Voter,” he told the CNN producer that he was a Trump supporter, and, even if he didn’t, a third-grader could have done a quick online search and discovered it anyway.

I wasn’t able to track down Brodner’s claim that John Malone has ordered changes, but I’m more disturbed by the lack of mainstream coverage of this story.

CNN didn’t just make a mistake. They perpetrated an easily avoidable fraud.

But it seems the coverage is limited to a handful of muckrakers, and none of the major outlets are picking it up.

I don’t get it.

On a related note — that is, bad decisions by major outlets that major outlets aren’t discussing — Tom Tomorrow has some fun with a growing discontent over Fact Checkers.

IMHO, he spends too many panels on limp justifications that seem to justify Trump, but I can’t argue with the specifics because — granted with comic exaggeration — they mirror actual explanations I’ve seen.

And it might not matter if Trump got too cozy with Kim Jong Un, but when he recommended injecting disinfectants to fight covid, people did, with dangerous results.

It does, of course, matter whether Trump gets cozy with murderous dictators, but the other half of this problem is that in order to appear “fair,” fact checkers then turn around and nit-pick Democratic statements to suggest a level of falsity equal to Trump’s.

It’s the “they all do it” game, which is only valid when you prove it, not when you jam it into place like Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting off their toes in an attempt to fit into the glass slipper.

Drew Sheneman, bless his heart, points out the falsity and hypocrisy of MAGAts who jumped to mock Gus Walz and then withdrew their hateful remarks with this bogus explanation.

What I don’t understand this time around is why you would pour hatred on a kid in the first place. It’s reminiscent of 1995, when blowhard bully Rush Limbaugh called 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton a dog.

Chelsea, you will note, has since outgrown clumsy adolescence and become a stylish, attractive woman, but, 30 years later, pigs are still pigs and they still wallow in their own filth.

I don’t get why, but Sheneman offers an insight, if not an answer.

What I don’t get in this Matt Davies cartoon is his point.

I’m seeing a lot of cartoons about how traumatized kids will be if they can’t wile away the hours in history and math classes texting their friends under the desk, and, as I’ve written before, I’ve got more faith in their resilience than that. They’ll either get over it or find ways past it, but they’ll all survive somehow.

Davies, I hope, is simply illustrating the way some parents are responding to an educational emergency of their own making. In an actual emergency, you call the office, just as parents did for decades before cell phones existed.

The issue — to the extent there is one — is what exactly constitutes an emergency these days? Our ability to contact each other any time any place has spawned a generation of helicopter parents for whom any whim must be immediately addressed.

It ain’t about the kids, and, to that extent, Davies has it right. As either Socrates or possibly Ben Franklin said, “The kids are alright.” (Go ahead and fact-check that.)

Juxtaposition of the Day

Pat Bagley

Ratt

Bagley notes an effort in Utah to suppress citizen initiatives, but it’s not solely a regional issue. Arkansas successfully blocked an effort to get a pro-choice measure on the ballot in November, using a technicality to frustrate 100,000 petitioners.

For that matter, about the time I left Colorado 35 years ago, politicians were trying to stop citizens from being able to force votes on things that mattered to them.

But if you don’t understand how they reason, Ratt reminds us of the old dodge used by authoritarians, a debating club point about how we aren’t actually a democracy but rather a republic. Like most debating club arguments, it does very well within a sealed academic bell jar but expires immediately when exposed to light and oxygen.

No, we’re not a direct democracy. We don’t all go down to Washington and stand around outside the Capitol raising our hands to vote on every measure that comes up.

But the idea that representational democracy means we elect people who don’t listen to us is so fundamentally foolish that it cannot be dismissed as an error. It is a deliberate attempt to place power in the hands of an authoritarian elite.

And it appears to be working. I don’t get it.

I realize a lot of people don’t read newspapers anymore, but what in the wide wide world of sports leads Dana Summers (Tribune) to think losing RFK Jr’s endorsement is a blow to the Harris/Walz campaign?

No, they didn’t respond when he solicited a job in exchange for aligning his wackadoodle campaign with their sensible one. What a lost opportunity!

Perhaps they should correct this error by opening negotiations with Tarquin Fin-Tim-Lin-Bin-Whin-Bim-Lin-Bus-Stop-F’Tang-F’Tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel.

Assuming Tarquin hasn’t already endorsed Trump.