CSotD: Clowns to the Right of me, Jokers to the Left
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I don’t envy political cartoonists, working in an atmosphere of “Baffle’em with B*llsh*t,” as Matt Davies (AMS) indicates. It should be obvious that Trump has backed out of the kitchen-table promises that brought so many voters to his side, but he’s following Bannon’s advice to flood the zone in order to keep critics from focusing on any particular issue.
The flaw in that is that flooding the zone involves putting a lot of balls in the air and, as Marshall Ramsey (Creators) points out, it’s plain that Trump is no juggler.
The balls are dropping at such a pace that even his own staff can’t keep up with what is happening and what isn’t happening and what might be happening and what just happened.
People are comparing Karoline Leavitt to Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, whose attempts to explain Trump’s evasions and lies were relentlessly mocked.
But nobody’s laughing. She’s more in the position of Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, who coined the term “photo opportunity” but is remembered more for his attempts to provide cover as Nixon’s Watergate explanations began to crumble, and, Zeigler explained “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.”
Davies scores a second time with this depiction. Leavitt is facing a situation where her boss is flooding the zone with inoperative statements and nonsensical, unconstitutional, impossible proposals, some of which are absurd to begin with, others of which are destined to be knocked down by the courts.
However incompetent it makes Leavitt look, the chaotic foolishness of the new administration is making criticism difficult, because columnists, cartoonists and social media critics find themselves criticizing something that, by the time their commentary appears, is no longer happening.
In addition, it’s hard for Leavitt to explain a policy that her boss and his underlings don’t understand and haven’t thought out.
Not only is she forced to say that a memo is inoperable but that the policy it describes is still in effect, except that it’s been halted by a judge and withdrawn by her boss, but she then has to parse how “stop spending” only means stop spending on this but certainly not on that and maybe only a little on that other thing.
It’s not a matter of sorting through the bafflegab. It’s an issue of the people putting out the proposals not understanding them themselves, and people who think they know what it all means posting criticism on social media that is equally inoperable.
So now everybody is getting it wrong, both the rightwing clowns with flamethrowers and the leftwing jokers who criticize them.
Is this anyway to run a democracy?
Dennis Goris suggests one solution, but all it would yield would be President Vance, and he’s as much of an amateur at governing as his boss. To borrow a phrase from Coleman Young, Vance has “never run anything but his mouth.”
If you needed more proof that the guys in charge are no business geniuses, the buyout offer is proof.
Real buyouts by competent companies set specific targets, both for overall numbers and for specific numbers within specific departments. You might say that you were seeking this many buyouts in Defense and this many in the IRS and that many in the Department of Agriculture.
You don’t just offer blanket buyouts to an unspecified two million employees. No wonder Dear Leader created so many bankruptcies.
Apparently, the proposition was concocted by Elon Musk, who did something similar at Twitter, and then had to ask laid-off employees to come back. The purported genius ground his platform down to a nub through his blockheaded management ideas.
Which leaves us with Mr. Bankruptcy taking advice from the Famous Celebrated Genius.
What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, back at the Concentration Camp
Barry Blitt offers some explanations for why raising your arm straight out, palm down, might have innocent implications.
While Zapiro explains his former countryman’s use of the gesture, until he runs out of excuses and has to admit the truth, which is more than anyone on this side of the Atlantic (assuming it’s still called that) has managed so far.
Some are saying that Musk doesn’t harbor Nazi sympathies, though his support of Germany’s far right AfD party makes him seem that way, as does his telling them
I think there’s, like, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents or even let alone their parents, their great grandparents, maybe even. And we should be optimistic and excited about a future for Germany.
His biographer feels he’s a sociopath, as does a woman who was at his tour of Auschwitz and said
One defense is that he has Asperger’s Syndrome and can’t help making inappropriate comments and gestures.
Baloney.
I ran a high school Quiz Bowl for six years in which every successful team had at least one Aspie (an affectionate term they use themselves). They often have an astonishing ability to recall random facts, though we sometimes had to caution them not to ring in early because they can have problems with impulse control.
But Aspies can learn basic social skills and understand the difference between being hyperfocused on mitochondria and being hyperfocused on National Socialism, if only to the extent of realizing people may be bored by one but will almost certainly be horrified by the other.
As Dr. MacLeod suggests, if your friend can’t recognize how a fixation on Nazis works against him, you don’t put him in a position where it will harm him and you certainly don’t take his advice on what to do with all the brown people you plan to round up.
Unless concentration camps were your idea, in which case perhaps his being a Nazi is just frosting on a toxic cake.
Dear Leader says the concentration camp will be for the worst criminals, but that there will be 30,000 of them. You can’t have a grip on our immigration problem and believe there are 30,000 violent immigrant criminals in our midst.
Trump has the excuse of never reading his briefing papers or paying attention to advisors, but, then again, in this maelstrom of chaos, hostility and incompetence, who can get a grip on what’s happening?
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