CSotD: O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
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Dear Leader’s urge for Lebensraum is getting a frosty reception in the Great White North, as Aislin indicates. Apparently they won’t drink his Kool-Aid (yes, yes, “Flavor-Aid”) up there. And if they did, they’d likely have to pay a tariff on it, because their government isn’t taking the trade war lying down.
Here’s another view from the north, in which Graeme MacKay riffs on the toddler image so many people have picked up on.
Note that both he and Aislin refute the “polite Canadian” stereotype, which more careful observers understand contains an element of Kwai Chang Caine, of being quiet and sedate until pushed. In both World Wars, the Canadians opened their can of whoop-ass while the Americans were still dithering and hoping it would all work out.
Which is not to predict a shooting war but rather to laugh at Dear Leader’s expectation that they are eager to give up their health care, lower college costs, longer vacations and national dignity in exchange for a bowl of pottage.
Though on the topic of shooting wars and armed strength and whatever, Allan McDonald (Cartoon Movement) points out the hypocrisy of Dear Leader’s threats to use the military in order to round up and expel migrants, given that nearly one-fifth of active military is also Latino.
My own experience is that it’s an error to consider Latino/Hispanic ethnicity as a unified political body, either as Chicano activists or Cuban ultraconservatives. But McDonald doesn’t predict how they would respond to being pressed into action, suggesting only that they seem an inappropriate force for the task.
Trump admires William McKinley, whose reliance on tariffs helped boost the fortunes of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, but his aggressive imperialism flowered under Theodore Roosevelt, who managed to make some admirable domestic moves for his fellow Americans while pursuing aggressive imperialist policies abroad, including supporting/instigating a revolution in Panama to break it free from Colombia and open the way for the US to build and largely control the Panama Canal.
But Golding mocks the considerable difference between the well-backed gunboat diplomacy of Roosevelt and the undignified, empty threats of Dear Leader.
Which is a good moment to leave off from foreign perspectives long enough to point out the sanewashing at work within our own major media. CBS cheerfully announces “Trump gets high approval ratings for his first weeks, new CBS poll finds” but doesn’t back up its happy talk with historical perspective.
Gallup, however, provides that grounding, and, while it pegs Trump’s approval rating at 47% rather than the 54% CBS claims, it also points out where other presidents have landed in their first few weeks.
Whether your polling shows Trump at 54 or 47 is secondary to where he ranks among past presidents, which doesn’t seem nearly as jolly as the CBS coverage suggests. You might slide towards paranoia by pointing out that, while Gallup isn’t being sued by Trump, CBS is, but I’d want to see internal memos before accusing them of skewing coverage with that in mind.
I’d focus instead on my theory that a major in journalism or mass communications should include coursework in statistics, plus a sneaking suspicion that nobody who lives by ratings wants to make 48% of viewers angry.
I have often felt embarrassed at how much junk culture we spread around the world.
When Sadat was trying to get rural Egyptians to watch TV programs about how to grow tomatoes in brackish water, he had to sweeten the offerings with episodes of “Dallas,” which unfortunately inspired kids to abandon the farm and move to Cairo.
Meanwhile, episodes of “Laverne and Shirley” were broadcast in Indonesia, but were so far from Muslim culture that the show was explained as being about two insane women who lived together. Which it was, but we didn’t describe it that way here.
Now, Venables suggests, we’ve got Dear Leader hijacking the news with his firehose of braggadocio and self-interest.
Starring Elon Musk as JR Ewing and JD Vance as Squiggy.
Herbert dismisses the massive flood of foolish ideas as a smokescreen, and she doesn’t really suggest much of a sense of threat in Trump’s expansionism, marking Greenland also as public relations and hot air.
And I’d point out that if a lie goes around the world while truth is lacing up its shoes, so, apparently, does utter nonsense, given that Herbert picked up on two recent idiocies: The plastic straws and Kanye’s re-emergence.
Or maybe it’s just harder to sneak dawn past the rooster when the rooster sees the sunrise 12 hours before we do.
However foolish the things flowing out of Washington may seem, the US is still a major economy with major weaponry and so has to be dealt with sensibly, a task Katauskas thinks is massively complex, given the lack of diplomacy and compromise being offered from our end of the stick.
Hudson seems less interested in analyzing precisely what is being hurled at Trump’s visitors. Perhaps there is a trick to earning respect that can’t be taught to apes.
Rowson dismisses Dear Leader as the cat in the lap of the true archvillain, and if there’s any way to wound Trump’s pride I’d guess that declaring him secondary to Musk offers a chink in the armor. And I not only admire the grumpy cat expression but the fact that Rowson undercuts Musk’s villainy by having him make a Dr. Evil gesture.
Chappatte suggests that Trump is an apt student of his master, which leaves Dear Leader in a tough position, since he denies the “Russia hoax” without making many moves to separate himself from Putin, either in business or in politics, and threatens lawsuits against anyone who peeks behind the curtain.
Somebody said Trump represented a Goliath in planning to take over Gaza, but it didn’t take long for people who had RTFM to point out how Goliath fared as a champion of the Philistines, and, by the way, isn’t “champion of the Philistines” an excellent cognomen for him?
But what’s the point? His superpower is that he assumes that he’s admired.
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