CSotD: Moscow on the Potomac
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Martyn Turner gets to lead off today on the basis of simplicity: Trump is helping Putin to raise the flag of Russia over Ukraine. Extra points for using a symbol of American heroism to mark a moment of American betrayal.
You would think, if the Trump administration were going to advocate giving Russia a slice of Ukrainian territory in settling the war, that they would invent some reasonably credible explanation. For example, when Russia seized the Crimea, there were historic issues brought forth to justify it, and, if they weren’t particularly credible, at least they weren’t ridiculous.
Trump’s claim that Ukraine started the war is beyond not-credible and amounts to an insult not simply to Ukraine and its people but to the United States and its people and to the free world. As Luckovich and others have pointed out, it’s like blaming Britain or France or Poland for the start of World War II.
In the words of Michael Corleone, “It insults my intelligence and makes me very angry.”
Matt joins Luckovich in carrying Trump’s ridiculous lie further back into history, and his absurd switch on the Washington legend should alert us to the possibility that Trump doesn’t really expect anyone to believe his lie.
Clay Jones notes the punishment of the Associated Press for its use of the international name for international waters, despite its having acknowledged Dear Leader’s right to restore the white people’s name for a mountain within US borders.
In this reading of the situation, Trump doesn’t care if you believe him as long as you don’t contradict him. The issue is loyalty, not logic, and if Trump says Ukraine started the war, he doesn’t care whether it makes any sense or not. He cares that you nod and smile and agree that he’s right and that George Washington seized British airfields during the Revolution, too!
Absolutely, Mr. President!
Any media that report otherwise are liars and will be excluded from access. As Karoline Leavitt has said, reporting on the president is a privilege that is extended only to those who report correctly.
And as our other president has suggested, those who report incorrectly should wind up not simply out of the loop but in prison.
We are, at best, on the edge of a coup, though the courts are fighting back and there are rumblings of discontent in the comments on social media, amid the declarations of loyalty to Dear Leader’s government.
The argument with Wheeler’s point is whether this is an American-sponsored or Russian-sponsored coup?
David Rowe echoes the words Trump hurled at Hillary Clinton in their debate when she accused him of being a Russian puppet, because if the truth were not obvious back in 2016, it’s clear today that Dear Leader is perched on the lap of Vladimir Putin, parroting Russian demands as he dictates peace conditions to Ukraine.
And if Rowe’s depiction is too subtle, Randy Bish makes the situation clear to the most dense reader. As much as Trump has denied “The Russian Hoax,” the reality of his subservience is no longer in doubt. As both Bish and Rowe declare, we know whose hand is in the puppet and who is really speaking when the puppet’s lips move.
Loyalists will, of course, continue to defend the government’s dubious positions, though this Chip Bok cartoon is a head scratcher. I looked up Bok’s age to see if youth were his excuse for not knowing that Hanoi participated in the peace talks and how North Vietnam came out of that war, but he was 22 years old when Saigon fell and had its name changed to “Ho Chi Minh City,” which, by the by, is probably how their media is required to refer to it.
If Ukraine ends up in the same position North Vietnam did, I hope they rename Moscow “Olgagrad.”
However Trump Loyalists see it, our European allies are appalled and while Trump has always expressed some hostility towards NATO, Norwegian cartoonist Herb sees him as now genuinely breaking ranks with treaty members.
Note that one of Putin’s demands is that NATO nations cannot serve as peacekeepers in whatever is left of Ukraine after the war ends.
Whatever Putin wants, Trump is likely to approve, since, as Boris notes, he’s willing to proclaim Zelenskyy the dictator as well as the aggressor in this confrontation.
It’s more than rhetoric, Blower notes, given that the criminal is being absolved in this Russian murder story and the punishment being shifted to the victims. Zelenskyy in this case stands in for the Ukrainian people, those already killed in battle, those murdered by Russian war criminals and the children kidnapped and deported to be raised as Russian.
There will be no Nuremberg and no accounting in the wake of this war, since the US and Russia have veto powers and are united in their goals and their denials.
Dave Brown spoofs Trump’s offer to surrender, and it’s often a benefit to read the margin of his cartoons and seek the original piece of art he is replicating.
In this case, it is Alexander Schwabe (1818-1872)’s painting “Truce Envoys,” depicting a much more dignified offer of a cease fire if not surrender. In seeking more information on the painting, I discovered that the Russians were amused by Brown’s parody.
Whether they recognized the spirit of irony in which is it offered remains a question, but at least they saw it. It’s sad remembering when American presidents read the newspapers and worried over the way they were being criticized by editorial cartoonists, and when they listened to the shouting in the streets.
It seems like a very long time ago, that Lyndon Johnson agonized over chants of “Hey Hey LBJ: How many kids did you kill today?” and Richard Nixon snuck out of the White House at 4 a.m. to sit and talk to antiwar demonstrators.
If they fantasized about shooting protesters, they at least didn’t bring it up as a suggestion.
As long as we’re comparing current cartoons to older artworks, Paul Fell asks a question that has been asked before, and will be asked again.
How will you answer?
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