CSotD: On Beyond Putin
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I could, if I wanted to, do an entire posting of nothing but cartoons showing Vladimir Putin either giving the State of the Union speech or employing a Trump puppet to give the speech.
I don’t want to do that, so I’ll let John Deering’s example represent them all, because he included JD’s “Boycott Vermont” button, and that jolly fiasco was the bright spot of the week hereabouts.
Seems the Green Mountain State has a hillbilly allergy.
I still believe that, if you think of an idea right away, it’s likely a few other cartoonists thought of the same thing, too, but I’m willing to bear in mind that the speech was late at night and went on for an hour and forty minutes, which is a good excuse for doing the first thing that comes to mind, whether you waited for the speech to be over or not.
I hit record and went to bed before it started, but I haven’t seen anything in the news today that makes me want to endure 100 minutes of that bizarre, nasal sing-songy voice Dear Leader adopts when he has to read aloud. It seems he didn’t bring up anything new anyway.
Steve Greenberg had already made the Putin Puppet point anyway, and I appreciate his bipartisan listing, since Vladimir Trumpski seems unwilling to stop complaining about Biden and take a little responsibility for his present policies and for the harmful impact of that fellow who was president just before Biden.
Koterba points out the way Trump’s infatuation with Putin contrasts with Reagan’s tough attitude. It’s up to historians to determine whether Reagan’s Berlin speech hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, which may have had more to do with their misadventure in Afghanistan and an expensive attempt to match Reagan’s fanciful Star Wars defense shield.
On the other hand, the GOP has apparently forgotten the reverence they had for Reagan and there has even been talk of a name change to “Dear Leader International Airport” as soon as they figure out how to prevent airplanes from banging into each other there.
Dutch, you may remember, broke the air traffic controllers union, but it didn’t occur to him to fire them and let the free market of the skies provide a sort of Darwinian safety program.
It’s that lack of vision that is making him seem so ineffectual by comparison.
Andy Bundy commented on the President’s desire for peace, which consists of letting his pal Vladimir do for Ukraine what another pal is doing to prepare the site for his planned seaside resort.
His attitude in these matters brings back memories of Mad Magazine’s “The Rifle, Man” spoof of a TV show that starred a gun, and the man who loved it.
Trump — who called dead veterans “suckers” and “losers” and didn’t want any disabled vets parading where he could see them — has allowed the muskrats to halt most medical benefits for vets and to cut the veteran’s suicide hotline as wasteful.
Vets are also a large target of the job cuts the muskrats have ordered, but his White House counselor explained that a large number of veterans don’t deserve jobs, so it’s okay.
It makes it kinda hard to pin down Murphy’s specific motivation for this poster mock-up, though perhaps it’s the entire attitude.
Anyhow, it’s one more thing to hammer on between now and the midterms. Surely there are a few vets who voted for Trump but didn’t vote to end burn-pit coverage.
On a practical level, Dear Leader’s power is not based on what he has done so much as what voters think he has done. I was surprised to see Ramirez fall for the ridiculous misjudgment by the muskrats about 150-year-old dead people collecting Social Security.
In case you’ve been ignoring the news, the scandal, such as it is, erupted when Musk’s Children’s Crusade saw that SS logs don’t erase names unless they get a certified death certificate, though they stop writing new checks when the old ones are returned as undeliverable. Or something.
Point is, there’s a difference between having a list of names and writing checks to everyone on that list, but Trump repeated the disproven claim last night.
Why not? We’ve got cabinet members who still believe in all the voter fraud from 2020 that was exhaustively and expensively investigated without results.
So Ramirez added that clearly false conspiracy theory to the Social Security nonsense.
It makes you wonder if anybody wants to fight this out on facts, or if they’re afraid of losing a reality-based battle?
It will be interesting to see if Dear Leader can skate around the impact of the trade war his belief in tariffs is setting off. The impact on grocery prices should be fairly immediate, given how much of our fruits and vegetables come from Mexico and how much wheat and other grains come from Canada.
It may take longer for people to feel the effect on housing prices caused by tariffs on Canadian lumber, and on cars, given the number of times various parts cross both borders even if the final product is assembled here.
But the real question is how long Dear Leader can blame everything on Biden, and what other scapegoats he can find.
The other day, he suggested that farmers could offset the loss of Chinese markets for soy beans by selling them to Americans instead, which indicates that he has no idea how much soy we export or what the American diet consists of.
“Let them eat tofu” is not sound economic advice, particularly coming from someone whose diet seems to consist entirely of Diet Coke and Quarter Pounders.
Tony Carrillo charges people with complaining instead of “doing something,” but complaining is “doing something:” It’s raising consciousness and letting people know it’s not hopeless, despite the flood of hateful disinformation.
Some may be motivated to take action, and we do need people to register voters and support candidates.
But even if all they do is show up on election day, that’s “doing something.”
There’s a lot to be said for raising consciousness when ignorance, fear and hatred are the enemies.
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