CSotD: Proposals, Solutions & Dumb Ideas
Skip to comments
I’m pretty well done with talking about the State of the Union Address, and Horsey sums it up fairly well. Commentators have referred to it as more of a campaign speech than anything addressing the state of the union or proposing any major policies, or at least any new ones.
It did likely help Trump rally the faithful and, while I doubt he created any converts, I think he did well at reinforcing what he had.
Juxtaposition of the Day
There was considerable pre-speech discussion about what the Democrats should do, including a boycott or a walk-out, and some did not attend, but the largest contingent held up paddles, similar to how people bid at an auction, but with messages of dissent.
That wasn’t enough for Walters and Zyglis. But political cartoons often criticize what did happen without providing a clue as to what the artist thought should happen.
Even columnists often fail to suggest what a party without a majority in either house should do, given that the days of the talking filibuster are over and Jimmy Stewart can’t bring everything to a halt any more.
Al Green’s disruption — like Joe Walsh’s shout of “You lie” during Obama’s address in 2019 or the braying of Greene and Boebert at Biden in 2022 — was easily spun and turned into something more embarrassing than effective.
It’s hard to get the attention of the media at the SOTU in a way that comes across as more than oppositional hot air.
I think AOC and Jasmine Crockett are doing a good job of making solid, coherent objections in venues like Meet the Press, or in local speeches that get coverage.
But the heavy lifting, the challenging in court of various attempts, is happening at the state level where AGs and legislators have the political standing to make serious efforts to get rulings on federal abuses.
As for Al Green’s quixotic interruption, it may help to touch off
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Bish may be too subtle, because that’s the message viewers should have gotten but it’s highly unlikely it got through to the MAGA crowd. It’s a case of seeing things as he wishes they were instead of as they are. Which is not to say I don’t also wish it had landed in that manner.
German uses a lot of dialogue, which isn’t great in cartooning but which, in this case, makes his point clear: The administration is playing an Orwellian game with the term “free speech,” and it’s the same game Elon Musk has played at Xitter: You have the freedom to agree with them, which is no freedom at all.
Thomas Hobbes wrote of liberty being the right to go along with the flow, and he disagreed with the idea that you should have the freedom to swim across that current or upstream.
Hobbes also believed in the Divine Right of Kings, that God put leaders in charge as part of His eternal plan.
His philosophy is in stark contrast to the Constitution, but it is how the Trump administration sees both “free speech” and their place in the governmental cosmos.
McCoy suggests that peaceful protesting in support of Ukraine is useless, and proposes that some form of surrender in which Russia stops bombing and killing, presumably in return for land, is the only practical alternative to the conflict.
If you believe in democracy, however, speaking your mind is central to the overall process, and whether it can make a difference in our current situation is a central and vital matter. Perhaps, with the GOP holding both houses and clearly unwilling to challenge Dear Leader’s policies, it’s pointless.
But we are scheduled to hold midterm elections in 20 months, and a steady drumbeat of discontent is critical if there is to be any hope of changing the legislative balance and bringing about real change.
Alternately, the process of democracy is based on the principle that, if you choose to sit on your thumbs, you get what you deserve.
It seems that, for progressive reformers, the key to the midterms is to rally their side rather than try to convert the MAGA hardliners, who, as Sorensen points out, have adopted a set of beliefs that appear both heartless and illogical.
That, in turn, stems from the appearance that Dear Leader is heartless and illogical. The persistent question is whether he is telling deliberate lies or is genuinely ignorant of the facts.
For instance, he continues to declare that 120-year-olds are receiving Social Security checks and that tariffs are paid by exporters, and it’s hard to believe he hasn’t been corrected, which would mean that these are lies and not errors.
But we also know that he doesn’t read briefing papers and drifts off in meetings, so that he may genuinely think that “asylum seekers” are people who have been confined to mental hospitals, and that scientists are breeding transgender, rather than transgenic, mice.
Bear in mind that, while he insisted Obama release his college grades to prove a Negro could only graduate thanks to racial preferences, he threatened to sue any schools that revealed his grades, and falsely claimed to have graduated with honors.
We’re not likely to see a repeat of the bleach debacle, though we should keep an eye on Dear Leader if the bird flu begins to infect people at a serious pace. But Luckovich is speaking metaphorically here, and ignorance in power can, indeed, be deadly for the body politic.
The upcoming trade wars, however, are likely to hit the same people who voted for lower egg prices and cheaper gasoline, and seeing a staunch conservative like Stiglich step up against them is, for progressives, an optimistic sign.
It’s never wise to pay too much attention to your 401k, which should be a long-term investment, but if people are going to watch it fluctuate, maybe it will focus them on the absolute foolishness of the trade wars that will raise day-to-day prices and wreak havoc on stock prices.
The defense of trade wars is that they inflict necessary pain for important purposes.
That seems an argument both sides will be able to make.
Comments