CSotD: The Bleat Goes On
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The Great Creators Famine continues at GoComics and since your mix is likely different than mine, I’ll just send you to their Comics page and their Editorial Cartoons page so you can see what you missed.
And you may have missed quite a bit among the editorial cartoons. When I ran through today’s crop, I found that there were several Kelley pieces that fell between the one currently on GoComics and the one above, which is his latest.
I’m featuring this one because it’s much ado about nothing. The Heritage Foundation is trying to claim Biden’s use of an autopen to sign executive orders proves he was mentally unfit and that therefore those orders are unconstitutional and invalid.
Even the NY Post’s coverage admits that it’s a common practice going back to Harry Truman. Geez Louise, if you can’t convince the NY Post that there’s a scandal to be had, it’s not much of a scandal.
I was already on top of this, because shortly after JFK was killed, I sent in a contribution to build his library, which, given that I was 13, can’t have been much, but I got a nice thank-you letter from Jackie. Even at that age, I knew she hadn’t sat down and wrote it herself or even signed it, though her signature was at the bottom.
Using an autopen didn’t mean she was crazy.
A few years later, there was a rumor that Jack was alive, in a vegetative state and being cared for by Jackie on a Greek island, which was why she was pretending to be married to Aristotle Onasis.
The Heritage Foundation should definitely look into that!
After they’ve thoroughly looked into the mental capacity of our former president, perhaps they’d like to take a gander at the mental capacity of the current office holder, who got up in front of Congress and announced that scientists were creating transgender mice, which, as Jones notes, scared the heck out of the transphobic elephants.
“Transgenic” means something entirely otherwise, and Dear Leader’s gaffe has touched off a raft of jokes, although there have also been grants that included using mice to study the impact of hormonal treatment of transgender people, but as a minor aspect of normal medical research not involving sex changes.
Not that the speech was otherwise free of dubious assertions, but we’re getting a little numb to that.
Jones also notes the disappearance of references to the Enola Gay in Defense Department files, which he contrasts with the adoption by Trump of the gay anthem Y.M.C.A.
My guess is that removal of references to minority and female servicemembers, as well as anyone named “Gay” and airplanes bearing the name, is either caused by overly servile nitwits attempting to follow unclear instructions or by search-and-replace shortcuts by a slightly different classification of nitwits.
Which reminds me of a few decades ago, when newspapers used search-and-replace to replace an outdated racial descriptor with the newer, proper term, resulting in them advising readers to get their budgets in the African-American.
Nitwittery is fun, but leave us not forget what the Enola Gay was carrying and that these nitwits have access to even bigger things.
We’re still fussing over the verbal assault on Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House, and Matson is one of several cartoonists who suggests we wouldn’t have treated Churchill that way during WWII. I would quibble at bit because during WWII, Churchill, like Zelenskyy, dressed in a military jumpsuit.
Collins takes up the Churchill theme to point out the folly of “balanced” coverage. He’s in Britain but the folly certainly happens here on the other side of the Atlantic American Ocean as well.
BTW, this odd memorial is in the cemetery near my house. It’s a bit jarring until you realize it marks the grave of a local fellow who died before the war and was a member of a lodge that used the old symbol prior to its adoption by the bad guys.
However, I suppose there’s some danger this pic will be scraped by some AI bot and will begin to appear in history texts, once we save money by firing all the historians.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two takes on Trump’s desire to do away with the Dept of Education and leave educational matters up to the states.
Day notes that “states’ rights” were once the means of preserving slavery, but even after Lincoln’s time, some states had good schools and some states had lousy schools, just as some states had segregated schools and some had integrated schools, some by law and some by economic happenstance.
Federal funding smooths some of the inequities, providing money for special ed and preschools, though the Republicans are right that these funds could come from other departments if the Dept of Education were eliminated. The question is whether they would be.
As Rogers suggests, Dear Leader may not be the best example of what our schools can produce, but perhaps his position as president is an indication of what our schools do produce, since nearly half the country voted for him.
Where states’ rights threaten things is in combination with Trump’s demands for ideological loyalty, because, while there is no “federal curriculum” and states are free to set their own standards, we’re already in a position where history books must pass muster in the major market of Texas to be economically viable.
That’s why school texts nationally often refer to “The War Between the States,” list states’ rights as a major cause of the war and give Reconstruction short shrift. It’s hard to make a profit printing 50 different editions of a textbook.
It’s entirely possible that the enshrinement of loyalty and of rightwing dogma could mean the elimination of things like climate change and the civil rights movement from textbooks, whether the feds decide to dictate curricula or not.
Stantis worries that Trump could issue executive orders to revive the concentration camps that held Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
The other half of the danger is that FDR’s order was upheld 6-3 by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v US.
Would the Mitchell Court rule differently?
Meanwhile, Dear Leader has begun arresting dissenters.
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