CSotD: May You Live In Puzzling Times
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Jonesy offers this grim bit of humor and I chuckled and then I didn’t. We’ve had a lot of jokes about Russians falling out of windows, and a former Olympic champion and member of the Duma suffered the same fate last week.
The reason I quit laughing is that Russians aren’t idiots and I’m sure there’s no mystery or surprise at work here. When someone falls dead in the street and you later learn that they were poked with a sharpened umbrella or somehow consumed a toxin, maybe that was supposed to be a secret.
But after about the third person falls out of a window during questioning, that’s not a secret.
It’s a message.
I had a little trouble reading the message in Chip Bok’s cartoon, in part because Claudia Scheinbaum was elected president of Mexico a month before Trump squeaked into office here, and in part because all that happened in Canada was a change in who heads the Liberal Party and hence the government.
Trudeau was already on shaky ground, but his being replaced is hardly a major shakeup, and certainly not much of a shift to the left. In fact, Canadian politics has always reminded me of a joke from Beyond the Fringe, which was that Britain has the Conservative Party, which is conservative, and the Liberal Party, which is conservative.
As for coat-tails, The Little Man from Shawinigan emerged from retirement with this advice:
To Donald Trump, from one old guy to another, give your head a shake! What could make you think that Canadians would ever give up the best country in the world — and make no mistake that is what we are — to join the United States?
Bok is correct that both Sheinbaum and Carney are in more powerful positions because of Trump’s blockheaded approach to foreign relations and world economies, but they’re only leftists when they stand next to him, and isn’t everybody?
Ramirez also has a somewhat muddled message, but he’s certainly not alone. Progressive cartoonists are also dragging out the SOTU business with complaints about the Democrats not doing anything.
I suppose when a conservative says that, the suggestion is that they should have acted like tourists, storming the building, pooping on the floors, smashing windows, stealing souvenirs, assaulting police officers and otherwise peacefully registering their political dissent.
But I have still not heard what any progressives think would have been effective, unless they are dreaming of headlines reading
TRUMP RESIGNS PRESIDENCY AFTER DEMOCRATS WALK OUT DURING SPEECH
Well, there’s an opportunity missed, I suppose, but then again perhaps being the minority party in both houses means there’s nothing you can do that won’t be spun to make you look foolish. Including nothing.
Ted Rall suggests Democrats should shoot people, which seems a little over-the-top, but he ignores the string of victories they have enjoyed in court, insisting that legal remedies take too long and come out in favor of the bad guys.
Granted, if he’d shown the courts ruling in Schumer’s favor and Dear Leader refusing to follow their directives, he might have a valid point, but we’re still probing that outcome, and, at the moment, the judicial branch appears to be holding.
In fact, speaking of Nazis deporting people, I just read that a judge has halted Trump’s plan to declare anyone who opposes American policies to be a terrorist fit for deportation, though there’s no word yet on legal resistance to his war on invading cartoonists.
Juxtaposition of the Day
It’s unusual to see Varvel and Campbell apparently on the same side, but I’m flummoxed over the notion that something’s wrong with the USPS, beyond, of course, the sabotage of having forced them to bank their pension funding ahead of time, which happened over a decade ago under Barack Obama. (UPDATE: But see comments)
It’s been plain that certain oligarchs would like to see the postal service taken over by private industry, but that’s been clear for a long time and the whole pension-saving scam was just one such maneuver.
The latest innovation is Trump’s cunning plan to eliminate Census workers in 2030 and have letter carriers collect the information, which would not only have the advantage of bringing postal service to a grinding halt for a month or two but (I covered the 1990 Census) would also result in a majorly incomplete head count, allowing the gummint to shift legislative districts around however they’d like.
Anyhow, the bulk of my mail seems to arrive on time, even though I changed addresses this past year and a few things have shown up a little late because they were misaddressed, which is hardly Mr. ZIP’s fault.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
To be clear, there’s all sorts of privatization going on in the government, and I’d welcome an investigation into the conflicts of interest whereby President Musk snatched a contract away from Verizon and awarded it to himself, plus all the rocketry profiteering going on with him and with Trump acolyte and contributor Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes specifically cites Trump’s plan to grant citizenship to anyone who ponies up $5 million, which is not entirely unprecedented.
The Canadians made a similar offer for considerably less of a bribe several years ago, resulting in a flood of Chinese immigrants to Vancouver, and let me be clear that it was not an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act whereby they had to pay a head tax to enter.
Demanding $50 was discriminatory, while inviting, but not requiring, $250,000 is like one of those charity concerts with a “suggested offering.”
We’ve also got “suggested housing” for our president in Florida, as German notes, for which we pay to fly him and his Secret Service posse down there, rent rooms at Mar A Lago for said posse and also rent them golf carts and feed everyone for those rare weekends he needs to get away.
He’s only flown to Mar A Lago six times in the seven weeks since he was inaugurated, merely costing taxpayers an average of $3.4 million each trip.
He’d have to travel over 20 miles to spend a weekend in the White House and play golf at Andrews Air Force Base.
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