CSotD: Here We Come Again – Catch Us If You Can
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I don’t like to repeat a topic, operating largely on a “You snooze, you lose” basis with political cartoonists and expecting them to leap to their drawing boards when something major happens.
But I awoke this morning to a plethora of new cartoons about the security breach, and not just a metric plethora but a good old fashioned avoirduplethora of cartoons and jokes and stupid comments of which I present a sample.
I start with Kuper’s panel because he approached it from the intentional-inclusion point of view, but managed to incorporate both the overall carelessness and the utter lack of adult judgment involved.
Or as Mrs. Betty Bowers put it:
The reason the Trump administration has so many incompetent opportunists who make bad choices is because the only criterion for getting any of these jobs is that you’ve shown loyalty to Donald Trump — and that’s a huge sign that you are an incompetent person who makes bad choices.
Her comments tie in nicely with the reaction of Patrick Blower to Hegseth’s insulting comments about European freeloaders, which no intelligent cabinet secretary would ever say out loud.
Unlike the French member of the European Parliament who blistered Karoline Leavitt for her insulting foolishness, Blower doesn’t bother to do more than offer a “consider the source” response.
There seems to be a lot of considering of the source going around, and Morland also expresses his response in contempt for Hegseth and Vance rather than trying to employ logic to refute nonsense.
And in this country, rightwing bloviator Charlie Kirk shows the folly of attempting to use history and logic to defend Dear Leader, leading off a laundry list of Other People’s Errors with a major mistake by a Republican president that wound up destabilizing the entire Middle East.
It’s possible he was confused by the fact that Trump has repeatedly lied, claiming he was against the Iraq invasion when, in fact, he supported it at the time, having objected to George HW Bush’s decision in the first war to halt after securing the liberation of Kuwait. As noted in that linked fact-check, his position has varied enough that it hardly supports a claim of steady judgment.
If I’m going to trust the judgment of a wise-ass, it’s going to be that of First Dog on the Moon, who, rather than trying to make you believe he’s smarter than he really is, goes the opposite direction with silly-seeming arguments that suddenly betray solid judgment and that stand up well to fact-checking.
And speaking of wise-asses:
The Onion faces quite a dilemma in these times when the real news is ridiculous enough that you can’t tell satire from reality, but they offer the Democrats a challenge with this, daring them to let a wise-ass joke turn out to be prophetic.
As it happens, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were already scheduled to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday and the Democrats certainly didn’t let them off the hook, though the result was mostly ducking and dodging rather than providing direct answers to pointed questions.
Gabbard even declined to admit that she was on the call, and insisted that none of the planning for the attack qualified as classified information.
Ratcliffe was slightly more forthcoming and undermined an accusation by some critics by noting that chats on Signal are required to have a transcript made after, since the app deletes calls after a certain time. Critics had charged that use of Signal violated records-keeping regulations.
Darkow makes a chart of the call, with the important addition not only of Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally added to the chat, but of Vladimir Putin, who is depicted as mocking the incompetence of the group.
This is important, first of all, because Signal is encrypted but not genuinely secure, and not only was Gabbard overseas during the meeting, but Ukraine and Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff was right in Moscow as they conversed. The chat may or may not have bounced off Russian cell towers, but it was certainly within range of whatever intelligence-gathering tools they have in their own backyard.
The other factor is that the Trump administration is suggesting that Goldberg was not accidentally invited to the chat but somehow snuck into it. It would surely seem that, if a magazine editor could inject himself into the chat, a trained Russian or Chinese operative could, as well.
Edison Lee gets the lucky-timing award for today’s strip, which suggests that our government officials are more frightened of the press than they are of gangsters, among whom I would include Putin and his remaining undefenstrated oligarchs.
Anderson makes a more direct point, which is that both Gabbard and Ratcliffe denied that any of the material in the conversation was classified and Hegseth has denied that they even discussed war plans, all of which strains credulity.
As he points out, it seems strange indeed that, while plans to launch a military attack are not classified, the identity of individuals seized, deported and jailed without a trial is super-secret and even their families and their lawyers are not permitted to know where they are, much less why.
The whole world is watching, and over at the Guardian, Marina Hyde offers a column for those who prefer their wise-assery in text format, tying the “worst group chat ever” into the current uproar over the effect of smartphones on adolescent boys: “(S)hould we ban the devices for US national security advisers under the age of 60? Do you know what your national security adviser is doing on his device?”
Meanwhile, lord know other cartoonists are having fun with misdirected government information, as seen in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
These are all jokes, of course. Dear Leader has no plans to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Ramirez isn’t laughing, but then again, he’s an American conservative and gets no joy out of watching his country screw up.
The real question was posed by the Onion: Will this still matter next week, or will ducking-and-dodging pay off again?
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