CSotD: Another Week in Paradise
Skip to comments
Petrenko leads off today because I’ve seen so many falling-graph cartoons that they make my eyes glaze over, but he freshens the conceit by making it into a commentary on Trump’s apparent profiteering.
Obviously, we’ll have to wait for an investigation to prove that Trump has engaged in insider trading, and, just as obviously, that may be a long wait. The Democrats in the Senate are calling for an investigation, but they’ve also begun holding shadow hearings about VA cuts and DOJ harassment, since they can’t get a message out in for-real congressional hearings dominated by the majority party.
Anything they come up with will be more performative than enforceable, but it’s better than remaining silent.
When I signed on as a reporter, I was cautioned not to do a lot of aggressive stock trading, because it could call my ethical neutrality into question. It boggles the mind that elected officials are permitted to play the market and profit from the results of their official work.
Clearly, neutrality is a relative matter. People knew I had opinions, but they knew I’d keep them in my back pocket. That’s all that anyone should ask for, but it sure seems like a big ask these days.
The only exaggeration in Deering’s cartoon is the Secret Service officer’s comment. The rest could easily be direct quotes from a Cabinet meeting, in which officers praise Dear Leader with verbal bouquets not normally seen outside of Pyongyang.
Again, it’s an issue of appearances, discretion and personal pride. You wouldn’t be expected to serve an executive you didn’t at least respect if not like personally, but you’re supposed to demonstrate that through your actions, not by giving him a tongue bath for the cameras.
But we’ve seen the change from governance to fandom, and it’s not just Karoline Leavitt telling cheerful lies to the press. It’s the alteration of the Department of Justice from enforcing the law to enforcing loyalty, and Pam Bondi honestly thinks her job is to punish those who challenge Dear Leader.
It’s not theoretical: Trump has ordered DOJ and Homeland Security to investigate Chris Krebs, who had been head of cybersecurity in his first administration, for having announced that the 2020 Election was secure and had not been fixed to favor Biden. His crime? Suppressing conservative or dissenting voices and distorting public opinion.
Trump has also revoked security clearances not just for Krebs but for all employees of the company where Krebs now works.
Meanwhile, the tongue-bathing has entered media, where Jeff Bezos has ordered the Washington Post opinion pages to practice loyalty, Patrick Soon-Shiong has done the same at the LA Times, and Lisa Benson declares that China started the tariff war and is being damaged by it.
The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of
self-deception. -- 1984
Morland sees the trade war between the US and China differently, but he’s in England, too far away to see matters clearly. Or at least his paper, the Guardian, is too far away to be extorted into compliance.
Fortunately, there are still those in this country who are equally unwilling to bend the knee, to twist the facts, and, to borrow Dear Leader’s elegant language, to kiss the ass.
Bok has become a puzzle lately, apparently still loyal to extreme conservatism but with some cracks in his loyalty to Trump himself. It’s hard to tell if he really thinks you can just fire up long-idle machinery and jump back into production, or if those empty factories are even still standing. Most of them are not.
And however Bok sees it, it would take millions of dollars and months — perhaps years — of work to get those factories back into production. Starting from scratch would not only likely be necessary, but would likely be more efficient.
At which point you have to ask, for what? With Dear Leader giving business writers whiplash from his changing tariff policies, he has now — as of this morning but perhaps not as of this afternoon — exempted electronics from his massive tariffs, leaving clothing as the major victim of the trade war.
Meanwhile, our unemployment rate is so low that Republicans are introducing legislation to end restrictions on child labor, not quite as much as seen in Rogers’ cartoon, but enough to seriously impede the education of high school students and possibly expose them to physical danger.
It’s hard to unring a bell, and Dear Leader has already done a fair amount of damage, not only with his on-again-off-again tariffs as seen here, but with his allowing Elon and the Lost Boys to run rampant through the government, canceling programs and laying off people and then having to reactive and rehire and reboot, which isn’t always possible.
Musk had promised to cut government spending by $2 trillion, but now says it will only be $150 billion, which is like promising a yacht cruise around the world and then offering a bike ride to the corner. It isn’t worth the blood, sweat and tears expended thus far.
We’re at least still able to afford for Dear Leader to fly to Florida every weekend for golf instead of having to play at Andrews Air Force Base, and we’ll still have $92 million left for a Soviet-style parade on his birthday.
Priorities! Priorities!
People won’t like losing their jobs, or T-shirts suddenly costing $40, but, unfortunately, xkcd’s explanation of economic folly won’t reach the people who don’t already understand what’s happening.
You can’t tell the official lies from the Russian fakery from the paranoid rumors. People in Texas are saying that the measles outbreak is caused by illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande with the virus. Why not? People believed migrants were smuggling fentanyl, and that Mexico emptied its prisons and madhouses into our country.
The cure is tariffs, and to seize Greenland.
Comments 4