CSotD: Margins of Error
Skip to comments
Yesterday was VE Day except in the United States, where it was “Victory Day For World War II,” according to our president, who celebrated by posting this image of marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, a hill just west of Berlin that was named for German composer Johann Sebastian Suribachi.
Or maybe, just maybe, Dear Leader is unaware that the war went on for another three months and ended with a bang on August 14th.
But he has his own set of beliefs about the war.
(T)he victory was mostly accomplished because of us. Whether you like it or not, we came into that war and we won that war and we had a lot of help from a lot of great people a lot of great allies. But I think there would be nobody that would say that we were not the dominant force in that war.
I’ll grant you that American schools in my day didn’t say much about our ally on the Eastern Front, but Dorman Smith had commented nearly a year before VE Day on the fact that the Russians had driven German troops out of the Soviet Union and were pushing them back through Poland.
When the allied troops met in Berlin and ended the war in Europe, Smith offered modified joy, knowing that there was still unfinished business in the Pacific Theater.
As for Dear Leader’s boast that we carried the heaviest load, we certainly didn’t top the butcher’s bill, in part because most participants had fought without us for several years before Pearl Harbor forced the America First crowd to pipe down and forced Congress and FDR to step up.
To be fair, Pearl Harbor happened in the half of the war that nobody told Dear Leader about until 2017, when he toured the memorial and had to ask Gen. John Kelly what had happened there.
Meanwhile, Trump is considering changing the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Gulf, apparently because he’s contemplating a new nuclear deal with Iran to replace the one he tore up in his first administration, and the best way to move that forward is to insult and infuriate the Iranians.
And while you mustn’t let people change their names, and it’s degrading to change the names of sports teams, it’s right and just to change centuries-old geographic names, and to force everyone to use those new monikers.
Though as Patterson notes, press conferences at the White House have become better run since they started tossing out representatives of outlets that keep saying “Gulf of Mexico” and filled their seats with patriotic reporters who ask the right questions.
That improvement was too good to last — Stupid First Amendment! — but Karoline still has things under control.
That AP brouhaha was not Karoline’s fault, of course. Even a stable genius has trouble knowing quite what the Constitution means.
Names aren’t the only bothersome thing happening. Whether it’s the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf, it is not to be confused with the Red Sea, where the poor USS Harry Truman is having a most difficult cruise.
The aircraft carrier already slammed into a merchant vessel, which cost its captain his command, since, in the Navy, poop rolls uphill, not down, and a commanding officer is responsible for whatever happens on his vessel.
Now the substitute skipper has seen two $73 million jets go off the flight deck and into the water, and lost another one to friendly fire from the USS Gettysburg, which apparently mistook it for a Houthi rocket.
Boris notes that dropping jets into the water doesn’t fit in with DOGE’s attempt to cut government spending, and he’s right. President Trump could enjoy six months of golf for the price of an F-18.
In any case, when they either run out of aircraft or run out of commanding officers they can go home.
Don’t expect tickertape.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Speaking of changing names, the days leading up to the newly minting of Pope Leo XIV brought a flurry of cartoons and it was interesting to see the breadth of attitudes.
Chappatte addressed the anticipation Catholics were feeling, since Francis was well-liked by modern worshippers but despised by old-school traditionalists, which put the conservatives in an odd position, since their rock-ribbed dogma says that the Pope is chosen by divine inspiration but they had to argue that the conclave had made a mistake.
Less conservative Catholics appreciated Francis’s gentle, accepting direction, even though he didn’t go as far as many of them wanted in dealing with things like clerical celibacy and women’s place in the clergy.
But while Catholics watched to see the direction the new pontiff would take, non-Catholics made jokes about white and black smoke and, as in Cagle’s case, seemed to be mocking the religious beliefs behind the process.
There’s an element of “we can tell those jokes but you can’t,” and even fallen-away Catholics like myself can be offended on an ethnic rather than spiritual level, but if you deal with human frailty rather than deep beliefs, it only offends the bluenoses.
Venables makes the kind of cartoon Catholics themselves have enjoyed since the days of Brother Juniper and Speck the Altar Boy.
Juxtaposition of the Compulsively Fecund
However Leo XIV deals with the religious issues of family planning, artificial insemination and right-to-life, there is a sudden burst of interest in none-of-your-business coming out of the Musk/Trump administration.
Trump’s proposed $5,000 maternity bonus is particularly bizarre and illogical, given that his administration is otherwise cutting programs to help parents afford to raise healthy, well-educated children.
Though as Espinoza reminds us on another topic, Republicans have a history of caring more about birth than anything that happens to children afterwards.
Stantis’s piece suggests a profit motive, but it seems more likely that they’re attempting to counter the Great Replacement by deporting brown babies and encouraging people to furnish us with more white babies.
What it particularly suggests is yet another way in which the MAGA crowds wants to go back to a simpler time of simpler people. (Take a hint, Harvard!)
Comments 10
Comments are closed.