CSotD: Political Partying On
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There are any number of cartoons, memes and videos floating around about what a disappointment Dear Leader’s parade turned out to be, and that’s probably a good thing in terms of keeping up morale among the dissenters, though I doubt much of it will get through the president’s protective bubble.
The thing is, LBJ and Nixon were both devastated by the flow of criticism leveled at them, because they were paying attention. No such problem now, and however disappointed Trump may be, it’s not being compounded by the mockery because he’s not likely seeing it. And you can bet his staff isn’t pointing it out.
But I think Uncle Sam deserves an answer to his question, because the Great Fog Machine has been busily convincing people that, because several corporations have stepped up to sponsor the entire 250th shindig, the parade didn’t cost taxpayers a thing.
I don’t think that’s true, but I haven’t seen any accounting for who paid for what, and it matters.
If our country is going to be as divided as it is, we deserve to know what’s going on. (Well, we deserve to know what’s going on anyway, but moreso when somebody seems to be purposely dividing us.)
Tom Tomorrow lays out the pattern of purposeful dishonesty and he does a nice job of capturing the combination of insensitivity, foolishness, personal spite and downright lying that seem the center of administration policy, as well as the flattery which keeps it all running smoothly.
Ruben Bolling cuts through to the spoiled kid at the center of it all. The humor he pulls out of the situation is based on imagining that the kid has some sense of his own twisted values and intentions.
For my part, I remain flummoxed by the fact that the question “What did the president know and when did he know it?” which was so clear an issue under Nixon remains such an impenetrable mystery under Trump.
I’ve run into snake oil salesmen who believed their own BS. I once sat through a presentation by a developer who was planning an extra-wide main street in his housing development because he expected the Space Shuttle to use it as an emergency landing strip if the weather at the Space Center in Florida and at Edwards weren’t favorable.
Not only did nobody burst in to sedate and remove him, but he had nice, expensive die-cut folders with colorful maps, illustrations and explanations.
However, I suspect that printing them was as far as he ever got. The trick on that beat was to go to the Chamber of Commerce cocktail parties to hear the grandiose promises and then go to the Homebuilders Association meetings to find out who actually had shovels in the ground.
I wish more reporters were covering the administration that way, because quarreling over who gets to ask Karoline Leavitt questions seems like a spectacular waste of effort.
Not that we should let the spectacular failure go unrecorded. Whoever paid for it, it not only failed on its own, but particularly in contrast to the massive turnout for the No Kings rallies earlier in the day.
It’s funny when Venables suggests how things might have gone, but, then again, that’s how things may have gone. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be in the car on the drive home.
Of all reactions to the day, Huck’s sarcastic offering is the least likely by several country miles. There may be plenty of ketchup on the White House walls, but I’d be stunned to find Dear Leader blaming the failure on his own lack of personal charisma.
He may well blame the people around him, but mostly for having hidden his fantabulous light under a bushel. There’s no way he’s shouldering any of the blame.
However, just because constant mockery won’t pierce the protective walls around Dear Leader, that doesn’t make it useless.
Not only might the comparison between No Kings and the Parade help convince MAGAts that they’re betting on the wrong horse, but, as Smith suggests, more publicity for the failures and unpopularity of the ICE raids has to shake their confidence in Dear Leader.
Note, by the way, how general news of immigrants rounded up somewhere else gets plenty of praise from the mob, but when ICE seizes somebody with a name and a face and friends in the community, the response is otherwise.
Pointing out that ICE is handcuffing harmless seamstresses, not murderers, has impact, while if it’s Maria, the seamstress who lives down the block, that draws even more of a humane response.
Murphy poses the question, what do we do now that we’ve had our No Kings rallies?
The same question was asked after the Hands Off protests in April, and No Kings was the answer. Something else will be the answer now, because the solution is to keep on keepin’ on. Same as it ever was.
Plus this: One of the turning points in the antiwar movement of the 60s was the Democratic Convention, because, horror show as it was in person, it was a major TV event, and, since the networks were all covering the Convention, the whole world was, indeed, watching.
Combined with Woodstock the next summer, it made being hip hip. It shifted the gestalt and created a momentum that moved young Americans towards peace, love and marihooney.
As the button said, we were the people our parents warned us about.
If you keep having protests where hundreds of thousands people turn out to cheer and chant and hold up funny signs, while the opposition holds parades that nobody goes to, the political churn will follow.
It’s a universal. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the 1968 Mai-Juin riots in Paris, explained during an anniversary, that it had started out innocently enough, that what the students really wanted was to walk in the streets, singing, drinking wine, kissing each other. When the cops tried to stop them, that was when things went sideways.
There certainly were politics involved. But it was also a very large party, and that was what was so infectious, so effective, and so impossible to repress.
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