Since today is "politics day," I can juxtapose a Sunday strip with a Friday strip in order to make an observation, which is, "Who cares?" and I do not offer that as a rhetorical question.
Knight Life is unapologetically autobiographical, with a lighter touch than the K Chronicles or (Th)ink, in which Keefe draws Great Lessons from daily interactions. A lot of the marital humor here is based on his wife being from Germany and thus missing out on various nuances of language and American social conventions.
I think it's nice that we can have a strip about an American married to a German, though I'll grant you the general topic has been handled in the past.
There was a sitcom back in 1972, called "Bridget Loves Bernie," about an Irish Catholic married to a Jew, and it was quite popular, though it drew some fire from people who objected to such things, according to that Wikipedia article.
I don't know how many people have ever objected to the mixed-marriage in Knight Life, though I'm sure someone has, because I once read the viewer-response letters at three TV stations for an article, and there are some truly insane people out there.
In any case, Rhymes with Orange touched on the possibilities of a completely unmixed marriage Friday, and it was picked up on specifically by the Minnesota Star-Tribune, which reported something I did not know about Hilary Price:
Apparently, she's 46 years old.
Everything else in the article I had figured out, and I had to really dig for this September 16, 2014 strip, because, while I noted it at the time, I featured it so far down in the posting that it didn't show up in my searches.
I remember mentioning it two months later at Hilary's annual open studio, and, as I recall, her reaction was much like Keefe's, that, yes, why not and what's the big deal and who cares if somebody cares, because nobody who cares matters.
So the Minnesota Star-Tribune's "Hey -- wait a minute!" is a bit misplaced, particularly given that the one from a year-and-a-half ago is much more explicit on the topic of sexual orientation.
It should be noted that neither cartoonist is particularly shy about the topic, and, in fact, Keith Knight's other work is highly political and often deals specifically with racial issues.
But, dammit, "Bridget loves Bernie" was based on "Abie's Irish Rose," which opened in 1922.
So the question is, how long will we allow a bunch of knuckle-dragging idiots to set the agenda for this country?
Tune in this November and we'll find out
Steve Breen describes the depth to which our political process has sunk, and you don't have to like any of the preceding three to acknowledge that, if nothing else, they ran on the idea of rallying people to make America better, while Trump is running -- and succeeding -- on the basis of hyping up the fear, hostility and hate among those aforementioned K-DIs.
He's not the first: Strom Thurmond and George Wallace both ran on the basis of appealing to racists, but they had to do it on third-party tickets, since decent people would have nothing to do with them, and, though they each carried some states in the Deep South, they didn't total 100 electoral college votes combined.
You would think that decent people would hesitate to hearken back to those days, but, as Matt Bors points out, we're not talking about decent people.
Steve Benson suggests that Trump mirrors leadership in a declining empire, and it's hard to argue that we haven't, indeed, lowered ourselves to the level of offering bread and circuses to a slavering mob, though we're nowhere near as generous with the bread as we might be.
Trump has shown you can promise all sorts of things and you don't even have to wait until after the election to renege: He set his brownshirts on the attack specifically promising to cover their legal fees, now denies he said it, and none of them seem to remember it.
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
When I can pull the "liar liar" link from the Daily Caller, of all places, the take-away is not that Trump lies at an astonishing pace but that his followers don't know from one moment to the next what their Beloved Leader is saying, nor do they care.
And, yes, like Scott Stantis, I blame the media.
I don't simply blame them for refusing to invest in, or engage in, competent news reporting, though you have to wonder that nobody at PBS bothered to check out the tats on this Trump campaign worker, and I'm linking to People Magazine because this isn't some leftwing fantasy so hidden you couldn't figure it out.
PBS has explained that, first of all, they expect viewers to know this stuff and, second of all, they didn't know this stuff. So okay.
Well, I've seen the programming they run during pledge drives. Apparently they're not aware that Victor Borge died nearly two decades ago and that most of their delightful British comedies were long gone before he was. So why would they know what's happening now?
However, the rest of the media has also folded news into entertainment, and then turned entertainment into a flood of Honey Boo-Boo and the Search for Bigfoot and conspiracy theories and other programming that seems dedicated to making the American public as gullible, paranoid and foolish as possible.
In either case, it's a matter of giving their audience what it wants: One wants 30 year old sitcoms, another wants assurance that science is wrong and monsters indeed roam the Earth and that the evil government is covering up everything.
As John Cole notes, here's where you find yourself when you start swallowing your own "free market" snake oil. (Nice touch on the cheesy make-up!)
The Republicans have only themselves to blame: A smarter political party would simply have selected an acceptable candidate long ago and shoved it down the suckers' throats.
Sweetly, of course.
Comments