Come Alive! You're in the Spontaneous Generation!

I'm cheating: My rule is that a cartoon is fresh until it has been replaced, regardless of date of issue.

This Clay Bennett cartoon actually ran a week ago, and, while there are several editorial cartoonists for whom a week-old cartoon remains "current," Bennett is considerably more prolific than that.

Nonetheless, if not "timely" under the rules of this blog, it is "timeless" as a summing up of the Trump presidency.

Granted, it takes a pretty hungry ego to want to be president in the first place, and even Henry Clay, who famously declared "I would rather be right than be president," was ranking two of his personal goals, rather than renouncing the latter.

And, as an abolitionist from Kentucky, he found those two goals often in conflict.

My allegiance is to this Union and to my state; but if gentlemen suppose they can exact from me an acknowledgement of allegiance to any ideal or future contemplated confederacy of the South, I here declare that I owe no allegiance to it; nor will I, for one, come under any such allegiance if I can avoid it.

Well, he achieved the goal of being right. If you're forced to choose, that's the right choice.

I don't know how many Presidents have had to close their eyes and jam their fingers in their ears in order to serve with a semblence of personal honor, but this is the first time we've had a chief executive who does not acknowledge the need to at least make the effort.

"The Apprentice" was not a TV show about management technique. It was a show about Donald Trump. And that's fine for a TV show.

For the presidency, however, it is unseemly. You must fly the Stars and Stripes above your own banner, out of good taste and good manners, if not sincere belief.

His speech at the Coast Guard Academy graduation proved that his priority is always Donald Trump and not America: He alternated between whining about his own trials and tribulations, boasting of his own accomplishments and then demonstrated his utter lack of fitness for the position by discussing the wonderful fighter jets and aircraft carriers those Coasties would soon enjoy.

"You're fired" was a great tagline. But everything since has been a punchline.

Trump recently suggested that nobody should listen to his press secretary or other staff because they couldn't seem to keep track of his nimble mind, but I think RJ Matson's depiction of Baghdad Sean pretty much nails it.

And Lalo Alcaraz memorializes the revelation that Comey, when everyone was called into the White House for something or other, hoped that wearing a blue suit and standing near blue curtains would make him inconspicuous.

(I like the placement of the speech balloons, by the way, because it was kind of hopeless for a guy who is 6'8" to try to be inconspicuous.)

The theory is that the President appoints the Director of the FBI but then leaves him alone. They aren't supposed to be buddies and Comey did not want to be Trump's friend any more than he had wanted to be Obama's friend.

There are certain jobs that require distance.

But they also require that both parties know how things work, and it's not that Trump doesn't know these things but that he seems both indifferent and impervious to learning.

I mean, the guy thinks the Coast Guard has aircraft carriers.

This is less an example of the cunningly-adopted quasi-legal concept of willful ignorance than it is of the good ol' regular kind.

Which brings us to the Roger Ailes factor, nicely rendered here by Adam Zyglis.

Discussions of the death of Ailes have often credited him not with actually causing the Trump presidency, though he did help with the campaign, but with creating the atmosphere in which Trump could win.

There are limits to this: Ailes had great influence with Republican presidents from Nixon forward, but I haven't heard that he sparked Reagan to end the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which required broadcasters to offer equal time for opposing viewpoints.

This meant that, rather than allow three minutes of partisan posturing and hope nobody asks for equal time, broadcasters could air as much one-sided commentary as they wanted. A year later, Rush Limbaugh's radio show went national, removing all vestiges of silence from the Silent Majority.

However, as Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman said on NPR in the obituary coverage, Ailes built Fox on a related but slightly different platform: He took actual reportage out of the mix and offered news-free news shows in which the talking heads simply commented on issues without any (expensive) correspondents in the field investigating anything.

Not only was it immensely profitable, compared to networks that gathered news, but it fed the appetite for a sort of medieval-science approach to reality.

That is, as recently as 250 years ago, science -- which had arisen as "natural philosophy" -- was expected to explain what people already believed, the most-often cited example being "spontaneous generation" in which maggots grew out of dead flesh and barnacles somehow transmogrified into geese.

It's not far from the type of theology in which philosophers and Church Fathers used logic to prove the existence of God, as opposed to using it to ask the question "Does God exist?"

Those who begin with the belief that God exists are delighted to find proof that He does, while they dismiss any logic which fails to prove it as faulty, dishonest and the work of heretics.

That is the atmosphere in which a man who appears to an independent observer ignorant, arrogant and blatantly dishonest is seen by True Believers as righteous and deserving.

It's the atmosphere in which those whose speech and actions are not aligned with Correct Thought are sometimes burned at the stake, sometimes hanged and sometimes pressed to death.

Part of that whole "I know you are, but what am I?" school of political thought.

Or, y'know, this: