True Sailing Is Dead

I've never started a blog post with your moment of zen, but, then, I've never felt we were so desperately becalmed.

And it's only one minute and 35 seconds of terrifyingly appropriate mood-setting zen, so wotthehell.

Joel Pett marks World Press Freedom Day and, discouraging as his take seems, it's really only a symptom of a much larger issue, part of which is sitting in the White House and part of which put him there.

It's all very well to mock the inane, counterfactual idiocy that falls out of his mouth,and I laughed at today's Bad Reporter.

Still, it's gallows humor and you should know where you stand, which is right on the trap door.

Trump was a lot more amusing as a temperamental two-year-old ranting on a TV show than he is now that he's right here and has somehow found a loaded handgun.

And the question of who left a loaded handgun where the toddler could find it is something better discussed after he's no longer running around the Oval Office waving it.

As Clay Jones suggests both in this cartoon and in his essay, it's hard to tell how Trump's admiration of bloodthirsty tyrants could be any more alarming than it is right now, the chief difference being that Jason Vorhees is a fictional psychopath in horror films and Roderigo Duterte is the real deal.

Duterte's direct, open, undenied mass murders put him head and shoulders above other tyrants Trump has praised, who at least have the human decency to deny human rights violations that should shock the conscience of an American president.

But we have a president who didn't know who Frederick Douglass was and who is unaware that people have debated at great length the cause of the Civil War and who did not realize the being President of the United States would be a demanding gig and who apparently is unaware that the election -- in which he thinks he won a popular majority, and of which he brags that his critics should shut up because he won -- is over and he needs to put away the banners and start governing.

John Deering uses the failure of the plan to repeal the ACA to point out Trump's narcissism, as he stands over the patient he has all but killed, taking his own vital signs, but it applies to everything he does: The speech in Wisconsin was a gob-smacking celebration of Donald J. Trump, larded with slogans rather than solutions.

Had the fulsome praise been coming from someone introducing him, you'd say, "Quit sucking up to the guy," but he was sucking up to himself, praising his audience for liking him:

The optimism in this room is the same incredible spirit that is sweeping across our country -- and even greater than that great day in November when I won the state of Wisconsin and when we won the presidency. That was a great day. That was a great day. And thank you, Wisconsin.

No, no, thank you, Mr. President!

Nick Anderson notes that Trump could build his wall with his own broken promises, but Nick is indulging in comic exaggeration: Most of those proposals were not actually written down, or at least not fleshed out to the point where all of them stacked together would amount to a single sheaf.

Doesn't matter.  

Broken promises are swept away as if they never happened or, perhaps, were only "promised" and never actually promised.

And shut up, because he doesn't stand by anything and get out of my office.

Which clip would have been easier to find if he hadn't also cut off reporters who challenged his view of reality in February and in January (having brought a claque to that January "press conference" to applaud his great, really great, unbelieveably good answers).

 

Kevin Kallaugher didn't mince panels in evaluating what the Trump presidency has done to America in its first 100 days.

But the problem is, what now?

A group of psychologists broke an informal ethical rule and, diagnosing him from afar, wrote a letter to the NYTimes saying they felt he was mentally unfit to hold office, and Washington Post's conservative -- conservative -- columnist Jennifer Ruben addressed the topic in a piece tellingly headlined "When is it okay to say the president might be nuts?"

Among other wise observations, she notes that "there is a fundamental difference between calling someone 'crazy' because of his views, for example, on the Vietnam War and questioning someone’s mental stability based on his behavior, speech and other observable factors."

But, as she and others have said, personal mental illness may not impair governance to the point of touching off the 25th Amendment.

Still, it was damned stupid for W to think invading Iraq was a good idea, particularly since he had access to the president who, a decade earlier, had decided not to press on to Baghdad. It was foolish and short-sighted and -- in the justification given -- dishonest.

But I never heard anyone suggest, except in the informal rhetorical sense, that W was insane.

Trump's inability to process reality goes far beyond "lying" or even "spinning," and few responsible commentators continue to suggest that it's all part of a cunning plan to distract us.

It's real, and his level of denial inspired this

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Watson)

(Mike Smith)

It's a funny enough gag except that, while the kid may be trying to skate past a grounding, Trump appears to genuinely believe that being drubbed on his budget proposal was a victory.

When Charles Krauthammer calls it a loss on Fox News, it's not a win, Mr. President, and your proposal to let the government shut down is simply further proof of your ignorance of how the system functions.

Still, Bill Day suggests that he didn't slither into the Oval Office without help.

So here we sit, throwing horses overboard to lighten the load and to save on feed while we hope for whatever faint zephyr may come up and get us at least to 2018.

 

A second helping, perhaps?

 

Comments

[Mark Jackson]

I assume Bill Day was inspired by this:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/01/politics/trump-the-snake/

[Mike Peterson]

I hadn't seen that, but I've cited the story myself a few times. Not sure how you make it come out in Trump's favor, mind you. It's easier to apply it the way I have and the way Bill did. (Al Wilson didn't write it -- Oscar Brown Jr. did. CNN just published fake snake news.)

[Craig L Wittler]

Lar DeSouza is a cartoonist who draws webcomics written by somebody else, but he also does random cartoons and caricatures based on whatever strikes his fancy in a Tumblr blog. Mostly his topics have been Pop Culture (he's sold an entire book of Star Trek themed toons), but he's gotten into current events lately and has done some excellent Trump stuff, none more thought-provoking than this:
http://uncalar.tumblr.com/post/160277970305/cartoon-reality-busting-with-apologies-to-adam

It does make me wonder about the true origins of "alternate facts".

for the record, other Trump stuff:

http://uncalar.tumblr.com/post/159692195660/editorial-cartoon-are-you-my-moab

http://uncalar.tumblr.com/post/156631270480/editorial-cartoon-the-orange-meanie-i-was

http://uncalar.tumblr.com/post/154536159095/cartoon-had-this-idea-for-awhile-a-bit-too-easy

http://uncalar.tumblr.com/post/154183155200/cartoon-many-people-are-talking-about-times

[Mike Peterson]

Not bad stuff, Craig. On the follow list, which I have to clean up at some point. (It's getting kinda long)

[Hank G.]

It’s pretty amazing the Trump does not have enough self-awareness to realize that many people would find the snake story more applicable to himself than any other person or group.

Or, perhaps he does realize that and just enjoys rubbing our face in it.

A similar, but more appropriate fable is the one concerning the frog in the scorpion. In that story, the scorpion’s action ends up killing itself, as well as the frog. The possibilities of that one scares me.