First as farce, then as tragedy

Jeff Stahler does a nice job of exploiting the joke of the day in a manner that ties it into an actual event, since the Scripps National Spelling Bee is, in fact, happening as we speak.

Someone criticized him on Facebook for taking up such a silly moment, and I've seen a couple of complaints that, with so much wrong in the world, a misspelled word is nothing more than a distraction. 

I'd note that most of the people I've heard making that complaint are not demanding that cartoonists should, instead, take up the issues that Bill Sanders is raising.

Trump has tried to cover for the covfefe screw-up by reviving his "crooked Hillary" insult, to which she replied "People in covfefe houses shouldn't throw covfefe," which is funny but not all that presidential either.

I'm trying to remember how much attention anyone paid to Al Gore or John Kerry in the wake of their defeats, but, in sorting wheat from chaff, I'm more fascinated that anybody even knows who Kathy Griffin is, and that -- between conservatives pretending she matters and liberals assuring us she doesn't -- she's soaking up more ink this week than she ever got when her career was active.

Just before the covfefe hit the fan, Jack Ohman commented on Jared Kushner's (alleged) plan to set up back-channel communications, with a cartoon that questions Trump's grip on reality, and I find that a more compelling issue, of which covfefe is simply another symptom.

Timing matters in comedy, and I've been thinking of a pair of jokes that came early enough to be funny but later seemed prophetic, under the category of "kidding on the square."

One came in June, 2001, when Vice-President Dick Cheney underwent surgery to have a defribillator placed in his chest, and someone in the newsroom asked "I forget: If anything happens to Cheney, who becomes president?"

It was a pretty funny line, given that Dick Cheney had been asked to find a good VP candidate, looked all around and decided the answer was "Dick Cheney."

Still, the joke seemed kind of harmless a few months before 9/11, coming well before Cheney looked around for links to Iraq and for super-secret WMDs and found what he wanted, which his amiable puppet accepted as cheerfully as he had accepted that original recommendation for a candidate.

The other came sometime during the second Reagan administration and involved Ron and Nancy at a restaurant. She tells the waiter:
"I'd like the steak, medium rare, a salad with ranch dressing and a baked potato."
"And the vegetable?"
"He'll have the same."

That was kind of tasteless even before the Alzheimer's diagnosis, but the pertinent fact, in both cases, is that the jokes preceded the solid realization, and reverses Karl Marx's comment about Napoleon and Napoleon III, that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."

It is a scary world indeed where the pertinent statement becomes, "Not so funny now, is it?"

And for all the laughter over "covfefe," there's something bizarre and disturbing in the fact that the White House declined to simply brush it off as misspelling. (By the way, placement of relevant keys aside, "coverage" has eight letters and "covfefe" only seven.)

You would think it would be the opposite: That, if anyone tried to make it into a serious issue, the White House would laugh it away. Instead, they put forth a statement that "The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."

I'm afraid we may know what the message meant, which was the point of this opinion piece in the LA Times and this column in the Detroit Free Press.

As noted in the former:

Whatever it was, Trump’s tweet did raise concerns about the health of a president who is 70 years old, overweight and just returned from a jam-packed eight-day trip across the Middle East and Europe. Conservative writer David Frum, a former aide to President George W. Bush, tweeted his speculation that Trump may have experienced a spasm while his Twitter feed was live, and lost consciousness.

We should not get too hung up on Trump's campaign attack that Hillary Clinton didn't have the stamina to be president, while, on his first foreign trip less than six months into his first term, he had to cancel an event and then take a golf cart while the other G7 leaders walked.

Hillary is no longer an issue, but the silly letter from his physician that took the place of a competent, thorough medical evaluation still is.

Perhaps if we had recognized the farce for what it was then, we wouldn't be in danger of experiencing it as tragedy in the near future.

Meanwhile, Matt Davies notes the absurdity of Trump cleaning out his communications office in order to avert trouble.

Does anybody remember the old tech acronym "GIGO"?

Davies nails it: Replacing the loudspeaker isn't gonna solve this problem.

 

Meanwhile, back at the restaurant

Tina's Groove has been on a story arc in which Tina trains her replacement. I have no idea what this means, but it could be that she will abandon the restaurant setting for a more wide-ranging strip.

Pure speculation on my part, of course, but I think if Rina Piccolo were dropping the strip entirely, word would have gotten out simply because newspapers would have been told they'd need to fill the space. I also doubt she would have done this recent interview, at least until things shook out a little.

I also recall that, some years ago, she had an on-line strip about a single woman with more issues to deal with than waiting tables, and it wouldn't surprise me to see some of that come into Tina's world.

Or she may simply hit the Reset button on Monday.

Nobody tells me anything, but, anyway, neither Tina nor Rina are ever boring.

 

Now here's your moment of advice for the president:

 Things I say at midnight,
I ain't gonna say 'em in daylight.

Comments

[Woodrowfan]

his supporters are trying to claim it's really a word in Arabic. I think it was "coverage" typos can include missing letters too.

[Brian O'C]

Hi Pete,

The article below was linked at Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

http://theweek.com/articles/702218/why-are-people-still-losing-minds-over-hillary?utm_source=links&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=twitter

"What is different about Hillary Clinton is the rampant misogyny still being directed at her..."

Eh. Not buying it.

That is, any minority is going to attract bigotry, and I'm sorry for that, and if it had been Joe Lieberman or Joaquin Castro, they'd be getting hate mail based on their ethnicity/religion. So I'm sorry people reach for that gun in hating Hillary.

But the article notes that most candidates have at least waited longer to re-emerge and I guess I have a problem with that lack of discrete silence, but then my problems with her as a candidate began when she was magically the only Democrat who wanted the office -- unless you count O'Malley, who barely registered. (I never thought Biden would be a good candidate either, but I'd have liked to have seen him give it a shot. And I'd have burned shoe leather for Barbara Boxer.)

I think her stranglehold on the nomination infuriated a lot of people who would have welcomed a female candidate, and let's not even get into the Evita Peron/Lurleen Wallace aspect.

But then there's this: I live in Bernie Sanders country and I never, ever met a "Bernie Bro."

Perhaps if I'd lived in St. Petersburg or Moscow, I'd have run into more of them.

[Woodrowfan]

I think her stranglehold on the nomination

in other words she was a very smart politician who had all her ducks in a row well before 2016. I am not sure why this is a problem?

[Mike Peterson]

Trump was also a smart politician. Not a problem, then.

[Woodrowfan]

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[Mike Peterson]

What I mean is that having your ducks in a row is not a moral factor, and "smart politician" can be a pretty cynical description, depending on how you parse it. This may have been your intention, of course.

Mine was that I'd have objected to anyone who seemed to short-circuit an allegedly open selection process. I might have felt better if the DNC had simply said, "Here's our candidate and we're cancelling the primaries."