Over at L'il Donnie today, Mike Norton despairs of being able to come up with any satire more ridiculous than reality, and I can't blame him. The Donald is indeed making it hard for political cartoonists.
Darrin Bell takes the route of casting doubt on the strangely upbeat report by the White House physician.
As I've said before, I don't know how any competent, ethical physician could predict six years of excellent health for a 71 year old man who is borderline obese and taking a variety of meds for what we might call "fat old man disease," a wisecrack I can make because I'm more or less in the same position.
At one point a few years ago, my doctor asked me a general "how's your overall morale?" question and I answered honestly that it's a little depressing -- just in general, not clinically -- to be in the home stretch. He responded that I shouldn't be too pessimistic and that, with reasonable precautions and good choices, I might have another 20 years.
However, there is no way he would specifically predict where I would be at any point in the future. It would be unethical, but it's also stupid and unscientific and bad medical practice.
And even if the President's height and weight were honestly presented in his physical -- my bet is that they were self-reported -- it's impossible to take this quote seriously:
Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.
You told him what?
Some people do have great genes, true, and it's too late for him to go back and un-eat all those cheeseburgers, so your prediction can't actually be put to the test, but, even so, WTF kind of thing is that for a physician from this planet to tell anyone, much less to repeat in an on-the-record report about the President's actual health?
Sure, Doc: If he hadn't eaten all that junk food, he might have lived to be 200.
And if his arms were three inches longer, he'd be able to fly.
And speaking of flying, some people will believe anything, and some of them swing large enough bats, as Steve Sack suggests, that they are able to influence the stock market.
"Irrational exuberance" was the phrase coined by Alan Greenspan during another inexplicable upswing, and this looks like a whole lot of that.
Trump supporters are joyously claiming that the uptick in the markets is because of Trump, but there are a couple of problems with that, the first being that, while the market has certainly gone up, Trump is hardly setting any records, and is in fact, middle of the pack, according to this spanking new analysis from Forbes.
The other being that stock prices are nearly independent of what's going on in your kitchen. Stock prices are based on what major traders think the stocks are worth, and there is both a circularity and a strong element of self-deception at work.
If you want to talk about "fake news," the earnest explanations of why stocks rose and fell on a particular day are as fake as it comes. It's because of the storms in the Northwest, one pundit writes, while another insists it was an announcement in Europe and a third is sure it had to do with the latest report on new home construction.
The stock market is not unlike the oddsmakers in Las Vegas who are currently taking bets on the Super Bowl. The odds do reflect some sober analysis of probability, but they're set by what the bettors think is likely to happen, such that, if too many people begin to bet on one team, they will change the odds to encourage bettors to put some money on the other side of the ledger.
Stock prices aren't manipulated that directly, but they do reflect a combination of factors of which actual sober analysis is only one.
Moreover, your pension funds may be invested in the market, but you have no control over them, and when the One-Percenters tell you that you have a part in the whole thing, they are lying.
If you don't personally own 20 or 30 percent of a company's stock, you have nothing to say about it.
I love Judy Holliday, but this clip is as accurate as "Solid Gold Cadillac" ever gets -- a single voice questioning the corporate bafflegab and being ignored. The part where she rounds up the proxies of small shareholders and brings the board to heel is a pleasant comedy, not a serious lesson in How Things Work.
For the average person, Sack's cartoon should bring to mind the old poem:
Birdie, birdie in the sky
Dropping whitewash in my eye
I'm no baby, I don't cry,
But boy I'm glad that cows don't fly
On accounta now they do.
And Matt Wuerker is hardly the only observer to wonder what it could take to shake the faith of the True Believers.
The same people who apparently have no problem with Trump dallying with a porn star while his (third) wife cares for their newborn child continue to attack Hillary Clinton for being married to a noted tomcat, even though she hasn't been a candidate for anything in more than a year.
Moreover, when Barack Obama proved to be a solid family man, they attacked him for having a wife who felt children should eat healthy food.
I remember when Nelson Rockefeller's divorce was predicted to make him unelectable.
It turned out most people didn't think divorce was such a bad thing, which was encouraging.
I'm not encouraged by the idea that most people don't have a problem with this degrading soap opera.
And as Mark Parisi suggests, they apparently don't.
And if you think we've seen domestic terrorism now, just wait until Dear Leader is impeached or even if he simply gets voted out in 2020.
Might need a few more this time
I dont know why people are so taken with the physical report. Of course he's in fine health, for a seventy year old. morbidly obese, no doubt diabetic and possibly malnourished dementia patient.
Posted by: sean martin | 01/20/2018 at 08:52 AM
Were Trump to keel over dead tomorrow, I'm sure the White House would immediately release the news that he has a slight cold.
https://seanmunger.com/2014/01/07/dropping-like-flies-the-gerontocracy-in-the-last-years-of-the-soviet-union/
Posted by: Paul Berge | 01/20/2018 at 05:54 PM
Perhaps the situation for political cartoonists is like that seen in old Porky Pig (for example) cartoons, where the little glutton is put into a hellish machine that crams all the foods he liked to eat down his gullet mercilessly, until he wakes up screaming in terror and never does it again.
Posted by: Kip W | 01/21/2018 at 05:18 PM