Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(Drew Sheneman, Tribune Content Agency)

(David Rowe, Financial Review, Australia)

(Morten Morland, The Times, UK)

(Jack Ohman, Tribune Content Agency)

(Michael Ramirez, Las Vegas Review-Journal)

(Rob Rogers, Tinyview.com)

(Dave Whamond, caglecartoons.com, Canada)

(Michael de Adder, caglecartoons.com, Canada)

(Robert Ariail, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, SC)

(Phil Hands, Wisconsin State Journal)

(Walt Handelsman, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans)

(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)

(Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, @mannequinonthemoon)

QOTD -- The Musk-y Smell Of The Cybertruck

 

"... The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in a version of Freejack in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.  [snip]

"What I can tell you is this: I saw my first Cybertruck stop at a red light near the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan on Sunday, and this car sucked in a way that had strangers on the sidewalk making Oh brother faces at each other. I could not have been better prepared to encounter this vehicle, and yet I was not prepared at all. It is one thing to have an image in your mind that roughly corresponds to 'Albert Pyun's Homercar: 2049' and quite another to watch that actual vehicle turn, seemingly on drunken tiptoe, onto Columbus Avenue. It is an experience that everyone should have, I think. The stupid, tacky future that our culture's reigning mediocrities are making every day can feel abstract and almost poignant when encountered through a screen—a thing that no one but them wants, and which does not work very well, trying and failing to seem like progress. It is much more useful, I think, to see how ridiculous—how gaudy and cheap and patently unwantable—that future looks trying to navigate the world in which everyone else is trying to live." (our emphasis) -- part of David Roth's review in The Defector of the ghastly Cybertruck produced by one of "our culture's reigning mediocrities," Elon Musk.  To think, this is the same mastermind whose Space X is providing rockets for space exploration...

(Photo: It does have that dumpster appeal / via Rob DenBleyker, Twitter/X)

QOTD -- "Trolling, Recrimination And Bile"

 

"It is both an uneasy and an incredibly easy time to be an ambitious Republican politician. A generation of hothouse freaks bred for and molded by the conservative political ecosystem are running up against the realization that their base cares nothing about the ludicrously shitty and unpopular policies they’ve been pushing for generations, and also hates their tricksy and smug debate-club rhetoric, and also hates them, really, mostly for the usual reasons that people dislike Yalies but also because they are boring. But what has replaced all that professional stuff is just trolling and recrimination and bile; there is no real reasoning to it, or with it.

"What this base wants to see is itself, reflected in shades of gunmetal and gold, because it does not trust and cannot care about anything but that reflection. This is the language that Jenner is trying to learn to speak, the uncanny patois of sunburned small-business tyrants and seething but secretly bored bosses and aggrieved middle-management. The task before Jenner is to learn the things that the deranged hornball grifters and serial antagonizers of customer service professionals and sloppy hair-trigger affluenza cases hear all day from their televisions, and then learn to say it back to them. Trump was able to do this because, for all his wealth, he was exactly as small of spirit and vacant of principle and jealously selfish as the people that idolized him, and just as voracious a consumer of the same terrible television. For all the other things that might hold Jenner back as a candidate, she does at least seem to have all that going for her." --  David Roth, writing about Republican candidate for California Governor Caitlin "I Can See Homeless People From My Hangar" Jenner, but really about Republican pols in general, who reflect the vacuity of their base in the era of the former guy.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

In case you missed it, on Sunday the 29 daily McClatchy newspapers (circulation 2.4 million) published an op/ ed co- authored by Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren on broad reforms needed to flush the corruption of the Trump regime out of the political system, illustrated by the corrupt bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic:

... Trump seems to think he can direct funding for the response to this crisis based on which politicians are nice to him, which states he’s trying to win in November and which businesses he wants to enrich — all without any accountability. We have a different view.

Taxpayer relief should go to those most in need. Hospitals, essential workers, small businesses, and state and local governments should get the help they need immediately. If large corporations want help, they should agree not to turn around and fire all their workers. The relief bill’s unconscionable tax giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires should be repealed. But that is not enough.

During the recent presidential primary, both of us called for significant reforms to end Washington corruption and guarantee a government that works for the people. We urgently need those broader reforms now.

The op/ ed goes to to talk about reforms in the areas of conflict of interest, lobbying and oversight that a Democratic administration would pursue.

David Roth writes about how the media has become sucked into the "empire of stupidity" reigned over by Very Stable Genius Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump:

... The rhythm of every news cycle is more or less the same, just as the shape of every daily presidential press briefing is generally similar to the previous day’s. The variables have changed under the pressure of the pandemic, though, which has had the strange effect of destabilizing what had become a more or less automatic process without changing it in any meaningful way. Some very long shadows are now troubling the corners of those familiar shots, but the cameras still whir into action at the same time each day. That alone guarantees that Trump will keep showing up, because it’s simply not in the man to pass up an opportunity to talk on television. Similarly, when the reporters at these briefings see the president of the United States standing there, swaying oddly and doing accordion things with his hands while putting strange childlike questions to his team of experts, it is simply not in them to focus their attention anywhere else.

And so they ask Trump questions about what he’s saying, and he talks about what he always talks about; he never knows anything useful, cannot tell the truth about the few things he knows, and is pulled by his own preposterous vanity and insecurities back toward the only thing he really cares about, which is himself. This is what the news is made of, now—the things that a vainglorious fraud says, and then the things that other people on television say about how Dangerous and Irresponsible they are, and then what Trump says about that in his amphetamized after-dark Twitter sessions or scrambling tantrum-swept mornings. It’s not that the things Trump says aren’t actually dangerous or irresponsible: They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that the definition by which these things are considered news—basically, because the president says them—is no longer workable.

Scott Lemieux at LGM has some thoughts about how the allegations made by Tara Reade will be used by the same media that plays along with Trumpland dystopia:

One thing we should be very clear about here is that Reade’s allegations are being used as a translucent pretext. Reade has never said that her complaint included a claim of sexual assault, and is now claiming that it didn’t claim sexual harassment either. And, in addition, the Senate Papers don’t include personnel files. There’s as much chance of finding something material to Reade’s claims in Biden’s documents as there is of uncovering secret Biden connections to the Kennedy assassination. This has nothing to do with Reade and everything to do with reporters wanting some raw material to churn out months of EMAILS! stories to balance out the corrupt president completely botching his handling of a pandemic and economic depression. That’s it.

It’s also worth noting that the Times’s ridiculous “clouds raised” stories about the Clinton Foundation make clear that there’s basically no chance that reporters are going to spend weeks looking through boxes of records in Newark, DE and just conclude “nope, turns out there’s nothing there.” Biden releasing the papers will just lead to a bunch of negative stories built on decades-old minutia hyped up by reporters and editors desperate to justify an unwise investment of time and resources. And when it turns up nothing about Reade, this won’t end the requests for more records — there’s always something else you could provide, more questions to be raised, more shadows to be cast. The only winning move in Transparency Calvinball is not to play.

Over at Balloon Juice, Adam Silverman deconstructs a case in point of how the media is serving as a willing tool of right- wing propaganda, with a bogus claim about Biden that ABC News "reporter" Sasha Pezenik tweeted out:

What is really going on here, and it is going to accelerate and grow until or unless reporters, editors, and producers get their acts together, is a two pronged influence operation. The first part is to get misinformation about Vice President Biden out into the mainstream media as quickly as possible, Because once it is reported on, no matter how quick the debunking is, the misinformation will be seized on and promoted, while the debunking will, at best, get pointed to by people like me. Pezenik had a legit news story to break last night, but it wasn’t the story she broke. She even had all the pieces to break the real news, which was “failed Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is attempting to smear Vice President Biden with a false allegation, which we were able to debunk with two phone calls. We are continuing our investigation in an attempt to learn why O’Donnell is doing this.” That framing would have allowed Pezenik and ABC News to break the story last night. But that isn’t what they did. O’Donnell and whoever put O’Donnell up to this knows that reporters have a sweet tooth for this type of thing. And they also know that if they can get the allegation out there through a legitimate news source, they will have laundered the misinformation successfully because almost no one they’re trying to message to is going to pay attention to the debunking.

The second part of this influence operation is agitprop. It is to further the President’s, the Republican Party’s, the conservative movement’s, Fox News’s, prominent Republicans’, conservatives’, and their surrogates’ argument that the real and legitimate news sources in the US are actually fake. That they cannot be trusted to report accurately or fairly. It is to create cognitive dissonance where the false and debunked in real time accusations against Vice President Biden are accepted as true, while at the same time the argument that the news media is lying to everyone and can’t be trusted because they botched the story by reporting factually wrong information is reinforced. It is a have your cake and eat it too influence operation. It is also, exactly, what Putin has been trying to do within Russia, within the US, and around the world for well over a decade. It is the attempt to create the dynamic where because nothing is true anything and everything is possible.

If you hoped the media learned its lesson from the disproportionate focus in 2016 on Hillary Clinton's email management protocols while Trump was demonstrating his grotesque, monumental lack of fitness for office, it appears you would be wrong.  At least now we're forewarned how they're going to handle things.  The blowback on this media behavior needs to be ferocious this time around.

Once again, Infidel 753 has labored to provide the best link round- up on the internet, so you would be well advised to check it out (as well as his regular posts, like this one!).

QOTD: Trump's Disordered Mind On Display

Writing in The Concourse / Deadspin, writer David Roth looks at mentally unstable sociopath and incompetent schemer Donald "The Chosen One" Trump's incoherence and inability to process information, other than the dreck he gets from his favorite media channels. He burps back what he's seeing and hearing from his manipulating friends on Fux, etc. because his failing mind has the intellectual curiosity and attention span of a small mammal. Here's one excerpt:

"The more worrying part of all this is that there is fundamentally nothing to know about most of what he talks about. Every rank thought-chunk that clears his blowhole is either some legacy beef or bigotry or something Trump learns from his television shows, which feed him attenuated suspicions, a list of ominous what-abouts that hint at some sort of outcome but stop well short of it, and a bunch of leading questions that, by design, cannot be answered. All of this is supposed to shore up a worldview and generate specific political outcomes, but mostly it aims to create a mood—a coiled and claustrophobic sense of being under siege, by someone—more than it does to answer any of the questions it hints at. It doesn’t really add up to anything, but also it can’t; the game is to accumulate. [snip]

Donald Trump is one of the worst people his generation produced, a vain and vicious and relentlessly exploitive nullity. But there is something pitiable in watching him try to defend himself with the weapons he’s been given by the culture that created him. He opens his mouth to answer for what he’s done and finds that these silly, sordid questions are all he has."  (our emphasis)

The whole article is brutally on target and a must read. The concerning part is, now that the impeachment inquiry is underway, that his mind will unravel more and he will do more lasting damage than he's already done to the nation.

QOTD -- "Man Of The Year"

"... Trump is a being of pure reaction and grievance and avarice, and as such is never really very difficult to parse. When he lies about money it’s because he wants people to think he has more of it than he does; when he lies about golf it’s because he wants people to think he’s a better golfer than he is. Those lies tell you something about how Trump wants to be seen, but they’re incidental to the bigger questions of who and what he is. Stranger lies like the Michigan Man one reveal more about how he sees the world and understands his relationship to the other people in it, which is fundamentally as someone cleaning up at an endless televised awards show."  --  David Roth, in an entertaining article about the odd lies that narcissistic sicko Donald "Rump" Trump "belches up," particularly a howler about being named Michigan Man of the Year, repeated multiple times over the years.

BONUS:

Trump says he was once named Michigan Man of the Year. I think he "misremembered." Actually, he was named Michelin Man of the year. #Trump #politics

— MIke Thompson (@ThompsonToons) August 16, 2019

QOTD -- Lies Are All Trump Has Left

"America loves to tell stories about itself to itself, and if these are not all quite lies they are mostly much sweeter and safer than fact. The lies that Trump has told since his party lost badly in the midterm elections have ranged from the usual—the loss was actually a win, thank you to all—into more explicit and desperate denial. It’s not a new thing for Republicans to justify voter suppression and resist vote-counting, but as Trump has subsumed his party the importance of his particular fantasies—Trump still, somehow, does everything off the opening position that he has never been wrong or lost—the attendant need to make his lies true has grown and grown. He will lie if the truth doesn’t fit and millions will hear that lie as a truth for that reason. Order will supersede Law, because it is easier that way. This is all open field. Anything that needs be can be labeled a fraud or the bought-and-paid-for result of a conspiracy, any fact can be made into something else afterwards." -- David Roth, in a must- read article in Deadspin.