Not Me
God dammit.
I finished the above cartoon, was all set to write an article, and post it… then President T-Bag bombed a convenient military target, redirecting the media’s focus from cries of wolf about an absurdly-exaggerated Russian entanglement scandal, to cries of wolf about yet another Middle Eastern boogeyman.
Then, while I was in the middle of writing this, he bombed ANOTHER place!
Obviously, these are show bombings, meant to distract and enthrall, instead of serving any genuine humanitarian or military purpose. What else would you expect from a President who’s more brand now than man; the shoddiest construction capable of meeting lax building codes, thinly-disguised by a cheap veneer of imitation marble and faux-gold leaf?
Trump is incredibly lucky that his most powerful, well-funded, and visible political opponents are just as self-centered, insincere, and dishonest as he is; but most of them are relative neophytes to capitalizing on deranged conspiracy theories like he’s done for years, to say nothing of the decades he’s spent selling snake-oil. That’s why attempting to engage him on his own terms, using his own methods is a strategy doomed to failure; an object lesson in how arguing with idiots lets them drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
I’m even more confident now than I was in December that claims Russia “hacked the election” in November are ridiculous, paranoid fantasies, based on unconfirmed rumors, hasty generalizations, and outright lies, especially since some of their loudest proponents are brain-damaged lunatics, drug-addled blowhards with violent delusions of grandeur, and cheaters already known to have interfered with the election, themselves.
Neither thousands of Alex Jones wannabes nor those in the government or intelligence community tasked with investigating the matter have managed to produce any corroborated evidence, at this point. Even goalpost-shifting, overhyped attempts to prove Russia influenced the election with propaganda have instead proven themselves laughably weak.
The supreme irony is that Trump likely wouldn’t have been elected in the first place, if some of the same people currently spinning yarns about Russian hacking hadn’t helped rig the Democratic Primary for a candidate somehow even less-electable than he was.
That’s what this cartoon illustrates, by way of a running gag from the interminable newspaper strip, The Family Circus. The gag usually involves the eponymous family’s children being asked who was responsible for some kind of mess or mishap, and the children replying “not me” (or “nobody” or “ida know”), while a mischievous, so-named poltergeist, invisible to their parents, flees the scene.
Those little shits know what they did, but think they can avoid responsibility by blaming it on phantoms.
Pictured in the cartoon are Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who presided over historic losses as chair of the DNC; Donna Brazile, who was fired by CNN for passing Hillary Clinton a cheat-sheet for one of the Democratic Primary debates; Clinton herself, whose campaign was so inept, they actually managed to lose an open election to Donald Trump; and Rachel Maddow, whose determination to injure her own credibility for ratings like a cast member of TV’s Jackass earned her inclusion here as the representative #ImWithHer corporate “news” stooge.
And of course, Vladimir Putin as the Russian scape-ghost.
6 Responses to “Not Me”
Missing from the cartoon are caricatures of pompous purity testing fauxgressive fucks who voted green or stayed home and let a human garbage fire get in on fewer votes than Romney pulled. You left a steaming pile on the rug and you still want to point fingers at Hillary and the DNC. Oooh, they were mean to Bernie. Nothing compared to how the RNC treated the Oompa Loompa Oligarch, but he plowed through. Grow up.
“Missing from the cartoon are caricatures of pompous purity testing fauxgressive fucks who voted green” This is what entitled spoiled brats liberals are.
First of all, if we’re talking about headwinds from third parties, Trump faced a stiffer one than Hillary Clinton. Proportionally, Romney had more trouble than Trump did. If Gary Johnson and Jill Stein died of heart attacks three months before the election, he would’ve trounced her even harder.
Then again, for about a month after 2016 Democrats like Joy Ann Reid sincerely believed that they should’ve gotten Gary Johnson voters. Ironically enough, I think that if the Democratic Party was open and honest about their bootlicking towards capitalism, entrepreneuralism, and market liberalism they could make a decent pitch towards libertarians.
Secondly, Democrats are not only pretentious, they’re also COWARDLY. Democrats are quick to blame the white working class/Millenials for their screw-ups, but they don’t have the nerve to blame racial minorities — even though Trump massively improved on Romney’s margin across the board with all nonwhites. These fainting-couch frauds have no problem blaming Berniebros or deplorables or whatever for Mommy Wokest going down, but that they don’t have the spine nor moral clarity to blame the pwecious minorities these endlessly-lying imperialists who broke deportation records pretend to care about.
Latest polling is in, and responsibility for the mess on the carpet is being appropriately assigned in concert with the fine artwork above:
“Sixty-seven percent of Americans say the Democratic Party is out of touch with their concerns — that’s more than those who think the Republican Party or President Trump are out of touch with most Americans’ concerns, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.” – ABC News/WaPo
To swing even a small fraction of the elections we need to to remove the stranglehold that particularly awful, right wing elements currently hold on our country, we need to reach two groups united in their dogmatic insistence on voting against their own basic self interest of pure, dumb dogma. One is the Fox News addled, often Christian, lower to middle income right wing voter. The other is the parsimonious, purity testing, hypocritical, head jammed squarely up own rectum left wing scold. Y’all are squarely in the second category, and your unwillingness to admit to being part of the problem is a huge factor in my decision to emigrate to the People’s Republic of China for the last decade plus. I still vote. For parties who can win, and because it matters. Because I care. You have zero excuse.
*out of pure, dumb dogma.
PRC is an interesting bet to make for this century. China was neither looking for nor ready yet to assume a mantle of global governance from a retrenching USA. But who can say whether or not they can manufacture a benevolent hegemony like a passable third-shift knock-off. The hazards of collapsing into the same ideological traps as an interventionist West will remain.
About deploying humor in this Age of Absurdity…
In fairness, poking fun at the faults and foibles of modern American politics is mostly just that—fun. Largely unproductive, sometimes partially informative, fun. But taking aim at politics is certainly fair game given the absurd degree to which increasingly impotent grown adults can be observed taking every possible effort to defend their own failures. This extends far beyond the liberal/conservative divide and is a phenomena of many a professional politician who aren’t engaged in helping to solve serious problems for ordinary Americans any longer. On the one hand, these so-called decision-makers are painfully ill-equipped to take risks for the benefit of constituents thanks to spending their entire professional existence in an arena which exorbitantly incentivizes individual gains. All that gain for the paltry cost of effective governance, what a bargain! At least the corporate private sector still demands that managers and executives deliver some sort of marketable product to stave off going bankrupt. Although, monopolistic strategies can also be effectively deployed to prevent genuine competition and leave consumers no choice but to accept damaged goods as an only option. Can I get a hallelujah for Comcast and the other telecoms?
Given our great wealth of flimsy individuals whose primary function is little more than working out how to promote themselves while not embarrassing professional superiors or other patrons, call me old fashioned, but I do still believe in the tired notions of accountability. Again, this extends all the way across the exaggerated political left/right divide. It’s intensely disappointing and often disgusting to watch officials of any brand or color betray and sell public trust for pitiful sums of self-interest gain. Everything from the Governor of Michigan refusing to take proper responsibility for the debacle of poisoned water in Flint to endless war hawks like the Clintons, W. Bush, Obama, and now evidently Mr. Trump also escalating failed military strategies. Call me clannish, but I take it quite personally that these self-satisfied decision makers are willing to justify getting me and my kind killed in conflicts which no longer even off the patriotic jackpot of being winnable.
Clever humor is perhaps not a productive way to address our underlying problems and can easily end up reinforcing simplistic political loyalties. But I’ll take the potential harm of thoughtful humor over the demonstrable damage being done by charlatans in the political game. These all-to-human failures are legitimately convinced they are looking out for the interests of ordinary Americans. My blatantly generalistic view, deployed now for linguistic effect, is that the ineffectual chattering classes in government and media share a set common ethical standards with polio. An unfortunate, but naturally occurring, plague of fickle will and spirit that debilitates the lives of citizens at large. Treatment in response is strictly limited to candy corn oxycontin policies and generous xanax-laced messaging.
What else must we do but laugh, cry, and continue to look for an effective inoculation against this age of peak bullshit.
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