Over in the Economist,
Kal Kallaugher wonders if Europe will ever trust us again, given that she’s got reasons not to.
I’m leading with it because yesterday I promised to look into the missile strike against a launch base in Syria, admitting that, given my feelings about our having abandoned our Kurdish allies, I had some expectations in the matter.
An analyst interviewed on the BBC that morning noted that the target was an Iraqi group and suggested it was a departure from the Trump policy of blaming everything on Iran and signaled a softening related to our desire to rebuild the Iran nuclear treaty.
The Fitz introduction:
Next Saturday begins the glorious weekend of the 2021 Tucson Virtual Festival of Books. The lineup of authors is amazing. Imagine enjoying every moment of TFOB with your feet up. I had the pleasure to interview one of my heroes, a Tucson Festival of Books Crowd Cast Guest, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, digitally on the rounds promoting “Dbury@50: The Complete Digital Doonesbury”. I was cool. I didn’t gush. I should have asked him about his middle name, Beekman, but instead we talked about cartooning. Here’s our conversation…
With 24 fully formed complex fictional humans in your head, and then some, do you ever worry about your sanity?
Gary Markstein (Creators). He keeps up his partnership with Tony Rubino at their daily strip, “
Daddy’s Home” consistently, but posts his own political commentary so rarely that I’m sometimes tempted to drop him from my GoComics lineup.
However, it’s paid off this time around, because he posted this one January 12, only six days after the attempted coup, and so it sat there for more than a month, until just now, when congressional hearings transformed it and made it current.
Thing is, I passed it over when it was fresh because I thought it was too obvious. We all knew there were massive, huge, universal indicators, not about precisely what would happen Jan 6, but, certainly, that all hell was about the break loose in DC.
Dream on, Winslow.
Prickly City (AMS) has been a voice in the wilderness, trying to put forth conservative views without falling into the mire that seems to have taken over things on that side of the aisle.
Trump broke his silence the other day with a rant triggered by his loss at the Supreme Court, in which he whined about his being picked on and repeated his paranoid claim to have been cheated by an unfair election.
By contrast, Nixon disappeared after Watergate and returned only years later, in the guise of a statesman. But for all his personal faults and failures, Nixon
“No, but we must carry on as though we did.”
“Amen.”
I was delighted to see
Jen Sorensen address the stereotype that all Red State (ie, rural) voters are dedicated conservatives and Trump supporters.
The two-township community in which I grew up went for Trump 501-397, or about a 55/45 split, which isn’t close but is hardly a runaway and mirrors our county’s 55/43 vote.
That’s a substantial percentage of pro-Biden voters, and, if you looked at my Facebook feed, you’d see that my high school friends were very much in his corner, perhaps because those who feel otherwise have either unfriended me or been unfriended by me or were never my friends in the first place.