The Donald Trump Show (Un-Obama)

This really is putting the cart before the horse, as excerpts go―

Trump is likely to have a tough time getting the Republican nomination. Back in 2000, John McCain had exactly the right message after Bill Clinton: straight talk. But conservatives didn’t trust McCain. McCain had challenged conservatives’ ascendancy over the Republican Party, so conservatives rallied behind George W. Bush. And ran a vicious campaign in the South Carolina primary to stop McCain.

Now another Bush is trying to stop the frontrunner by attacking his conservative credentials. “Mr. Trump doesn’t have a proven conservative record,” Jeb Bush charged last week. “People will vote for a proven conservative leader.” Bush is going to have to get a lot tougher than that. The Bush family proved in 1988 and 2000 that they can get pretty nasty.

Trump offers decisiveness, which is something a lot of voters are missing in President Obama. That’s why Trump has acquired a following. But brashness and boorishness come with the package, and that will make it tough for Trump to expand his following. Most voters find those qualities repugnant. And unpresidential. Too much unlike Obama.

―but the path Bill Schneider forges to that reach conclusion really is worth the time to read.

He makes a reasonable point.

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Image note: Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday, 10 February 2011. (Detail of photo by Gage Skidmore)

Schneider, Bill. “The Un-Obama”. The Huffington Post. 23 August 2015.

The Scott Walker Show (Sounds About Right)

Okay, so this is how we’re going to do it―

Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) affirmed on Sunday that he would not seek to end birthright citizenship as president, seemingly bringing to an end a days-long grapple for a definitive position on the issue.

“No,” said the Wisconsin Republican when asked if he was “seeking to repeal or alter the 14th Amendment,” during an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”

Walker’s position on the topic―which has moved from the fringes of the Republican Party to a mainstay of the campaign trail―has not so much evolved as jumped around in the past week ....

―with Sam Stein explaining the joke for Huffington Post, and you deciding whether or not you really want the detail, since it’s not actually funny, and, well, you know, we might also suggest simply nodding and saying, “Sounds about right”, would suffice.

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Stein, Sam. “Scott Walker Completes The Journey Back To Not Repealing The 14th Amendment”. The Huffington Post. 23 August 2015.

My Own Private Disgrace

With utmost apologies, of course, to Adam Huber, though in truth none could possibly suffice. Sorry, Adam, I couldn’t help myself.

To the other, such exercises are useful; in printed news media, the notion of column inches is disappearing into the electronic aether, but it does still exist for those whose writing aims to appear in the paper edition. And the nature of cartooning, of course, will always force some consideration of panel space.

This is the important part, because just how far does one push in order to make the joke work? There is an obvious hole in the remix, but it’s hard to explain just how our hero comes to expect that the stuff in the container is his grandmother’s cremated ashes mixed into baby fat and other such disgusting ingredients that she might await chthonic resurrection.