Category: Uncategorized

FROM KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
BY BOB FRANKEN

CANCEL THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Welcome back to the good old days of legislative compromise, where there were arguable, principled and partisan differences between two sides of an issue. A case in point is the Democrats’ version of pandemic aid in a wretched economy. It would shower financial aid on so many millions of desperate, unemployed Americans whose lives have been turned upside down by the coronavirus.
Republicans argue that its largesse would also dribble over to the not-so-desperate to the extent that it would break the federal bank.
Then there are the absurd, mindless matters so favored by media organizations with a point of view. Those have been literally market tested and are less news stories and more audience builders that hosts on the far right and far left can caterwaul to death.
Such an example is the so-called cancel culture, usually presented in simple-minded tidbits, but part of a highly complex overlap of free speech, racial prejudice, sexual prejudice, resentment, resentment at the resentment and false equivalency.
Donald Trump was a master at exploiting these matters, deriding the pressure to remove Confederate leaders and other figures now associated with racism or worse, from schools, military bases and monuments. For his audience of “patriots” it was vilifying this country’s history. He handily ignored such consequential topics like Jim Crow and, more fundamentally, that great blot on the United States, slavery. And all the offshoots that remain to this day.
But the term “cancel culture,” which is complicated itself, basically began as canceling an appearance of someone who is prominent due to his or her objectionable point of view. Those public speaking events frequently were scheduled at a college or university, which are supposed to be about exposure to ideas. At those same citadels of higher education we witnessed the establishment of “safe houses,” where delicate little flower students were allowed to avoid emotional damage by being in a hermetically sealed environment.

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FROM KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
BY BOB FRANKEN

C’MON CUOMO

For those of us in Media World, panic-stricken that we would turn into dust without Donald Trump, particularly since Joe Biden is boring us to death, not to worry. There is always someone in public life to entertain us with cheesy sex.
What’s the difference between the pervy lounge lizard whose idea of a seductive come-on line is: “Hi, baby. What’s your sign?” and the governor of the fourth most populous state? The answer is not much. Both make most women feel uncomfortable at being treated like a hooker.
It is downright smarmy when that governor, Andrew Cuomo, asks a 25-year-old subordinate if she’d ever been with an older man, meaning if she’d ever gone to bed with a guy 40 years her senior, like Cuomo is. Given the fact that he’s the boss, the explanation that he was just being “playful” doesn’t cut it, particularly when he has a long-established reputation for mistreating his staff.
How is it that when a female bigwig runs roughshod over her little-wigs, it’s a fatal blow to her ambitions? I’m thinking of Amy Klobuchar, whose presidential candidacy was blown out of the water when word seeped out that she was tough on those under her command, as opposed to Andrew Cuomo the bully.
Bully boy Cuomo is making himself scarce right now, except to appear and insist that he’s not going to resign. It ain’t going to happen, he says, and he’s given a reasonable chance of weathering his storms.

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FROM KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
BY BOB FRANKEN

GOLDEN CALF CRAMP

With all the Gospel experts among the evangelicals at the Conservative Political Action Conference, surely a few of them had a chuckle about the golden statue of Donald Trump that was wheeled around the CPAC conference in Orlando this past weekend. Or maybe not. They typically don’t have much of a sense of humor about such things. In fact, they usually don’t find much amusement in the Bible. So they won’t see any humor with the juxtaposition of the gold Trump statue and the golden calf from Old Testament times.
Golden calves are defined in the dictionary as “objects of materialistic or unworthy worship.”
Worthy or not, there wasn’t any question that the right wing true believers at CPAC worshipped Donald Trump. When he made his appearance, his first since being bounced from the White House, the roar was comparable to the high volume chaos at the Capitol building after the insurrectionists were incited by the then-president to start their deadly invasion of the home of democracy in the United States. Perhaps at CPAC the din was even louder because so many in the crowd could whoop it up while refusing to wear face masks. That is illogical for several reasons.
First of all, it is risky. Certainly by now even these defenders of “freedom” are aware of the dangers of going unmasked as COVID-19 strikes them down as a result. Secondly, they accept other limitations to their “liberties” — seat belt laws, for instance; those laws that make texting while driving illegal, for another; or the illegality of driving while drinking.
Thirdly, a mask would have covered up their spittle as they bellowed when Trump entered, and went bonkers when he asked, “Do you miss me yet?”

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FROM KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
BY BOB FRANKEN

SNOWFLAKE SCREWUP

It’s time for me to eat a little crow. I’d say eat a little Snowflake, which is the name of Ted Cruz’s family dog, but that could start a cultural conversation that’s a distraction, and the point is difficult enough for me.
I reported that the Cruzes had left Snowflake alone in their freezing Houston house as they tried to escape to Cancun. They also left behind millions of Texans, Sen. Cruz’s constituents, suffering in their frigid homes with a lack of safe water due to burst pipes because the state’s electric utility failed.
In the case of Snowflake, I done him wrong. Because I didn’t check for myself, I didn’t get my facts straight. Adorable Snowflake was not being mistreated. Electricity and heat had returned by the time the Cruz brood flew the family coop. Additionally, he had a pet sitter. I say “he” because other media have identified the dog as a male but, personally, I haven’t looked. And won’t.
But I digress. I got the puppy-left-in-the-cold part of the story wrong. And for that, I’m sorry.
Speaking of apologizing, Ted Cruz has been telling every media interviewer who asks that the Cancun trip was “a mistake.” And for a while, wherever TV cameras went, there was Cruz, passing out food and water. Which begs the question, When does apologizing become groveling?
After a few days, Cruz has gotten his oleaginous mojo back to complain that it was “creepy” that a reporter had snapped a picture of Snowflake standing in the door, and “really creepy” that paparazzi got photos of his wife, Heidi, at the beach wearing a bikini.
My momma didn’t raise no objectifying fool, so there’s no way I’ll describe the money picture. Instead, I rely on her husband, who said, “Heidi is smoking hot.”
As for the calls for him to resign. Cruz brushed them off with, “We just need to laugh a little bit and loosen up,” which might strike some people as rank hypocrisy considering Sen. Ted Cruz’s style of pedal-to-the-metal politics. No shot is too cheap.

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FROM KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
BY BOB FRANKEN

SNOWFLAKE SCREWUP

It’s time for me to eat a little crow. I’d say eat a little Snowflake, which is the name of Ted Cruz’s family dog, but that could start a cultural conversation that’s a distraction, and the point is difficult enough for me.
I reported that the Cruzes had left Snowflake alone in their freezing Houston house as they tried to escape to Cancun. They also left behind millions of Texans, Sen. Cruz’s constituents, suffering in their frigid homes with a lack of safe water due to burst pipes because the state’s electric utility failed.
In the case of Snowflake, I done him wrong. Because I didn’t check for myself, I didn’t get my facts straight. Adorable Snowflake was not being mistreated. Electricity and heat had returned by the time the Cruz brood flew the family coop. Additionally, he had a pet sitter. I say “he” because other media have identified the dog as a male but, personally, I haven’t looked. And won’t.
But I digress. I got the puppy-left-in-the-cold part of the story wrong. And for that, I’m sorry.
Speaking of apologizing, Ted Cruz has been telling every media interviewer who asks that the Cancun trip was “a mistake.” And for a while, wherever TV cameras went, there was Cruz, passing out food and water. Which begs the question, When does apologizing become groveling?
After a few days, Cruz has gotten his oleaginous mojo back to complain that it was “creepy” that a reporter had snapped a picture of Snowflake standing in the door, and “really creepy” that paparazzi got photos of his wife, Heidi, at the beach wearing a bikini.
My momma didn’t raise no objectifying fool, so there’s no way I’ll describe the money picture. Instead, I rely on her husband, who said, “Heidi is smoking hot.”
As for the calls for him to resign. Cruz brushed them off with, “We just need to laugh a little bit and loosen up,” which might strike some people as rank hypocrisy considering Sen. Ted Cruz’s style of pedal-to-the-metal politics. No shot is too cheap.

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