The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Notably: It has been increasingly embarrassing to be American–not because, say, because a U.S. Air Force plane drops a nuclear bomb by mistake on a South Carolina farm, partly destroying a house (as happened on March 11, 1958): mistakes happen. Not because the Pentagon put the cost of a human life at $12,000 (that was your family’s death “gratuity” if you were a soldier killed in action in 2005): Catch-22 never was fiction. Not because a certain brand of Christian evangelists were still preaching on national television (around the same time that we were paying $12,000 for a human life) that masturbation causes pregnancy: no one’s ever forced you into a church yet (that’s ahead in our public schools as the movement to bring back prayer gains converts). Not even because we have a knack for re-electing morons (Reagan, Bush, Trump) or crooks (LBJ, if you count 1964 as a sort of re-election, Nixon, Trump): American exceptionalism was always one of our more puerile myths. But because unforced errors on a national scale have never been daily, hourly embarrassments. Dial up any news source at any hour of the day. You’ll see one. (This just now: “With Congress Pliant, an Emboldened Trump Pushes His Business Interests.” What would have in more ordinary times been a banner headline across every time zone about the violation of the Emoluments clause is just another minor headline, not even above the fold, on the Times web page. It won’t be there at dusk. Or this: “I.R.S. Is Said to Be Planning to Give Musk’s Team Access to Taxpayer Records.” The banning of the Associated Press from White House press functions and Air Force One over the Gulf of Mexico idiocy not a time warp so much as a geographic warp: we’re going full bananas, as in banana-republic bananas. Nations have always had their own competing pet names (Malvinas v. Falklands, Strait of Dover for the Pas de Calais, English Channel for La Manche, or this tripartite typhoon over the waters between Japan and the Asian mainland–Korean East Sea, if you’re in North Korea, Sea of Japan, if you’re in Japan, and just East Sea if you’re in South Korea. (Incidentally, the South Koreas refer to North Korea as North Han, or simply The North, North Korea simply calls its southern neighbor “Hostile State,” the way moronic Arab regimes to this day call Israel the “Zionist entity” or some such idiocy, which is not half as bigoted or obliterating as Israel calling the West Bank “Judea and Samaria,” as if the Three Kings were on their way and the Sanhedrin’s members were still molesting the whores of Sodom). But Gulf of America? Reminds me of the time when lawmakers in Washington, in the early days of the war on Iraq, when France had the good sense to resist the insanity, wanted French fries renamed “Freedom Fries.” But they had the last laugh. What’s that replacement tower now called in Lower Manhattan? Freedom Tower. It’s a wonder the vulgar one hasn’t yet signed the executive order renaming it after himself. He’d finally have those extra floors he’s been lying about since first building the gaudy tower on Fifth and 56th.

—P.T.