{"id":589,"date":"2019-10-18T12:30:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T19:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=589"},"modified":"2019-10-18T12:42:59","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T19:42:59","slug":"and-i-hate-to-see-a-baby-seal-grow-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=589","title":{"rendered":"I Hate to See a Baby Seal Grow Old (Updated 10\/18\/19)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a>I follow This Modern World<\/a> cartoonist Tom Tomorrow on Daily Kos and Twitter. His\u00a0work stays relevant, no matter how old, and periodically he’ll recycle\u00a0a panel from the archives.<\/p>\n

Unlike Mr. Tomorrow, I\u00a0work under my actual name. Like Mr. Tomorrow, I too recycle\u00a0work from my archives. When it comes to Trump, everything I wrote from election day in 2016 on has come true in spades, and then some. So like Mr. Tomorrow, I’m recycling a post from eleven years ago. It’s about corruption, written long before Trump. But as you’ll see, I recycled the post once before, just a few months into the Trump administration, when it had already become clear the entire Republican Party, the media, and the majority of the American people were prepared to ignore corruption and pretend everything is normal.<\/p>\n

And here we are today, as Trump’s acting chief of staff announces that world leaders will stay at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Florida for the upcoming G7 meeting<\/a>, another in a long string of open assaults on the Constitution’s emoluments clause, and although there’s plenty of noise about it in the media at the moment, I bet by next week coverage will have moved on to some other outrage.<\/p>\n

Why Congressional Democrats conducting the impeachment inquiry aren’t focusing on Trump’s repeated violations of the Constitutional prohibition against using the office of the presidency for self-enrichment … actual, provable, criminal behavior … is beyond me. It makes me think they really aren’t interested in impeachment, and that they’re going to slow roll the process into the 2020 presidential election and beyond, and moreover that as a society we’ve given up on fighting corruption. Which puts us, as I pointed out in my update two years ago, on the same level as Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, never mind our vaunted rhetoric about democracy and the rule of law.<\/p>\n

Here’s the update from October 2017, followed by the original post from September 2008:<\/p>\n

(Update: 10\/24\/17):<\/span><\/strong><\/em> Last night I read about the awarding of a no-bid contract to restore Puerto Rico’s power grid (awarded to a two-year-old company that had two employees when Hurricane Maria hit the PR just over a month ago, and is situated in Interior Secretary Zinke’s home town), and started thinking about corruption.<\/p>\n

My initial thought was that the kind of frank corruption and\u00a0cashing-in we’re seeing with Trump and his\u00a0administration is a new thing, but then I remembered George W Bush and Dick Cheney and\u00a0the rampant corruption involving no-bid contracts in Iraq after we invaded in 2003, and then I remembered that a little over 100 years ago\u00a0it was normal to pay a bribe\u00a0to get a government job, and then I remembered that under current House and Senate rules lobbyists are legally able to bribe members of Congress, and then … well, then I\u00a0started missing the days when I could\u00a0open a bottle of scotch and quit remembering things.<\/p>\n

Probably a coincidence, but this morning\u00a0a reader commented on a post I wrote on\u00a0September 19, 2008, and I decided to move it back up to the top of the blog,\u00a0because here we are as Trump & company dismantle even the polite\u00a0white lie\u00a0that this country adheres to higher principles\u00a0than Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, noshing on bloody chunks of baby seal and not caring what anyone thinks, and\u00a0we’re averting our eyes and doing nothing about it.<\/p>\n

Here’s the post from September 2008:<\/p>\n

This brilliant comment<\/a>, posted by a reader named Wesley to a thread on Making Light<\/a>, encapsulates the current state of our ongoing culture war:<\/p>\n

There was a short story a few years ago by Howard Waldrop, called \u201cCalling Your Name.\u201d It ended up in a couple of Best-of-the-Year anthologies. There\u2019s this guy, see, and after getting a shock from a badly wired power tool he learns Richard Nixon was never president. And then it turns out the Beatles never got together. And then JFK turns up alive, married to Marilyn Monroe. And then even members of his family have different names. Little bits of his reality keep shifting away from him.<\/p>\n

I feel like the guy in the story. Except instead of history, it\u2019s civilization that\u2019s shifting. It seems like every few days I wake up and find another thing that was once beyond the pale is now normal, and considered unremarkable by everyone except some blogs somewhere. The lies are a little<\/em> more blatant. The standards of behavior and intellect we expect from our leaders are a little<\/em> lower. And hardly anyone cares, or even notices. Maybe I\u2019m misremembering, but twenty years ago, before George W. Bush lowered the bar, wouldn\u2019t somebody like Sarah Palin\u2026 who ran Alaska by filling important positions with old unqualified high school buddies and subadolescent sycophants who could in cold blood email things like \u201cYOU ARE SO AWESOME\u201d \u2026 wouldn\u2019t someone like this have been a national laughingstock?<\/p>\n

I keep expecting, someday, to wake up and on my way to work pass a handcart selling baby seals on a stick, freshly clubbed, skewered while still writhing. And everyone will be like, where have you been, dude? Everybody\u2019s always<\/em> eaten live baby seals for breakfast. It\u2019s how things are, in this great country of ours! And then they will splash me with the excess blood, laugh terrible shrieking laughs, and wander off to relieve themselves in the nearest park.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From now on, whenever I hear Rush Limbaugh or see Bill O’Reilly (which I’ll continue to do as infrequently as possible), I’ll picture them gnawing on freshly clubbed baby seal.<\/p>\n

The title of this entry, by the way, is a line from a truly awful song I learned in my fighter pilot days.\u00a0 Don’t go below the fold if you don’t want to read it!<\/p>\n

Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you . . .<\/p>\n

Baby Seal Song
\nMelody \u2014 That Good Old Mountain Dew<\/p>\n

Way up north where it is cold, you know they ain’t got gold
\nThey all make their living from the seal skins they’ve sold.
\nMe I like the killing, because it’s so fulfilling
\nAnd I hate to see a baby seal grow old.<\/p>\n

Chorus:<\/em>
\nYou don’t bludgeon a seal ’cause you want a meal
\nYou do it cause you want to hear those little suckers squeal.
\nYou hit ’em on the head, and you do it just for kicks
\nAnd you poke out their eyes with your eye-pokin’ sticks.
\n(Two \u2014 Three \u2014 Four)<\/p>\n

My daddy was a little mean, my mama was a bit obscene,
\nMaybe that’s the reason for the way that I feel.
\nYou might not believe me, but my woman wants to leave me
\nSo I guess I’ll take it out on a baby seal.<\/p>\n

Chorus<\/em><\/p>\n

The liberals want to lock me up because I kill the seal pups
\nAnd tie their fur up into little bales.
\nI know that it won’t be long ’til all the baby seals are gone
\nSo I guess I’ll just start wiping out the whales.<\/p>\n

Chorus<\/em><\/p>\n

Slice ’em, dice ’em, roto-till ’em, chop ’em up or just plain kill ’em,
\nTheir fur comes off with just one easy peel (RIP, RIP, RIP)
\nPeople, people don’t you cry cause I know that when I die
\nI’ll be coming back as a baby seal.<\/p>\n

Chorus<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Congressional Democrats conducting the impeachment inquiry aren’t focusing on Trump’s repeated violations of the Constitutional prohibition against using the office of the presidency for self-enrichment … actual, provable, criminal behavior … is beyond me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,16,8,2761],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics","category-yell-clouds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24791,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions\/24791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}