Becky is right, even If it sucks to admit. Unfortunately politicians are, for the most part, putting on a show when they want to get elected/re-elected. And what a show it is, enough that people would fight over who deserves to be elected.
The kind of President you see in (some) movies, or on TV. Attractive, charismatic, wholesome and good.
… oh, did you mean Dorothy as she actually is, rather than how she imagines herself? I believe the usual term is “wonk”.
Kyrik Michalowski
That is possible, the latter part I mean. If she was, then I don’t know whether she would get everything done, or nothing done.
Ryan
Wants to be Obama.
Would settle for Clinton.
Turns out to be Carter (who is top 5 by IQ, but sadly wasn’t particularly effective).
GholaHalleck
Grant. She”d be the Next Great Teapot Dome Scandal.
C.T. Phipps
Grant destroyed the 1st KKK and did his best to undo what Johnson rolled back to try to re-institute the Antebellum South. So he’s not quite the failure everyone makes him out to be.
Sajuuk-Khar
She would get just enough done to be absolutely miserable. It would shrivel her soul like a raisin in the path of a UV death laser.
The sad case of Dotty is that she’s a good person from a healthy family who had every reason to believe that she could right the injustices of the world so long as the world played by the rules, which hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaaahaa noooope
“To protect the world from devastation…
To unite all people within our nation…”
The Lurker
Clinton like without the intern action; unless Walky interns?
Taellosse
She’d probably actually be more like Hillary than Bill – smart, ambitious, talented, but lacking in an abundance of stage presence or charisma. Also silently bitter and resentful that she can’t lean on her strengths to compensate for that weakness NEARLY as easily as her male peers with similar abilities. And knows she has to ruthlessly conceal those feelings from ever showing in public, which also intensifies them.
StClair
Yup. 🙁
Freemage
I agree with all this, but she’d also lack one of the key failings of Hillary–who is the most lied-about woman in the country, but she makes it so, damned, easy for her enemies.
If there was a blurb piece on FOX claiming that Hillary had jaywalked, here’s how it would play out:
HRC: “I was out of town that day.”
Real Reporters: “Ma’am, you were in town for a conference.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a secret meeting of Jewish bankers? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Well, yes, but it was on the opposite side of town.”
Reporters: “It was in a building on that block.”
Tucker: Tucker: “Was Hillary in a hurry to perform a late-term abortion? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, but I crossed at the corner.”
Reporters: “We have video taken from a window by an office worker.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a Pedophiles Anonymous meeting? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, okay, fine, I crossed in the middle of the block because we were running late, the traffic had been closed off for the conference, and even then, I checked traffic both ways, even though it was on a one-way street.”
Real Reporters: “Huh, yeah, guess it was.”
Tucker: “Tonight on Jaygate: Did Hillary cross at that exact point so that she could finish the final leg of a summoning circle to bring for the dread Shog’Hgoth? I’m just asking questions.”
While Dotty sometimes shows a reluctance to admit to errors, she’s a little too self-aware to fall to this kind of absurdity.
Keulen
Dorothy seems to definitely want to be like the good kinds of presidents you see in fiction, not the real presidents who act like good people but do all sorts of terrible things when they think nobody will notice. Or when they think they can get the media to spin their bad deeds as good.
She should honestly just figure out how to become a billionaire. Then she could use her money to influence politics more than the president ever could by lobbying corrupt politicians into campaigning for her agenda. Or she could buy tons of media outlets to subtly or not, influencing public opinion through mass disinformation. Or she could develop the next big social media app and just have near complete control of how every person of influence communicates.
Rabbit
Too bad ‘good billionaire’ is an oxymoron.
BarerMender
Not an oxymoron, but a contradiction in terms. It there was an actual good billionaire, it would be a paradox.
Mark
First tell me what you mean by “good.” Andrew Carnegie caused an awful lot of public libraries to be built.
Grackle
The Carnegie model of billionaire philanthropy is based on the assumption that 1) billionaires know better than everyone else what people need, 2) that accomplishing that is best done by consolidating money and power in their hands, and therefore 3) they are entitled to exploit their workers for all they are worth—low pay, long hours, unsafe conditions, strikebreakering, etc.—so that they can then do a philanthropy. This is before we can get to the deleterious effects of market manipulation and monopolistic tendencies.
Even if you think the philanthropy outweighs the exploitation (how many of Carnegie’s workers had the time and leisure to enjoy a public library?) and the anti-democratic ideas underlying that thinking, billionaire philanthropy usually ends up being a way to burnish the billionaires’ reputation and enhance their power.
Keulen
Yeah this. Pretty much all billionaires become that wealthy through a combo of exploiting their workers and being born to a family that was already kinda wealthy..
Nicoleandmaggie
Don’t forget monopoly power.
Thag Simmons
I mean I would take the Carnegie model over what we have currently. At least they built public works and had a sense of style, our current crop of rich assholes can’t even manage that
zee
Is that, not what an oxymoron is?
Proxiehunter
We’re looking for a path that will let her keep her soul.
thejeff
The idea that anyone even suggests she should become a billionaire because being a politician requires too much moral compromise is just really mind-boggling
Sirksome
I mean I thought I was making a pretty obvious joke here, but maybe Dorothy could pull it off?
I honestly feel like a whole lot of Dorothy’s character arc is sort of like Robin’s in that Willis has gone through the entire cycle a whole hell of a lot of us have since 2015 or so, where we started out as progressive Democrats really excited about the future of electoral politics, and then Bernie lost, and then Hillary lost, and then Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa, and then maybe Grandpa wasn’t so bad because he at least wasn’t an open fucking fascist, but then Grandpa decided the pandemic was over, and at this point basically all of us are either rabid anarchists or refuse to engage on the basis of existential despair. Plus tbh social media has spread around enough verifiable history that it’s a lot harder to look away from the fact that we’re literally an empire built on genocide and war crimes in such an inttense and complicated way that it may bee that the only way to ever begin to stop doing that would be to stop existing.
So like… the idea that there could conceivably be a future President who’s a sympathetic character is… harder to swallow.
Basically yeah, lol. Her political ambitions worked well back in, like, 2010 when the comic started, but at this point seeing someone dream of being President makes me think they’re either morally suspect or just incredibly naive
There were a lot of young people who put a lot of faith in Obama. And a lot who put faith in Bill Clinton, back then. Probably Carter as well, but I was small.
Now it’s Sanders, but he didn’t get the nomination, so they get to focus more anger on Democrats and pretend Sanders would have saved us.
I guess every generation has to go through the cycle themselves. Hopefully wrapping back around to not thinking of Presidential candidates as heroic saviors, but just someone we’re getting to do a really tough job. They’re inevitably going to compromise and disappoint, but that’s different from betrayal and corruption, even though it’s seen that way.
Maybe if we could break the cycle of turning on Democrats when they fail to fix everything all at once, we could actually make some progress, since we wouldn’t be having Republicans break the entirely country on a regular basis.
StClair
Agreed and upvoted, +1.
Mark
There were also a lot of people who imagined things Obama never promised, and then castigated him for being him and not them.
not someone else
I don’t think Sanders would have saved us so much as that his failure to be elected prolonged the inevitable. I was too busy dealing with much to be particularly politically active in that way during the Obama administration so I just assumed he was doing a good job because at least he wasn’t the guy who caused a recession and dragged us into multiple wars based largely on lying.
But… I mean, fundamentally, a lot of people’s politics have changed such that we’re not “turning on” the Democrats, we believe fundamentally different things that they do. We don’t believe they know how to fix things because the things they say are the problems are not what we think are the problems, and a lot of their actual actions are things we think exacerbate the problems. And vice versa! They don’t like our actual beliefs either!
I don’t know whether Willis is one of those people, but like… it’s quite a bit more complicated than “aww you thought everything would magically be okay and then it was complicated”. Lot more like “aww you thought society might improve somewhat and now you’re lucky to get by working three part-time gig jobs that fire you if you make 20.01 hours a week, have a quasi-legal place to live, and your best means of communicating with others are constantly divebombed by a combination of people who want you dead because they’re literal, weapons-carrying Nazis and people who want you dead because they mistook you for someone who said something problematic about a fandom five years ago”.
Tl;dr shit’s gotten bad and if nothing else that makes a lot of people pessimistic.
1) “Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is just pure conspiracy theory. Sanders didn’t have a chance at the nomination. He was never in the lead. He was wildly popular with a certain subset of young activists, but not with the rest of the Democratic voting base. Especially not with black voters. If things had stayed divided, he might have eked out a plurality, but candidates were always going to drop out and the voters would consolidate.
2) Yeah, we’re an empire built on genocide and war crimes (and slavery). Like all empires. Like all great powers. Still, without downplaying what we’ve done as a great power, I’d say we’re closer to a benevolent overlord than past great powers were (or than our likely replacements would be). We do our dirty deeds, but not nearly to the level of older colonial powers or to Imperial powers before them.
We could do better. We probably even have the room to do better without being replaced as a great power. Maybe I’ve just gotten more cynical as I’ve gotten older and studied more history, but if we stepped away from the imperial role, China would likely fill the gap and it’s hard to see how they would be preferable for the rest of the world.
Matticus
1) Exactly. Bernie’s entire strategy in 2020 relied on the field staying huge all the way to the convention so that he could win with 30%. His team admitted this. It was, to quote Tony Stark, “Not a great plan.” The fact of the matter is that Bernie ran a doomed campaign based on the false assumption that most of his support in 2016 was about liking him instead of being anti -Clinton.
Also, I find it hilarious that someone would attack Biden as “grandpa” when Bernie is *older* than him.
not someone else
1) I’m… not really positing that there was a conspiracy so much as that he lost because the field consolidated around Biden but gg. Also “he was never in the lead” is just wrong. He was ahead the first three votes- Iowa was wonky because he got more votes but not as many delegates so sure, that one was weird- and Buttigieg was in second delegate-wise. It was pretty clear he was badly off after Super Tuesday, yes. He was still in second with 38% of the total delegates.
2) We’re certainly not the only Evil Empire out there and I doubt we’ll be the last but uh… you can certainly believe we’re the kinder and gentler murderous assholes. We might even be compared to some of them? Sort of like how during the African slave trade Britain and France et al. were kind of surprised Belgium was so brutal and cruel. I feel like you will understand why other people may disagree as to the relevance.
thejeff
“Openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is not “the field consolidated around Biden”
DoA started in 2010. I was definitely a liberal back then, and very naive about all the terrible things presidents and federal-level politicians from both major parties do in this country. I’ve pretty much always despised Republicans, but it took Bernie getting screwed out of the Democratic nomination twice for me to realize how bad that party really is. I went from a liberal who was clueless about the bad and corrupt stuff Democrats did to, as of a few years ago, well look at that hammer and sickle in my avatar.
thejeff
Which is exactly what I’m talking about.
Too many Sanders supporters can’t accept that he just didn’t have the support within the Democratic base to win, but have to invent conspiracy theories about how he was screwed out of the nomination.
He didn’t have the votes. He never had the votes. There was never polling that suggested he had the votes.
These ideas are the left-wing equivalent of the “Stop the Steal” nonsense, with the only real distinction being the Sanders himself isn’t claiming them – though some of his former staffers do use them to attack Democrats.
I thought the point of Dorothy’s dream was to be a woman president. That still seems something to cherish. Taking Hillary Clinton as the model inspiration maybe was more acceptable in 2010 than nowadays, but I took that to be a clue Willis left to warn us that Dorothy has her own bunch of issues to deal with, like the rest of the main cast.
that kinda youthful naivety in contrast to her being ‘academically’ smart is a nice contrast, i mean she’s not as knowingly naive as some others but i’d assume that’d be the term/somewhat chalks up to ‘youthful optimism’ that’d make a (non power hungry) 18 year old have the ‘ambition’ to be the president
always made me wonder, i’m sure there are some but how many 6 year olds saying “i wanna be an astronaut” actually ended up working for nasa lol
Maybe she should examine her moral principles vis a vis the work of the job she wants. When all choices are evil, usually the evil of any given choice is unevenly distributed. Turn it upside down and it becomes a choice of goods. Refusing the choice is also a choice, with its own balance of evil and good.
Real-world examples are hard to find, probably because nobody wants to talk about them afterward. For a fictional story that illustrates the conflict well, consider ST:TNG “Thine Own Self.” Order Geordi to fix the problem: he dies, everyone else is saved. Don’t give the order: Geordi lives a few minutes longer and then all die. Which is better? There is no provable answer to that. What you choose depends on your values.
Dorothy, what are your values? If you value the troop more than the individual, then you could be a good leader (in every sense), but individuals will be hurt along the way. If you place a higher value on the individual, then politics is not for you, because it’s all about group dynamics.
Is it just me or is the time delay getting worse and worse? Today my clock read 11:09 before the new comic loaded. Normally it was around 11:00 – 11:03.
197 thoughts on “Insult”
Ana Chronistic
Dotty not doing what she says she’s doing? That sounds EXACTLY like a politician tho
Jamie
And doing it for a fourth-wall photo op. Textbook.
DailyBrad
Coming from Becky, that’s definitely not an insult, not after her experience.
Thag Simmons
It’s basically a compliment.
zee
Tbh it’s generally a compliment
C.T. Phipps
Becky is a fantastic politician and I welcome our first Lesbian President.
Sirksome
She’s terrible at raging too. Horrible barbarian honestly, bet she can’t even lift an axe.
BarerMender
She can probably lift an ax. She’s an athlete.
Council
That an NPC class in d20 modern? I don’t keep up.
Oz
She’s a runner tho, runner’s bodies see arms muscles as useless weights. she can probably kick an axe.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
She’s got strong leg muscles…so if she had prehensile toes, she could wield an axe with her foot! xD
Okay, maybe that’s where we should draw that line… xD
Thag Simmons
Dorothy is absolutely a caster of some sort, probably wizard.
Psi Baka Onna
Well she ain’t a charisma based class, that’s for sure…
Bryy
…… goddammit now I want a Willisd comic of the Walkyverse but D&D.
Abel Undercity
Would upvote if I could.
Skeptible
Upvote
StClair
THANK you, Becky.
(words I thought I’d never say)
Kyrik Michalowski
Becky is right, even If it sucks to admit. Unfortunately politicians are, for the most part, putting on a show when they want to get elected/re-elected. And what a show it is, enough that people would fight over who deserves to be elected.
Kyrik Michalowski
I’m trying to imagine what someone like Dorothy would be as president and I’m failing. Anyone else want to weigh in on that thought?
StClair
The kind of President you see in (some) movies, or on TV. Attractive, charismatic, wholesome and good.
… oh, did you mean Dorothy as she actually is, rather than how she imagines herself? I believe the usual term is “wonk”.
Kyrik Michalowski
That is possible, the latter part I mean. If she was, then I don’t know whether she would get everything done, or nothing done.
Ryan
Wants to be Obama.
Would settle for Clinton.
Turns out to be Carter (who is top 5 by IQ, but sadly wasn’t particularly effective).
GholaHalleck
Grant. She”d be the Next Great Teapot Dome Scandal.
C.T. Phipps
Grant destroyed the 1st KKK and did his best to undo what Johnson rolled back to try to re-institute the Antebellum South. So he’s not quite the failure everyone makes him out to be.
Sajuuk-Khar
She would get just enough done to be absolutely miserable. It would shrivel her soul like a raisin in the path of a UV death laser.
The sad case of Dotty is that she’s a good person from a healthy family who had every reason to believe that she could right the injustices of the world so long as the world played by the rules, which hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaaahaa noooope
StClair
^ thiiiiiis ^ 🙁
The Wellerman
“To protect the world from devastation…
To unite all people within our nation…”
The Lurker
Clinton like without the intern action; unless Walky interns?
Taellosse
She’d probably actually be more like Hillary than Bill – smart, ambitious, talented, but lacking in an abundance of stage presence or charisma. Also silently bitter and resentful that she can’t lean on her strengths to compensate for that weakness NEARLY as easily as her male peers with similar abilities. And knows she has to ruthlessly conceal those feelings from ever showing in public, which also intensifies them.
StClair
Yup. 🙁
Freemage
I agree with all this, but she’d also lack one of the key failings of Hillary–who is the most lied-about woman in the country, but she makes it so, damned, easy for her enemies.
If there was a blurb piece on FOX claiming that Hillary had jaywalked, here’s how it would play out:
HRC: “I was out of town that day.”
Real Reporters: “Ma’am, you were in town for a conference.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a secret meeting of Jewish bankers? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Well, yes, but it was on the opposite side of town.”
Reporters: “It was in a building on that block.”
Tucker: Tucker: “Was Hillary in a hurry to perform a late-term abortion? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, but I crossed at the corner.”
Reporters: “We have video taken from a window by an office worker.”
Tucker: “Was Hillary attending a Pedophiles Anonymous meeting? I’m just asking questions.”
HRC: “Yes, okay, fine, I crossed in the middle of the block because we were running late, the traffic had been closed off for the conference, and even then, I checked traffic both ways, even though it was on a one-way street.”
Real Reporters: “Huh, yeah, guess it was.”
Tucker: “Tonight on Jaygate: Did Hillary cross at that exact point so that she could finish the final leg of a summoning circle to bring for the dread Shog’Hgoth? I’m just asking questions.”
While Dotty sometimes shows a reluctance to admit to errors, she’s a little too self-aware to fall to this kind of absurdity.
Keulen
Dorothy seems to definitely want to be like the good kinds of presidents you see in fiction, not the real presidents who act like good people but do all sorts of terrible things when they think nobody will notice. Or when they think they can get the media to spin their bad deeds as good.
Needfuldoer
The system would tear her to shreds as she desperately tries to please everyone.
Oz
I can’t see her signing up to a party at all, never mind getting enough support within that party to run for anything.
C.T. Phipps
The episode of THE SIMPSONS where Lisa is President.
butts
yeah idk dotty it kinda sounds like you should set a life goal for yourself that doesn’t involve constantly betraying your own moral principles
because, like, being a decent human being makes you unelectable
sakamism
Hope she ends up finding a new career path that will be meaningful to her while letting her keep her soul
Kyrik Michalowski
Lawyer? Judge? DA? Cabinet member?
Probably not the last one.
Oz
I think she would make a decent judge, but the most fitting job choice would be manager.
Sirksome
She should honestly just figure out how to become a billionaire. Then she could use her money to influence politics more than the president ever could by lobbying corrupt politicians into campaigning for her agenda. Or she could buy tons of media outlets to subtly or not, influencing public opinion through mass disinformation. Or she could develop the next big social media app and just have near complete control of how every person of influence communicates.
Rabbit
Too bad ‘good billionaire’ is an oxymoron.
BarerMender
Not an oxymoron, but a contradiction in terms. It there was an actual good billionaire, it would be a paradox.
Mark
First tell me what you mean by “good.” Andrew Carnegie caused an awful lot of public libraries to be built.
Grackle
The Carnegie model of billionaire philanthropy is based on the assumption that 1) billionaires know better than everyone else what people need, 2) that accomplishing that is best done by consolidating money and power in their hands, and therefore 3) they are entitled to exploit their workers for all they are worth—low pay, long hours, unsafe conditions, strikebreakering, etc.—so that they can then do a philanthropy. This is before we can get to the deleterious effects of market manipulation and monopolistic tendencies.
Even if you think the philanthropy outweighs the exploitation (how many of Carnegie’s workers had the time and leisure to enjoy a public library?) and the anti-democratic ideas underlying that thinking, billionaire philanthropy usually ends up being a way to burnish the billionaires’ reputation and enhance their power.
Keulen
Yeah this. Pretty much all billionaires become that wealthy through a combo of exploiting their workers and being born to a family that was already kinda wealthy..
Nicoleandmaggie
Don’t forget monopoly power.
Thag Simmons
I mean I would take the Carnegie model over what we have currently. At least they built public works and had a sense of style, our current crop of rich assholes can’t even manage that
zee
Is that, not what an oxymoron is?
Proxiehunter
We’re looking for a path that will let her keep her soul.
thejeff
The idea that anyone even suggests she should become a billionaire because being a politician requires too much moral compromise is just really mind-boggling
Sirksome
I mean I thought I was making a pretty obvious joke here, but maybe Dorothy could pull it off?
not someone else
I honestly feel like a whole lot of Dorothy’s character arc is sort of like Robin’s in that Willis has gone through the entire cycle a whole hell of a lot of us have since 2015 or so, where we started out as progressive Democrats really excited about the future of electoral politics, and then Bernie lost, and then Hillary lost, and then Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa, and then maybe Grandpa wasn’t so bad because he at least wasn’t an open fucking fascist, but then Grandpa decided the pandemic was over, and at this point basically all of us are either rabid anarchists or refuse to engage on the basis of existential despair. Plus tbh social media has spread around enough verifiable history that it’s a lot harder to look away from the fact that we’re literally an empire built on genocide and war crimes in such an inttense and complicated way that it may bee that the only way to ever begin to stop doing that would be to stop existing.
So like… the idea that there could conceivably be a future President who’s a sympathetic character is… harder to swallow.
sakamism
Basically yeah, lol. Her political ambitions worked well back in, like, 2010 when the comic started, but at this point seeing someone dream of being President makes me think they’re either morally suspect or just incredibly naive
Nathan
Were you a kid in 2010?
thejeff
There were a lot of young people who put a lot of faith in Obama. And a lot who put faith in Bill Clinton, back then. Probably Carter as well, but I was small.
Now it’s Sanders, but he didn’t get the nomination, so they get to focus more anger on Democrats and pretend Sanders would have saved us.
I guess every generation has to go through the cycle themselves. Hopefully wrapping back around to not thinking of Presidential candidates as heroic saviors, but just someone we’re getting to do a really tough job. They’re inevitably going to compromise and disappoint, but that’s different from betrayal and corruption, even though it’s seen that way.
Maybe if we could break the cycle of turning on Democrats when they fail to fix everything all at once, we could actually make some progress, since we wouldn’t be having Republicans break the entirely country on a regular basis.
StClair
Agreed and upvoted, +1.
Mark
There were also a lot of people who imagined things Obama never promised, and then castigated him for being him and not them.
not someone else
I don’t think Sanders would have saved us so much as that his failure to be elected prolonged the inevitable. I was too busy dealing with much to be particularly politically active in that way during the Obama administration so I just assumed he was doing a good job because at least he wasn’t the guy who caused a recession and dragged us into multiple wars based largely on lying.
But… I mean, fundamentally, a lot of people’s politics have changed such that we’re not “turning on” the Democrats, we believe fundamentally different things that they do. We don’t believe they know how to fix things because the things they say are the problems are not what we think are the problems, and a lot of their actual actions are things we think exacerbate the problems. And vice versa! They don’t like our actual beliefs either!
I don’t know whether Willis is one of those people, but like… it’s quite a bit more complicated than “aww you thought everything would magically be okay and then it was complicated”. Lot more like “aww you thought society might improve somewhat and now you’re lucky to get by working three part-time gig jobs that fire you if you make 20.01 hours a week, have a quasi-legal place to live, and your best means of communicating with others are constantly divebombed by a combination of people who want you dead because they’re literal, weapons-carrying Nazis and people who want you dead because they mistook you for someone who said something problematic about a fandom five years ago”.
Tl;dr shit’s gotten bad and if nothing else that makes a lot of people pessimistic.
newlland(Henryvolt)
Knowing is half that battle, but that still doesn’t help that I know to much and what I know upsets me constantly.
thejeff
1) “Bernie got openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is just pure conspiracy theory. Sanders didn’t have a chance at the nomination. He was never in the lead. He was wildly popular with a certain subset of young activists, but not with the rest of the Democratic voting base. Especially not with black voters. If things had stayed divided, he might have eked out a plurality, but candidates were always going to drop out and the voters would consolidate.
2) Yeah, we’re an empire built on genocide and war crimes (and slavery). Like all empires. Like all great powers. Still, without downplaying what we’ve done as a great power, I’d say we’re closer to a benevolent overlord than past great powers were (or than our likely replacements would be). We do our dirty deeds, but not nearly to the level of older colonial powers or to Imperial powers before them.
We could do better. We probably even have the room to do better without being replaced as a great power. Maybe I’ve just gotten more cynical as I’ve gotten older and studied more history, but if we stepped away from the imperial role, China would likely fill the gap and it’s hard to see how they would be preferable for the rest of the world.
Matticus
1) Exactly. Bernie’s entire strategy in 2020 relied on the field staying huge all the way to the convention so that he could win with 30%. His team admitted this. It was, to quote Tony Stark, “Not a great plan.” The fact of the matter is that Bernie ran a doomed campaign based on the false assumption that most of his support in 2016 was about liking him instead of being anti -Clinton.
Also, I find it hilarious that someone would attack Biden as “grandpa” when Bernie is *older* than him.
not someone else
1) I’m… not really positing that there was a conspiracy so much as that he lost because the field consolidated around Biden but gg. Also “he was never in the lead” is just wrong. He was ahead the first three votes- Iowa was wonky because he got more votes but not as many delegates so sure, that one was weird- and Buttigieg was in second delegate-wise. It was pretty clear he was badly off after Super Tuesday, yes. He was still in second with 38% of the total delegates.
2) We’re certainly not the only Evil Empire out there and I doubt we’ll be the last but uh… you can certainly believe we’re the kinder and gentler murderous assholes. We might even be compared to some of them? Sort of like how during the African slave trade Britain and France et al. were kind of surprised Belgium was so brutal and cruel. I feel like you will understand why other people may disagree as to the relevance.
thejeff
“Openly fucked by Red-Flag Segregationist Grandpa” is not “the field consolidated around Biden”
Keulen
DoA started in 2010. I was definitely a liberal back then, and very naive about all the terrible things presidents and federal-level politicians from both major parties do in this country. I’ve pretty much always despised Republicans, but it took Bernie getting screwed out of the Democratic nomination twice for me to realize how bad that party really is. I went from a liberal who was clueless about the bad and corrupt stuff Democrats did to, as of a few years ago, well look at that hammer and sickle in my avatar.
thejeff
Which is exactly what I’m talking about.
Too many Sanders supporters can’t accept that he just didn’t have the support within the Democratic base to win, but have to invent conspiracy theories about how he was screwed out of the nomination.
He didn’t have the votes. He never had the votes. There was never polling that suggested he had the votes.
These ideas are the left-wing equivalent of the “Stop the Steal” nonsense, with the only real distinction being the Sanders himself isn’t claiming them – though some of his former staffers do use them to attack Democrats.
Sombrero
I thought the point of Dorothy’s dream was to be a woman president. That still seems something to cherish. Taking Hillary Clinton as the model inspiration maybe was more acceptable in 2010 than nowadays, but I took that to be a clue Willis left to warn us that Dorothy has her own bunch of issues to deal with, like the rest of the main cast.
anon
that kinda youthful naivety in contrast to her being ‘academically’ smart is a nice contrast, i mean she’s not as knowingly naive as some others but i’d assume that’d be the term/somewhat chalks up to ‘youthful optimism’ that’d make a (non power hungry) 18 year old have the ‘ambition’ to be the president
always made me wonder, i’m sure there are some but how many 6 year olds saying “i wanna be an astronaut” actually ended up working for nasa lol
Mark
Maybe she should examine her moral principles vis a vis the work of the job she wants. When all choices are evil, usually the evil of any given choice is unevenly distributed. Turn it upside down and it becomes a choice of goods. Refusing the choice is also a choice, with its own balance of evil and good.
Real-world examples are hard to find, probably because nobody wants to talk about them afterward. For a fictional story that illustrates the conflict well, consider ST:TNG “Thine Own Self.” Order Geordi to fix the problem: he dies, everyone else is saved. Don’t give the order: Geordi lives a few minutes longer and then all die. Which is better? There is no provable answer to that. What you choose depends on your values.
Dorothy, what are your values? If you value the troop more than the individual, then you could be a good leader (in every sense), but individuals will be hurt along the way. If you place a higher value on the individual, then politics is not for you, because it’s all about group dynamics.
Suet
She’s still good, she got the theatrics part down
I still won’t be riled up if I was kicked like that poor chair
Stephen Bierce
Today’s strip was sponsored by Rooms To Go…
Kyrik Michalowski
Is it just me or is the time delay getting worse and worse? Today my clock read 11:09 before the new comic loaded. Normally it was around 11:00 – 11:03.
Axel
it has been at about 6-8 minutes past for me. Usually it fixes itself after a couple days/weeks, I think it’s a hiveworks thing
Thag Simmons
In my experience it gets progressively worse, I think because the clock’s version of a day is longer than an actual day.
lia