A Manhood Thing

First off, props to Speaker Pelosi, for nailing it when she describe Trump's obsession with securing funding for his border wall. She called it, "like a manhood thing." Key word being "like," as in resembling but not truly the real article, because let's face it: when it comes to Donald Trump, you probably wouldn't associate anything about him with manhood, would you? More like infant hood, what with all of the whining, grabbing, pouting and temper tantrums (props to Chuck Schumer, too).

N.B. While everyone has been watching this psychodrama play out between Trump and the House Democrats, folks might have missed some pretty important news: it turned out that Paul Man-a-Snort was sharing polling data with the Ruskies. Can you say collusion, boys and girls? How about smoky gun? Good grief, can we all just end the charade here? Donald Trump was most certainly not Putin's plant/Manchurian candidate/whatever. Clearly, he was just looking to pay back Putin or position himself for whatever Chump Organization venture he was planning in Russia. He probably never gave it a second thought about how his actions might affect the election outcome. He just didn't want to fall flat on his face with yet another failed business venture...again.

Okay, so back to the shiny object we've all been distracted into watching - the border wall and associated U.S. federal government shutdown. Did it ever occur to anyone who is fulminating about this act of political hostage taking that nobody has bothered to talk about the root causes and drivers of the Central American migration? I'm talking about the bloody civil wars and authoritarian dictatorships that the U.S. underwrote financially and supported with military training and diplomatic cover during the 1980s. And then there was the subsequent botched national reconstruction programs that didn't bother to address the ginormous socioeconomic and political inequalities between the elites and the rural and urban poor who comprised the vast majority of the countries' populations.

Yes, back in the day there were some Democrats and even a few principled Republicans who tried to put a check on the Reagan and Bush I regimes for the international war crimes they were committing. But, no, we're not hearing a peep about it now from all of the huffy, puffy self-righteous politicos, mostly Democrats, expressing their outrage and indignation about Trump's manhood thing. Sure, there's some talk about Trump creating the very humanitarian crisis he now claims he needs funding to address through his own inhumane, xenophobic actions, but that's just one more consequence of more than a century of U.S. imperialism in the Central American region.

Guess it must be a U.S. thing.

Enjoy the toon.