December 3, 2023

Will the history of Napoleon's return repeat itself?

I don't know, but let's compare 2 political cartoons on the subject.

First, here is what we get from The Washington Post today:

Second, here is what we got from Puck in 1912:

61 comments:

Lars Porsena said...

Time for an American Brutus?

rhhardin said...

The picture is Napoleon crossing the Rubicon.

Sebastian said...

Even by TDS standards, all this stuff about Trump becoming an authoritarian dictator is insane. How exactly is he going to do that? In his first term, he could barely get any competent help, most of the government apparatus actively resisted him, the deep state went after him with impunity, GOPers in Congress rarely cooperated, and even military leaders apparently did not actually follow the CiC.

Given the obvious insanity of the actual claim, the question is why anti-Trumpers peddle it. My guess: it's battle space prep--telling wavering Dems and nice women that they couldn't possibly vote for Orange Man. Save "our democracy"! Be a good citizen! How could you live with yourself if--.

Mr Wibble said...

They're laying the groundwork for blue states to remove Trump from the ballot next year.

Howard said...

The DNC/MSM continues to use the 2016 playbook that plays to Trump's strengths as a put upon poor victim of the power crazy libs. It's as if they need Trump as the poster boy of an ongoing movement to hold onto their power.

RideSpaceMountain said...

I love that Puck cartoon! I've been a life-long lover of Puck generally, but I've never seen that one. Teddy was such a Chad. Killing mountain lions, taking on JP Morgan, threatening to dig the Panama Canal with his bare hands and the whole "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!" thing all with that infamous shit-eating grin on his face...total hoss.

We should be lucky if we ever had another prez like Teddy. He was our first red pill president, not Trump.

Kate said...

If they'd compared Trump to Napoleon before Ridley Scott released his movie and made the topic a meme it would've been ... well, it still would've been stupid but it would've at least felt original.

chuck said...

Puck was body shaming Taft.

taking on JP Morgan<

I rather admire JP Morgan, he showed what you could do with an Art History degree.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

At first I thought the old cartoon was European stuff. The Kaiser? No, Taft with all the elephants vs. TR. Very funny stuff. Mencken worried that the crazy "German," TR, by rights ought to have opposed war with Germany; the decent high-minded Kant scholar, Wilson, ought to have favored the war. Why was it the reverse? Because, Henry, your analysis was somewhat lacking.

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

The WaPoo is a disgusting publication owed by a disgusting Jeff Bezos. It's projecting what Jeff Bezos wants to happen using its sock puppet, Joe "Bribe me!" Biden. The WaPoo and Joey want to muzzle anyone who might disagree with them. They're part of the fascist state. Part of the Ministry of Truth-anti-misinformation bureaucracy. The WaPoo suppresses positive stories about Republicans and creates negative stories out of whole cloth. Just like the "Dictator Don" story. They are part of the Mushroom Media Conspiracy.

Joey's already banning the use of cheapest energy source, natural gas, and the most versatile vehicle, gas- and diesel-powered cars/trucks. They want to force us into Emission Elsewhere Vehicles, then cut off the power to recharge them.

It's all in the name of "stopping climate change" by eliminating the generation of CO2. Too bad for Joey and the WaPoo, CO2 doesn't change the climate. The artic, antarctic, and Greenland ice sheets aren't melting. The Greenland ice sheet is growing in mass, not declining. The northern hemisphere snow coverage is above the 30-year mean and has been above the mean for the last few years. The temperature in antartica has declined 2-deg C in the last 20 years.

Rusty said...

The left is so easily manipullated into fear.

pacwest said...

This is just too wierd. It's become some kind fetish with them. They want a dictator in power, but they know it is a bad thing. With Trump they can cosplay. "Oh, he's such a bad boy. Umm, right there. That's it."

All the fun of the fantasy without the blame. "He made me do it."



Rich said...

If Trump wins the bond market would collapse. The only way he could ‘ finance ‘ his tax cut program would be thru large scale borrowing. He added $8 trillion alone in his first term to the national debt. Trump 2 would be Liz Truss on speed.

The biggest problem the US faces is not growth its debt. The US needs years of near balanced budgets to reduce debt to GDP with both Republicans and Democrats agreeing to spend less and tax more. Biden has had a lot of wins but the budget — like the border — was a disaster.

Ann Althouse said...

"... threatening to dig the Panama Canal with his bare hands...."

A Teddy and the canal cartoon, here.

He does have gloves on there though.

Here's a bare-handed one.

Cartoons were so much better then. We have utter crap now, even though all these digital tools and AI could help us.

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

You can also bet that the WaPoo is all in on the overpopulation hoax. Jeff Bezos and the WEF want to cleanse the planet's 8-billion people down to just a 500 million. Of course, if they do that, their trillion dollars in assets would decline to just stone and steel castles without any of the luxuries that they're accustomed to. Of course, they'd have all those peasants to serve them the bugs they so like, but no one to build their 450-ft yachts nor service said yachts.

Jeff Bezos and the WEF will never volunteer to be the first ones to join in the Great Die Off. That's for Ann, Crack MC, Rich, all the Mikes, Howard, and all the other of Ann's commenters to volunteer for.

Temujin said...

It's astonishing the number of people previously regarded as intellectually important, or sound, or just worth listening to have shown themselves to be weirdly susceptible to MSNBC mindset when it comes to Trump. It completely blows their cover for the rest of their lives. Kagan is just another in a long line.

When it comes to Trump, we are told the most amazing tales of what could be or what almost was. Sure, he's an abnormal human. We can all see that. But so many of our 'leaders' in various fields are not normal. Yet I doubt many of them would bring on the bizarre levels of hate and fiction that Trump has.

In the meantime, we live in the very presence of a machine that has given us the Censorship Industrial Complex, Russia Collusion hoax, covid from a pangolin- not the nearby level 4 research lab, horse pills, Afghanistan pullout (we can trust the Taliban), Hunter's laptop is Russian misinfo, Biden Family Bribery Company is not what you think it is, Ukraine/Russian peace that could have happened but these guys wanted a proxy war with Russia, J6 was the first insurrection featuring insurrectionists armed with cameras, BLM riots were peaceful, and on and on.

Sure, Kagan. Trump might be Napoleon. And you might be Baryshnikov. And I might be crazy, but from what I've sat here and watched over the last few decades, I think I'll go with Trump (or DeSantis) over those currently running things.

Cappy said...

One can only hope.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"Cartoons were so much better then. We have utter crap now, even though all these digital tools and AI could help us."

(https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1728647189008883916?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1728647189008883916%7Ctwgr%5E08a4b752cf51a69a51e7c46efa849e8b774bca89%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Facecomments.mu.nu%2F%3Fpost%3D407266)

Tell me about it. One of my Bing AI memes poking fun at Disney made it into this compilation on X. But you'll have to guess which one. Haha I'm famous lol. As someone with zero artistic talent but something of a way with words these new AI art programs are a godsend. Now we can relate our thoughts graphically...for better or worse. I see great and hilarious things in the future. More to come.

RideSpaceMountain said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
robother said...

Kagan's oped is an extended riff on the theme, "Trump's gonna do to us what we spent 8 years doing to him and his followers!" And that, that will be the end of Democracy. Perfect illustration of the political uses of projection.

cassandra lite said...

If the “clear path to dictatorship” is “getting shorter every day,” isn’t that an indictment of Biden?

gspencer said...

Dictatorship and Trump!

How original. Our lefties are on a roll.

gspencer said...

Kagan's uses 6,000 words and says nothing true.

Michael K said...

Blogger Rich said...

If Trump wins the bond market would collapse. The only way he could ‘ finance ‘ his tax cut program would be thru large scale borrowing. He added $8 trillion alone in his first term to the national debt. Trump 2 would be Liz Truss on speed.


"Rich" is channeling Krugman on Trump's election.

"Paul Krugman predicts a global recession after Trump's win
"Something terrible has just happened," Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says, predicting a global recession."

Dave Begley said...

Joe Biden has been bribed by the CCP. The checks are now public. Why isn’t that the biggest issue of the campaign?

Dave Begley said...

Liz Chaney on CBS Sunday Morning saying Trump is an existential threat to democracy, etc.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

dictatorship?

How?

He might lower our taxes?
He might send illegal entrants back to their nation of origin?

He might attempt to drain the swamp (he didn't do it last time - but perhaps he might this time?)
Yeah - that must be ultra scary for corruption supporting/excusing leftists.

Joe Smith said...

How did those cool hats ever go out of style?

As for Trump being a dictator, we can only hope...

pacwest said...

Biden has had a lot of wins

And those would be?

Rich your comments are becoming purile, which pretty much reflects what's coming out of the left. You're over ten years old right? You can do better. Much better.

William said...

Although he walked away from power three times, the French left were always accusing DeGaulle of being a fascist. Prior to WWII, DeGaulle wanted to equip two battalions of professionally manned and maintained tank battalions. The French left opposed this proposal because they thought DeGaulle would use these battalions to take control of France. There you have it. Equipping an army to fight Hitler was fascistic according to the French left.....There's a story that the Communists in the French Resistance betrayed the Gaullists in the Resistance to the Gestapo. They were afraid that if the Gaulists were allowed to survive Nazi occupation, they would install a Fascist government in France.....Many among the early Bolsheviks worried about a Napoleon arising from their ranks. Stalin was their choice to safely guide the Revolution. Well, it's true that Stalin wasn't a military genius and wasn't supportive of his generals. They did avoid Napoleon.

James K said...

If Trump wins the bond market would collapse.

Reagan cut taxes and the bond market was higher at the end of his term than at the beginning. 3-month rates fell from 15 down to 8 percent, 10-year from 12 down to 9. (For the uninitiated, lower yields mean higher prices.) Biden has blown out the budget with his reckless spending. We don't need more taxes, just less spending. A lot less.

William said...

I'm reading a bio of Wellington. During the 1830's he fell afoul of the press and the London mob. The press accused him of seeking to establish a military dictatorship in England. The reason: he opposed some of the electoral reforms that the liberals of that time were pushing. The man who defeated Napoleon was accused of wanting to be England's Napoleon.....The left has predicted five of the last two fascist dictators...If this film of Ridley Scott is any harbinger, Napoleon has at long last lost his appeal to artists and intellectuals. Goethe, Nietzsche, Lord Byron, Hugo, and a whole long list of the artists and intellectuals of his period and beyond were fanboys of Napoleon. I guess he's now regarded more as a proto-fascist than as an anti-monarchist but he got a favorable press in his day and the generations after. Even now, he's not regarded as one of the villains of history....They want to tear down Nelson's statue in Trafalgar Square. His offense: he wrote a letter to some plantation owners in the WI that he would support slavery if he became a member of Parliament....By way of contrast, Napoleon sent fifty thousand soldiers to restore slavery in French possessions in the WI and, so far as I know, there is no move to tear down the Arc de Triomphe.

rcocean said...

I love that cartoon! I wonder who the Republican pol is that is pondering next to Taft on the Elephant.

Harun said...

These stories are preparing their side for a color revolution if Trump wins.

That's it.

Jonah Goldberg recently tweeted that he thought the 2016 electoral college should have refused to vote in Trump...isn't that basically his version of J6? Find some way to reverse the election.

If Trump wins, the democrats will do exactly like J6 - "quasi legal" stuff up to color revolution. They ran simulations in 2020 where big blue states refused to accept the election of Trump.

Anti-Trump people are too smug about J6. I hope it innoculates them against extreme actions, but in fact, they seem to have their elements interested in doing extreme politics, too.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Trump - No new wars for 4 years. Yet he's a dictator?

Biden - we have nothing but war. The war machine is re-vamped... under a weak crooked Ukrainian-made-rich democrocratix mobster.

Biden - we have an open southern border and an entire lying industrial one-party rule media complex covering it up for him.


The real dictators? the Hack-D lying press.

NBC = Dictatorship.

gilbar said...

so.. Serious Question (actually, The MOST Serious Question)..
How Long? How Long before They are calling for Trump's execution?
They will tell us, that "democracy REQUIRES his demise"

So.. How Long? How Long before they openly call for it?

Drago said...

Kagan's wife?

Victoria Nuland.

Bob Boyd said...

Isn't Robert Kagan married to Victoria Nuland?

Mea Sententia said...

In 1912 they avoided a Teddy Roosevelt dictatorship and got racist Woodrow Wilson instead.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Given Rich/Chuck’s track record go heavy on bonds if Trump wins.

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

The Democrats are always calling Republicans fascists, Nazis and racists. They called Ike a fascist! Ike, who defeated Nazi Germany. Every Republican candidate for president is always "worse than Hitler", but then a few years later, the same candidate is a model of democracy and the current Republican president should strive to live up to that worthy.

Meanwhile, Democrats are always spreading the Big Lie: Biden's claim about Romney: "He's going to put you (Black voters) back in chains." That's just one. Now it's Trump is going to execute Democrats for being Democrats (Joe "Goebbels" Scarborough).

Narr said...

"Even now, [Bonaparte] is not regarded as one of the villains of history."

Depends on who you ask. I'll have to see if I still have Peter Geyl's "Napoleon: For and Against" on my shelves. I know I have Alan Schom's far from laudatory bio.

Speaking of TR and Wilson, it's a measure of how far we've come that both of them, and Henry Cabot Lodge, could have discussed (or at least written about) the Great War and the Versailles Treaty in fluent German if they needed to. I'm not sure about William Howard Fatt. Sorry, Taft. But he was as well educated as any of them, when education included foreign languages as a matter of course.

gspencer said...

Isn't Robert Kagan married to Victoria Nuland?

Yes. Enough to give the heebie-jeebies to us anti-NWO folks. And they've produced two spawns.

gspencer said...

"In 1912 they avoided a Teddy Roosevelt dictatorship and got racist Woodrow Wilson instead."

It wasn't his racism that was the worst of it. That was his internationalism for the NWO. He engineered us into WWI in 1917 (while running in 1916 on the claim that he kept us out of war) as the excuse for introducing the whole concept of a League of Nations. A wise Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.

So FDR ran the same game plan. Pretend to want to keep us out of war (his 1940 platform) only to goad Japan to attack us and then use the war to hatch the UN which a duped Senate did ratify.

Indigo Red said...

Napoleon was afraid of cats. Trump was fond of Cats.

madAsHell said...

Me thinks they are promoting a lousy movie.

Jim at said...

If Trump wins the bond market would collapse.

Really? Is that what happened last time?

Gusty Winds said...

The American Revolution was protected by the Atlatic Ocean. The monoarchs worried about the new wave of liberty couldn't instantly attack the United States. After the French Revolution, the European Monarchs we like "Holy Shit!", they'll cut off my head too. So, they aligned and attacked. That's what lead to Napoleon.

Current events are not the same dynamic. Biden's installation brought back The Divine Right of Kings. Trump isn't Napoleon. Give me a break.

They are daring you to trade one confirmed dictator for 'another' [Trump]. Trump has zero inclination to be a dictator. Luckily for the left, the education establishment has purposefully failed to educate two generations of Americans about history, and robbed them of the ability to understand it.

tim in vermont said...

Remember when Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, was recorded picking which of the coup plotters in Maidan, where the coup plotters massacred dozens and successfully blamed it on the democratically elected government they then overthrew, kicking off the civil war in Ukraine which has been going on up to today? These guys have dragged us to the brink of WWIII.

BTW, CTIL training documents, provided by our own government for use against its own citizens expresses admiration for assigning the blame for terrorist events to one's enemies, regardless of who actually committed the atrocities. That's comforting, isn't it? Especially when we think about J6.

tim in vermont said...

At least Trump was faced with an economically devastating pandemic to justify the spending. He didn't spend trillions on wars of choice and electric cars for affluent Democrats.

The bond market is already in the crapper. Gold is at record highs, but I am sure that we can blame this on Trump. It was the Chamber of Commerce GOP, led by Paul Ryan, which pushed through those tax cuts, most of which went to working people, which is why the Democrats lie about them nonstop, BTW.

But we shouldn't worry about the debt going up a trillion a month under Biden, it's just money we owe ourselves,... err, I mean, money the 99% owe the 1%.

But it is funny that Democrat spending is never the cause of debt, only Republican tax cuts, especially to people like Rich, who just happen to echo all of the same talking points as government trained TCIL sock puppets do. But Rich probably isn't one of these sock puppets, he's probably a rube taken in by them.

Narr said...

What's the best book or two on the topic of that rascal, the Sainted Woodrow, and World Shitstorm One?

FWIW old Donald Kagan's kids are a big part of The Institute for the Study of (drumroll please) War. NTTAWWT.

rcocean said...

TR made such good copy for Cartoonists, there a newspaper cartoon of a "Cartoonist" crying when TR left the White House in 1909.

Little did they know...

rcocean said...

THere are so many good cartoons of TR, that I can remmber reading. There's an anti-TR cartoon, which shows him walking about with a megaphone, and "I, I, I,I, I" is blaring out of it.

Mason G said...

"Really? Is that what happened last time?"

For leftists, there is no "last time". Every morning, everything is new again.

chuck said...

Reagan cut taxes and the bond market was higher at the end of his term than at the beginning.

I think that is misleading. Inflation was high in the Carter years and he appointed Volcker to fix the problem, which he did. The result was recession, which the Democrats unfairly blamed on Reagan, but when things settled down the economy started chugging along. So who gets credit for fixing the bond market? I say Carter. OTOH, Reagan started the trend of massive deficits that now looks pretty unfixable. There will be a nasty reckoning in our future that will get blamed on whatever party is in power.

The economy moves slower than policy. Just to balance things out, I blame the 2007 meltdown on Clinton.

gadfly said...

Wapo got the artwork right with Trump's wearing of a Napoleonic Bicorne hat. And of course, the hands holding the hat are small as we would expect from any Trump representation.

wendybar said...

Drago said...
Kagan's wife?

Victoria Nuland.

12/3/23, 1:21 PM

THAT explains everything.

RMc said...

Can something even be "increasingly inevitable"? I mean, isn't something either inevitable or it isn't? (That's like saying something is "more unique"...)

Narr said...

Sometimes I come here for expert opinion, and make polite requests for more info about a topic, but oftimes the expert won't offer anything but their original statement.

I guess I'll continue thinking that the Germans had a lot more to do with the wars of TWW and FDR than their personal failings and prejudices did.



mikee said...

One day an opponent of Democrats will exceed their expectations of totalitarian authoritarian genocidal megalomaniacal monsterishness. Boy, will they be surprised! Except that the event will be horrible, it sure will be funny to see all their propagandistic predictions fulfilled!

Rusty said...

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
Given Rich/Chuck’s track record go heavy on bonds if Trump wins.
If Trump wins the DOW will jump 800 points. Minimum.