The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, May 29, 2025

Readings: Randy Fine, the bigoted, body-count obsessed congressman who represents this district mostly held his tongue when he made a pair of appearances at last Monday’s Memorial Day ceremonies here, in Palm Coast and at the county. He spoke about the 1.2 million killed in American wars, steering clear of his ghastly suggestion of nuking Gaza, where the death toll would in one such bombing be roughly equivalent to that accumulated by the United States in two and a half centuries. But I was glad to see the American Conservative call for his resignation: “As the founder and president of the Catholic apostolate the Vulnerable People Project, I have had the privilege of getting to know first-hand the various cultures of the Holy Land, including the Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the West Bank, and Gaza, as well as their non-Christian neighbors. In my discussions with these people, I have not encountered the view that entire cultures must be annihilated to make more room for themselves. No, that disgraceful sentiment belongs to Fine, who describes himself as a “Zionist” and calls pro-Palestinians “demons” who “must be put down by any means necessary.” That statement came in response to the grotesque act of political violence in DC, but Fine was painting with a broad brush. Before I go on, I first and foremost want to give my own response to the Florida congressman’s recent comments: Rep. Randy Fine is a disgrace, and I am calling on him to resign. What’s more, if he will not resign, then I call on his colleagues in Congress to force him out. […] American Christians should take note: The culture Fine referred to as having something “deeply” wrong with it is the culture of the people of the Holy Land, including Christians directly descended from the Jews who first accepted Jesus and received the Holy Spirit. That’s the culture that gave birth to much of what sets the West, and the United States, apart. It’s the culture of the Gospel, which proclaims the inviolable dignity of every human being as made in the Image and Likeness of God. Or, as our Declaration of Independence put it: “all men are created equal” before “Nature’s God” with “certain unalienable rights.”

—P.T.

 

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Only my secretary does not smell of it. Her name is Sharon Kincaid and she comes from Eufala, Alabama. Although she has been working for me two weeks, I have not asked her for a date nor spoken of anything other than business. Yet the fact is that for two weeks I have thought of little else. She seems quite indifferent so far; and she is not really beautiful. She is a good-sized girl, at least five feet six and a hundred and thirty-five pounds-as big as a majorette-and her face is a little too short and pert, like one of those Renoir girls, and her eyes a little too yellow. Yet she has the most fearful soap-clean good looks. Her bottom is so beautiful that once as she crossed the room to the cooler I felt my eyes smart with tears of gratitude. She is one of those village beauties of which the South is so prodigal. From the sleaziest house in the sleaziest town, from the loins of redneck pa and rockface ma spring these lovelies, these rosy-cheeked Anglo-Saxon lovelies, by the million. They are commoner than sparrows, and like sparrows they are at home in the streets, in the parks, on doorsteps. No one marvels at them; no one holds them dear. They flush out of their nests first thing and alight in the cities to stay, and no one misses them. Even their men pay no attention to them, anyhow far less attention than they pay to money. But I marvel at them; I miss them; I hold them dear.

–From Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.