A brief look at a few cartoons I never got around to drawing

My idea suppliers are inconsistent...

As you can see, the Miami Beach spring breakers behaving like a bunch of morons (and this comes from a guy who willingly took a 92-MPH slider in the left kidney because he thought it would make some ballplayers laugh) provided material for the cartoon posted above.

I appreciate their efforts, although I really wish so many of my recent cartoon ideas didn’t involve crowds because they take a long time to draw and let’s face it, pretty much everything is about me and my needs, which gets us to my next complaint.

Despite my repeated requests, the people who provide cartoon material – politicians, celebrities and a wide assortment of dimwits and dumbbells – refuse to pace themselves and provide political cartoon material once, and only once, a day.

You’d think they could get organized and set up a schedule:

“I’ll say something stupendously stupid on Monday and you get caught in a sex scandal on Tuesday.  And if anyone has to call in sick or can’t get a babysitter, Mr. Trump, we’ll expect you to fill in.”

Which leads me to write a few words of what might be construed as praise (as long as you’re really bad at construing) about Donald Trump.

Without a doubt, Donald Trump was the most consistent provider of cartoon material in my 40-plus years of cartooning. Most presidents make news when they hold a press conference, so the smart ones hold as few press conferences as possible. But until they kicked him off the platform, Donald Trump had Twitter available 24 hours a day and a complete inability to keep his thoughts to himself, so he would send out random and quite often hilarious Tweets.

Like the time he welcomed his wife home and got her name wrong.

I’d say you can’t make this stuff up, but when Trump was president, you didn’t need to and as a political cartoonist having to provide five cartoons a week, I can’t tell you how much I miss Trump’s steady supply of cartoon material.

These days I’m actually having to work for a living, so it would really help if the subjects of my cartoons would provide a consistent flow of cartoon-suitable subjects, but instead they do absolutely nothing for three days and then on the fourth day provide too much material and I can’t get to it all in time and have to watch perfectly good cartoon subjects go over a metaphorical Niagara Falls because I was too busy grabbing another cartoon idea as it drifted by.

Which doesn’t mean I had nothing to say about the subjects I didn’t get to and that being the case, I thought I’d write about some of the cartoons I never got to draw.

And we’ll start with…

Sidney Powell saying she’s too crazy to be believable

As you may or may not recall, Sidney Powell is the lawyer (or at least one of them) who made some batshit crazy claims about election fraud and any time your election-fraud claims are too crazy for Donald Trump, that’s saying something.

The Trump legal team – which seemed to be largely composed of lawyers too crappy to have legitimate clients – severed ties with Powell after she claimed the election had been rigged and managed to work in an overly-dead Hugo Chavez as one of those somehow responsible.

She also claimed Dominion Voting Systems manipulated votes and as might be expected, Dominion – whose business relies on their image as a credible and accurate provider of vote tallies – took exception to Powell’s claims and sued her for defamation.

Part of Powell’s defense is that “no reasonable person” would conclude her unfounded claims were statements of fact.  Here’s more of what Powell’s lawyers had to say:

"Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as 'wild accusations' and 'outlandish claims.' They are repeatedly labelled 'inherently improbable' and even 'impossible.' Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants' position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process."

So it’s the old “Hey-everybody-knows-I’m-nuts” defense and frankly, she may have a point.

Mitch McConnell threatens to start acting like an asshole

Whichever party is out of power likes the filibuster (preventing legislative action by talking until your opponents concedes defeat if you’ll just shut the fuck up – a negotiating process used in many marriages) and Mitch McConnell recently threatened a “scorched earth” landscape if Democrats tried to end the Senate filibuster.

McConnell predicted the Senate would cease to function, a state most observers thought we’d already reached.

It’s kind of like Hitler invading Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece and then telling Russia if he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll really start acting like a jerk. (And once again I’ve fulfilled the Liberal Commentator’s obligation to make at least one Hitler reference per month.)

Joe Biden calls Vladimir Putin a killer

In a moment of overly-blunt lucidity, Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a “killer” and my first though was: “If Putin’s really a killer, how smart is it to say so?”

Here’s how Putin responded to Biden: “I would tell him: be healthy. I wish him good health. I say this without irony, no jokes. This is first of all."

Putin then hissed at the cameras and slithered away.

All of which for some reason reminded me of the scene in Godfather II when Michael kisses his brother and says: “I know it was you, Fredo.” Short version: If Vladimir Putin invites Joe Biden to go fishing on Lake Tahoe, Joe should make sure Vlad doesn’t sit behind him.

Biden agrees to supply Mexico with excess doses of coronavirus vaccine

Wait…there are excess doses of coronavirus vaccine?

Last I heard people right here in America were having a hard time getting vaccinated and while I’m not much of an “America First” guy because that phrase tends to come with two armloads of racist baggage and a burning cross, giving “excess” vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada while Americans wait in line seemed like a story worth a cartoon.

On the other hand…

The excess doses were of the AstraZeneca vaccine, so maybe this is a smart move and Americans can wait to see if any of our neighbors to the North or South develop a third eye or grow a tail before taking a dose ourselves. Which makes Joe Biden a very cagey customer if you completely ignore him fingering Putin as the kind of guy who knows how to kill people and get away with it.

In conclusion…

We’ve now reached the point in my word count where I start thinking about how to wrap things up and like an Academy Award winner who is slowly being drowned out by the increasing volume of the orchestra, let me cram in a few more names before I go. In no particular order, thanks to:

• Derek Chauvin’s lawyers who want the Minneapolis policeman to have a jury of his peers, which you’d think might include a few people wearing hoods and bedsheets…

• Krispy Kreme for offering to give a free a donut each and every day to anyone who gets vaccinated and the offer is good for the rest of the year (they’re putting their money where my mouth is)…

• And finally, the state of Oklahoma for putting a $2.1 million bounty on Bigfoot which they believe will attract Bigfoot-hunting tourists and seems to indicate Oklahoma doesn’t think they have enough morons in the state already.

Maybe Oklahoma should get in touch with Miami Beach, because as the cartoon indicates, they have a few morons to spare.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/