For the third time in a row the Republican Party is about to admit that it can’t find a better human being to run for president than Donald Trump, (not that Joe Biden is anything to write home about).
Trump recently beat Nikki Haley by approximately 372 percentage points in her home state, so while it’s bad for the country I’m really looking forward to the top-notch cartoon material Donald Trump supplies so effortlessly.
A recent Kansas City Star article did some fact-checking and turns out Haley and Trump have spent a fair amount of time telling lies about each other, which — apparently — is how you get elected to office.
A political system that has good people saying, “I’m not willing to (fill-in-the-blank with the distasteful activity of your choice) to get elected” so we’re left with the people who are willing to (fill-in-the-blank with the distasteful activity of your choice) to get elected; an elimination process which led Hunter S. Thompson to ask just how low a man had to stoop to become president of the United States.
So like a lot of you, this November I’ll once again be voting against someone instead of for someone.
Just in case you live someplace sane (and right now this minute I don’t know where that might be) and aren’t familiar with the term: “open carry” is allowing people to openly carry firearms.
In the Great State of Missouri you can also carry a concealed firearm as long as you’re 19. (There are some exceptions like being a convicted felon, voting for Barack Obama or listening to NPR, but let’s move on because we’ve still got a lot of legislative stupidity to talk about.)
OK, so you’re 19 and want to walk around with a Dirty Harry .44 Magnum shoved down your pants.
If you live in Missouri go right ahead, although, according to at least one law firm website, you still might want to get a “concealed carry” weapons permit from your local county sheriff’s department just in case you decide to visit some state where the legislators aren’t batshit crazy.
And speaking of batshit crazy legislators:
Google “weird laws in Missouri” and one of them is not allowing anyone under 21 years of age to take out the trash if the trash has liquor bottles in it, even if those bottles are empty, which means Missouri legislators are more concerned about a 19-year-old carrying an empty whiskey bottle than a loaded gun.
And while I’m busy explaining phrases: “To carry someone’s water” means to “occupy a subservient position, to do the bidding, the menial tasks, and frequently the dirty work, of a more powerful person.”
I got that definition off the internet and the same website theorized that the phrase became popular in the late 1970s and probably came from the term “water boy” who is usually on the lowest rung of a team’s hierarchy, the only less prestigious position being a member of the Missouri Legislature.
If guns make us all safer and we should trust some nitwit who thinks he’s Raylan Givens because he’s watched the entire Justified series (in my case, twice, because it was really good) why don’t airlines and the FAA let people carry guns onto airplanes?
And if guns make everybody safer why did the Secret Service tell the NRA that guns would not be allowed at their convention while then-President Donald Trump made an appearance?
And if guns make us all safer why can’t you take a gun into a police station or a courtroom?
Off the top of my head, it kinda seems like when people who aren’t sucking up to the NRA are in charge of making the rules, they don’t really think guns make us all safer.
A couple posts ago I wrote a piece called “A Moment of Silence” and said that’s all we get when we need politicians to say something meaningful about gun violence and then realized that ought to be a cartoon, so now it is.
This is only my opinion so feel free to disagree because I won’t know or care, but it seems like people still have a lot of antisemitic, homophobic, sexist and racist thoughts, but have learned not to express those thoughts out loud because these days that’ll get you in a lot of trouble.
But give people an excuse to let some of that bad shit out (like electing a Black president) and then you start hearing “We need to take back the country” which posed the question “From who and/or whom?” The obvious answer was the kind of president who shot hoops in the White House driveway and listened to Al Green instead of bowling and listening to Tony Bennett.
Couldn’t tell you for sure because I don’t fully understand what I think or why I think it, but I wouldn’t be shocked (or awed) to find out that some of the criticism of Israel and support for Hamas terrorism is based on antisemitism that people have been hiding until they had an excuse to express it.
Having said that…
I still believe you can disagree with the government of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu without being antisemitic, just like you can disagree with President Biden without being un-American.
But – according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial – since the Hamas terrorists attacked a legitimate democracy, the Anti-Defamation League says antisemitic incidents (including written and verbal harassment and physical assault) are way up and maybe that’s because people who were already quietly antisemitic now have a chance to express those feeling publicly.
And as the cartoon indicates, maybe we’re the wrong people to accuse somebody else of genocide.
Some cartoon ideas are hard to come by and it’s like digging through solid rock to find a small vein of gold and some ideas are like taking a walk while looking into the sky and trying to decide if birds shit on cars intentionally (I think they do because when’s the last time you saw bird shit all around a car and not on it) and tripping over a gold nugget the size of a cantaloupe. This one was easy after I read a story that said Nikki Haley wasn’t going to quit running for president because she was in it “for the long haul.”
And now I have to go dig a gold mine because I didn’t trip over any gold nuggets this morning.
Great cartoons. Funny and at the same time depressing.
Another most enjoyable epistle. Put me in mind … of an exchange at a dockside fish n chips place…
Me: I heard that birds have no sphincters.
Him: No, they have sphincters, they just have no couth.