Just Say No
An essay about obsessions, bad influences and developing a highly-practical I-Give-Up Attitude...
After their losses in the 2022 Midterm elections a number of sane Republicans (and they do exist although they’re clearly in the minority) said it was time for the GOP to end its obsession with Donald Trump.
Probably because Trump has never won the popular vote in a general election and he helped the Republican Party screw up those Midterm elections when he endorsed and promoted Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Election Denier candidates whose main qualification for public office was a willingness to kiss Donald Trump’s ass in public.
As professional political hypocrites have pointed out many times before; you can appeal to your party’s extremists and draw a crowd and maybe even get a nomination, but once you reach the general election and relatively sane people get to vote, being a fanatic might not play all that well.
So the Grown-Ups in the Republican Party said we need to end our obsession with this Con Man With A Combover and the Not Grown-Ups in the Republican Party voted for him in Iowa and New Hampshire anyway.
So it appears the majority of Republicans aren’t ready to break up with Donald Trump just yet and the metaphor that occurred to me was that scene from Brokeback Mountain where either Jake Gyllenhaal or Heath Ledger (I forgot to take notes) lamented the fact that he wasn’t strong enough to end a relationship that had major problems.
After deciding to use that scene, the most difficult part of producing the cartoon was deciding whether to use the quote everyone remembers: “I can’t quit you.”
Or the quote that was actually in the movie: “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
Which is a not an uncommon occurrence because as you might have noticed we often remember things the way we want to and if you don’t believe me you can ask any of my teammates on the 2023 Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs who carried me off the field after I scored the winning touchdown and my pop-singer girlfriend Taylor Swift asked for my hand in marriage.
The fact that we remember the quote incorrectly got me interested and having nothing better to do, I googled “famous movie quotes nobody actually said” and it turns out that in Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood did not say: “Do you feel lucky, punk?”
He actually said: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
In Casablanca Humphrey Bogart never said: “Play it again, Sam.”
The line was “Play it, Sam” and Ingrid Bergman said it, not Bogie.
In Wall Street Michael Douglas did not say: “Greed is good.”
Instead, he got overly chatty and said: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
And in The Wizard of Oz Judy Garland did not say: “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
Instead Judy said: “I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
And now that I write all that down I’m struck by the fact that the lines we made up are consistently better than the actual lines from the movies so it’s pretty clear we should all start writing screenplays and mine’s going to be about a mild-mannered political cartoonist who’s secretly a super hero, but nobody realizes the cartoonist and the superhero are the same guy because he’s a master of disguise and when he doesn’t want to be recognized, he puts on glasses!
(Also, his glaucoma-suffering coworkers are dumb as a bag of hammers.)
According to an Orlando Sentinel article that appeared in the Kansas City Star and then on my Dell computer, a year ago Ron DeSantis was the “next big thing” and Wall Street loved him and polls suggested he was more popular in the GOP than sliced bread and Donald Trump combined and DeSantis was clearly going to get an Oscar nomination, be asked to play centerfield for the New York Yankees and also be named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive which at one point was this guy:
But DeSantis screwed all that up by campaigning.
Because once people got an Up Close and Personal look at Ron DeSantis he came across like Grumpy the Dwarf, plus he was grumpy about weird stuff like Disney World, “wokeism” and drag queens and according to the Sentinel article he also ducked serious journalists because they might ask one of those highly-inconvenient serious journalist questions like: “How tall are you?”
An important issue the Palm Beach Post investigated because some people speculated that DeSantis wore lifts in his cowboy boots and if you Google “how tall is Ron DeSantis?” the answer is either 5-foot-8 or 5-foot-11 which is pretty vague, but both are significantly smaller than Donald Trump who is at least 6-foot-3 when measured horizontally.
Anyway…
The DeSantis campaign got off to a lousy start when he decided to show how hip and with it he was by announcing he was running for president on Twitter Space while sitting beside Elon Musk which was a dumb idea because the site kept crashing which made it seem like DeSantis was disorganized and a poor planner and hadn’t read much about Twitter or Tesla problems because otherwise why in the world would you think Elon Musk had his shit together?
Now here’s an article that says J.D. Power and Consumer Reports rank Teslas near the bottom of the pack when it comes to reliability:
https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-the-true-story
As one of my sons astutely pointed out, people don’t buy a Tesla because they’re good cars, they buy a Tesla because they think it says something about them and what it appears to say is: “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t do research.”
(Which probably means those people could work for the DeSantis campaign.)
OK, we seemed to have drifted from the topic at hand which is: what a lousy campaign Ron DeSantis ran and according to the following article from CNN, DeSantis complained that getting indicted was a huge advantage for Trump (which ought to tell you something about where the GOP is today) because it “galvanized” the MAGA Republicans which is either getting really excited or being coated with a protective layer of zinc, although in Trump’s case, a protective layer of Teflon seems a lot more likely.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/politics/desantis-campaign-what-happened/index.html
Just in case you didn’t read the article: apparently the DeSantis campaign was a disorganized mess and while they don’t require the exact same skill set, it seems unlikely that a politician who ran a disorganized and incompetent campaign is suddenly going to get his shit together once he’s elected and that’s the point I made in the cartoon you just looked at.
Originally it was called “global warming” but since we apparently don’t understand averages or how the Earth getting hotter can make it colder where we happen to be, concerned scientists wisely rebranded their disaster and started calling it “climate change” instead.
Timeout for some Mansplaining:
According to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (which is one of the worst names ever because it sounds like disasters are making contributions to charity and if Hurricane Katrina has made a donation I’ve yet to hear about it) the world’s warmer temperatures are disrupting the polar vortex and pushing cold air into non-traditional areas which helps explain why you can currently hold the Ice Capades in a Phoenix, Arizona parking lot.
Just kidding.
You can’t actually hold the Ice Capades in a Phoenix, Arizona parking lot mainly because the actual Ice Capades would sue your ass if you tried to use their name or, at the very least, want a cut of the profits.
So the Ice Capades joke was an exaggeration based on how cold it’s been here in recent weeks (it’s currently 36 which seems balmy by comparison) but semi-recently I did abandon an attempt to retrieve my newspaper from the sidewalk when I realized I’d need an ice axe, crampons, a safety rope and a Sherpa to get down my slippery front steps.
A good decision which makes me think giving up is a highly underrated strategy.
Just look at all the people who fucked up their lives by continuing in their attempt to climb Mount Everest or reach the North pole or sail across the Atlantic Ocean or date Taylor Swift and when I read about Westward expansion and the difficulties faced by pioneers – like the future dinner entrees that made up the Donner Party – I feel confident that had I been put in charge we would have stopped Westward Expansion somewhere around St. Louis.
And come to think of it, probably East St. Louis because I would have taken one look at the Mississippi River and said no way I’m trying to cross that thing until they build a four-lane freeway bridge over it.
Anyway…
If you want a more complete and much less entertaining explanation of how global warming causes cold temperatures, here you go:
When the weather is so weird you have to make up new terms like “thunder sleet” or “bomb cyclones” or “flash droughts” or “firenados” or “heatflation” or “space hurricanes” (and unfortunately I didn’t make even one of those up) you know we’re in a “shit storm” and as the cartoon depicts, since we first started talking about global warming as a possible problem I’m guessing the number of climate change skeptics has dropped dramatically.
OK, that’s it for today and unlike Republicans and Donald Trump, I know how to quit you…temporarily.
Talk to you soon.
Lee I always enjoyed your cartoons in the KC Star, but I had no idea of your written wit and humor. I look forward to your column here everyday, as it is the absolute best. You are priceless.
Only a very special genius would threaten Micky Mouse. Or slander the same.person he just lost $5 million to in court for doing that very thing. Reminds me of Martin and Aykroyds wild and crazy guys...if they were mean spirited and nasty. I enjoy your columns!