The Magic Touch
Assuming you’re not in a medically induced coma (an option you might want to consider for the next four years) you’ve probably heard that former FOX news contributor, accused Binge Drinker and Secretary of Defense (a trifecta of qualifications rarely seen in Cabinet members) Pete Hegseth accidentally sent plans for an air strike to the Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt proved they picked the exact right person for the job when she said: “no classified information was posted” which means one of two things:
A. Karoline Leavitt is a big fat liar liar, pants on fire, her nose is longer than a telephone wire, or…
B. The Trump Administration thinks the exact timing of warplane launches and bomb drops doesn’t need to be classified.
To make this screw-up even more ironic (or in this case, maybe I actually mean mo-ronic) apparently they’d been worried about leaks at the Pentagon before they started putting up billboards and texting the town crier and sky writing the details of our plans for upcoming military attacks and if Pete Hegseth had been in charge of the Normandy Invasion he probably would have shared those plans with Hedda Hopper and I sincerely hope the World War II motto still holds true:
“Loose lips sink shits.”
I may have that quote “technically” wrong—your call—but had the information gotten into the wrong hands (and Hegseth was being extremely sloppy with that information), accidentally publicizing attack plans before the attack took place might have allowed the targets to escape or, even worse, get ready for the attack and guess what; the Houthis have missiles.
So by being an Enormous Dumbass, which seems to be a fulltime occupation, the Secretary of Defense endangered U.S. pilots.
This is what happens when you put unqualified blockheads in charge and we’re going to see a lot more of this before we’re through.
The people who are screwing up just about everything they touch (a thought that led to the cartoon at the top of this post) have now announced they’ve got some great ideas about conducting elections and just in case you haven’t been able to keep track of their wide assortment of excuses and rationales for the bullshit they get up to:
They argued that the Department of Education should be disbanded because clearly, the individual states should get to decide just how dumb they’d like their residents to be, which, by the way was the same reasoning that allowed slavery to exist:
“Hey, if the Great State of Alabama thinks it’s OK to own other humans, who are we to disagree?”
But when it comes to elections, suddenly the states are incompetent knuckleheads and the federal government needs to step in and fix things because whenever Donald Trump or One of His Minions loses an election the only way that could possibly happen is through election fraud.
A while back I had at least two readers get angry that I occasionally draw cartoons criticizing Democrats and one of them called me a “right-wing asshole” and both implied it’s people like me that got Donald Trump elected.
At this point, several things occur to me:
First:
I totally agree with “asshole” part of that accusation and think that of myself several times a day, but “right-wing asshole” seems wildly inaccurate because actual “right-wing assholes” think I’m a “left-wing asshole” and in this rare case I agree with the “right-wing assholes.”
Second:
I am not and will never be a Democrat and don’t feel responsible for promoting their agenda, assuming they can ever figure out just what their agenda is. I criticize Democrats less often because I agree with them more often, but Democrats aren’t perfect and they’re giving a pretty convincing demonstration of that right now.
Third:
Refusing to admit your faults means you can’t grow and change (why would you, you’re already perfect) and then you keep making the same mistakes.
Refusal to admit Joe Biden was having problems led to a poor debate performance which led to a hastily thrown together Kamala Harris campaign (and up until then, she was seen by many as a campaign liability) which led to Donald Trump getting elected.
Here’s an article about what a hot mess Kamala’s brief 2020 presidential campaign was:
Just in case you didn’t read the article and odds are extremely good you didn’t, here’s what a Harris campaign staffer had to say about that 2020 campaign:
“Campaigns have highs and lows, mistakes and miscalculations. But because we have refused to confront our mistakes, foster an environment of critical thinking and honest feedback, or trust the expertise of talented staff, we find ourselves making the same unforced errors over and over.”
Sounds a lot like me about five paragraphs ago.
Refusal to admit mistakes also meant Kamala couldn’t publicly criticize the by-then deeply unpopular President Biden and when she was asked what she would do differently than Joe, Kamala said:
“Not a thing comes to mind.”
Which the Republicans immediately jumped on:
“Hey, if you don’t like how things are going under Joe Biden, a vote for Kamala is a vote for more of the same and by the way, our candidate is promising Peace in Our Time, Pot In Every Chicken and Flying Cars just like they had on the Jetsons.”
The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class and unions (if you don’t believe me, just ask Bernie Sanders) in favor of sucking up to rich donors and Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn’t get the minimum wage raised even though they had 12 years to do it. And if you’re not going to offer economic reasons to vote Democratic (and economics are the one issue that will unite Whites and Blacks and Men and Women and Gays and Straights and Michigan and Ohio State) then all you’re offering are supposedly moral reasons like:
“Vote for our candidate, she’s a woman and bi-racial!”
But don’t be surprised when the country you keep saying is sexist and racist is in fact sexist and racist.
It’s obviously possible for a Black man to become president once every 249 years, but when it comes to winning elections—in many cases—women and minorities have to swim upstream and while that’s definitely unfair, it’s also true.
But when it comes to winning elections versus being politically correct, all too often the Democrats would rather be politically correct which is how you wind up running Hillary Clinton, a person with an uncanny ability to irritate the living fuck out of everyone and that may include people she’s married to.
So if you’re looking for someone to blame for Donald Trump’s presidency, feel free to blame a few cartoons among my avalanche of anti-Trump drawings, but I’d save some of that finger-pointing for the Democrats who would rather blame voters than admit they ran flawed and unpopular candidates and blew off their natural supporters (blue-collar people and unions) and when those people think they have more in common with a billionaire who lives on a golf course than the Democrats, the Democrats may need to adjust their message.
But in far too many cases the Democrats are happy to sit on the sidelines and tell everybody how awful Donald Trump is and by the way, send us some money so we can continue to jack shit about that.
(Man, I sound bitter, don’t I?)
Probably because if the Democrats don’t admit their mistakes and get their shit together Donald Trump is going to suspend the Constitution and run for a third term or have one of his moron sons run in his place or maybe it’ll be Vice President and Maybelline eye-liner spokesmodel J.D. Vance and while any of those options would provide me with great cartoon material, I kinda feel bad for the rest of you.
Today’s Lesson
When the Democrats screw up don’t expect me to ignore it, considering what they’ve accomplished so far don’t expect the Trumpers to “fix” elections and as that great philosopher Forrest Gump often said: “Stupid is as stupid does” and if you Google what the hell does that mean (which I just did) the AI overview says:
“A person’s actions and behavior ultimately reveal their intelligence or lack thereof, rather than their appearance or claims.”
So it’s pretty clear President Forrest Gump would not have made Pete Hegseth Secretary of Defense and President Forrest Gump sound like a big improvement on what we have now and if you’re currently thinking, “But Forrest Gump is a fictional character” I have a question for you:
Donald Trump isn’t?
As always, hang in there.
Yeah, I cringed when Harris said she wouldn't change a thing from Biden's admin. WTH, her team & the Dem's didn't read the room so well.
Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of how clueless the Democrats were (and still are). Numerous polls & news stories at that time were about how much voters were looking for change that year, and here comes Trump, which, if nothing else, certainly represented “change” to the point where he was able to secure the Republican nomination.
So who do the Democrats choose? Certainly not the “change” candidate they had staring them in the face, no, they nominate a candidate as far from that as possible, a candidate whom, just like we can’t get enough presidents with the last name of Bush, we need more with the last name of Clinton in the white house. Worse, because of literally decades of attacks by republicans, she was virtually unique as being the one nominee that Republicans who did NOT want to vote for Trump simply couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either, so guess who they voted for instead?
And here we are now, and this is why.