Our National Priorities

Here in the United States of America, the Greatest Country in the History of the Universe and if you don’t believe it just ask us:

• 34 million Americans people live in poverty.

• Over half a million American people are homeless.

• 54 million Americans are going hungry.

• 43 million American adults are illiterate.

• And we recently set a record with over 7,000 hate crimes in a single year.

You can quibble with the numbers, but whether it’s 32 or 42 or 130 million adult Americans who can’t read (sources vary), it’s still a metric shitload of Americans who don’t know what this sentence just said.

We have some large and obvious problems which you’d think we’d want to solve right away, but instead Republicans are busy making sure the election fraud that didn’t happen in 2020 never happens again.

The Big Lie

The Big Lie is a propaganda tool used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and just in case you were dozing off in that World History class, here’s how it works:

You tell and repeat a lie so big that nobody thinks anyone would have the balls to make it up, especially Hitler because according to WWII-era songwriters he only had one of them.

Hitler lied about the Jews being behind pretty much every bad thing that ever happened to a German (I lost my car keys, obviously a Jew took them) and kept repeating that lie until it became ingrained in the German people’s minds and I’d write more about how simple-minded you have to be for that kind of Big Lie propaganda to work, but I need to finish this up so I can book my trip to Disneyland, “The Happiest Place on Earth.”

Which reminds me of a crass and infantile joke that I just remembered when I looked up Disneyland’s slogan:

Q: Why did Mickey Mouse divorce Minnie?

A: Because she was fucking Goofy.

(See? I told you it was crass and infantile, but you kept reading and my research indicates a solid 47% of you will repeat that joke sometime in the future. The other 53% will have to visit a proctologist so he or she can remove the stick up your ass, which is a horrible thing for me to say about people nice enough to read what I write, but too classy to repeat a crude joke, so let me try to distract you from my fox-paw with an amusing anecdote.)

True-Disney-Related-Story Alert

Back when newspapers had money to throw around, they employed political cartoonists and those cartoonists had a yearly convention and one year it was held in Orlando, Florida and since we were in the neighborhood, Disney World sent Mickey Mouse to one of our receptions.

The San Diego Chicken and maybe the Phillie Phanatic are physically talented enough to put across an emotion while having their head stuck inside a beach ball and wearing a costume the size of a phone booth, but most mascots just jump around and wave their arms in undecipherable antics that have the rest of us asking: “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Give ‘em a break, not everybody can be Marcel Marceau.

I’ve also heard a lot of those mascots have young girls inside because they tend to be smaller and can fit in the costumes which gives me disturbingly erotic thoughts about Mr. Met.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Anyway…

Mickey was flouncing around our reception and me and another cartoonist who would probably rather remain anonymous (because Bill DeOre of Dallas, Texas, former cartoonist of the Dallas Morning News and probably in the phone book if you want to call him and complain, would rather not have his name involved) started screwing around with Mickey and I said: “You’re not supposed to talk, are you?”

Mickey shook his or her head and I said: “We’ll make you talk!”

Then one of us (I think it was me) got him/her in a hammerlock and started yelling: “Talk, you little rat!” and I think the guy who definitely wasn’t Bill tried to put Mickey in a headlock, but had problems because Mickey’s head was too big, all of which Mickey apparently found funny because while there was a rule against talking, there didn’t seem to be a rule to stop Mickey from laughing his or her ass off.

Alcohol might have been a factor.  

Back to the Big Lie propaganda technique

OK, so Donald Trump keeps claiming he got cheated out of the presidency despite those claims being rejected by Democratic and Republican election officials, his own Justice and Homeland Security departments and every court except the one presided over by Judge Judy. (I think I already used that joke, but it’s pretty good so I repeated it.)

Nevertheless…

According to a recent poll a majority of Republicans believe Trump got cheated and half of the Republican polled believe the January 6th attack on the Capitol was largely non-violent or staged by left-wingers trying to make Trump look bad which is clearly ridiculous because Trump needs absolutely no help in that area.

They also wouldn’t mind buying a bridge if you happen to have one for sale.

Despite the lack of evidence, state-level Republicans have used Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud to push ballot restrictions because – as has been said many times before – if you can’t beat ‘em, change the rules.

Bottom line: Republicans want to make it hard for certain people to vote because those people tend to vote for Democrats and I assume Democrats would do the same thing if they thought they could get away with restricting voter rights in Beverly Hills.

The Emperor’s New Clothes and Liz Cheney

In 1837 Hans Christian Anderson published a story called “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in which a vain and gullible emperor is taken in by some con-artist tailors who tell him they’re going to make him a suit of clothes and the suit’s material is invisible to anyone who is stupid or incompetent.

That being the case, everyone – including the Emperor – pretends to see the clothes which eventually led to analytics ruining baseball.

(OK, I may have let my personal prejudices leak in there just a bit, so ignore the second half of the above sentence assuming you’re not one of the millions of Americans who can’t read and if that’s the case, feel free to ignore the entire sentence.)

Moving on.

The Emperor and all the people who pretended to see his clothes were exposed when a small child saw the Emperor walk by buck-ass-naked and cried out: “Hey, is that the Royal Penis?” In Han’s version of the story everyone then admitted that the Emperor was nude and felt embarrassed by the child’s honesty.

Fat chance.

This story was part of a series called Fairy Tales Told for Children which is an extremely accurate title because in the real world people would have continued to insist they saw the Emperor’s clothes, asked where they could get an outfit just like it and the child would have lost his position as a House Republican leader because in reality people don’t like it when you point out that they’re behaving like idiots.  

Trust me on that.

In my long career of Pointing Out Fairly Obvious Stuff, nobody has ever said:

“Thanks, man. I really had my head up my own ass for a while, but you pointing out that I was saying one thing while doing another really straightened me out.”

Instead, those people leave snotty comments on websites or cancel their subscriptions or make anonymous phone calls to tell you you’re a jerk even though you’re not the one making anonymous crank calls to complete strangers in which the caller is too embarrassed to reveal his or her name.

When boiled down, their basic complaint is a cartoon I drew with my name on it doesn’t reflect their point of view.

How dare I?

Sometimes these cartoons write themselves and the fact that Liz Cheney lost her leadership position because she wouldn’t bow down to Donald Trump was one of those occasions. These days, if you want to be a leader in the Republican Party, you need to be spineless and do what everybody else is doing and say you see the Emperor’s New Clothes.

And now I need to get to work Pointing Out Fairly Obvious Stuff about the CDC decision to drop mask mandates for people who are fully vaccinated.

Stay tuned.

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