Rally 'Round the Flag

So Jimmy Carter dies and Joe Biden orders American flags to be flown at half-staff – a traditional sign of mourning – for one full month, which is also the traditional half-staff-flag-flying time period when presidents or ex-presidents die and I looked it up and according to the internet, that’s how long flags were at half-staff when Ronald Reagan passed away.

And when George H.W. Bush died, then-President Donald Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff for – you guessed it – 30 days.

And according to an article from the Burlington Free Press (we’ll see how long that “Free Press” thing continues after Monday’s Inauguration) the 30-day half-staff mourning period was set by yet another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.

And according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, how long the flag stays at half-mast depends on who dies. For instance:

• Vice presidents, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Speaker of the House get 10 days…

• Associate Justices, members of the Cabinet, the president pro tempore of the Senate, the majority and minority leader of the Senate, the majority and minority leader of the House get from death until burial…

• And the Head of Internal Revenue Service gets a brisk 30 seconds and all U.S. citizens are invited to the funeral to stand in line and poke the corpse with a stick to make sure he’s dead.

OK, so 30 days for Carter is traditional, no big deal, nothing to see here, until – in a fit of Petulant Presidential Pettiness worthy of a cranky 2-year-old who skipped his afternoon nap – Donald Trump realized the flags would still be at half-mast on his Inauguration Day and worried that Democrats would turn it into a joke:

“Hey, look, everybody! We’re mourning Trump being President!”

To be fair (occasionally…I wouldn’t want it to be permanent policy) that’s just the kind of joke I’d make in a cartoon, but if you’re so thin-skinned you’re changing national policies because of what some juvenile cartoonist might do, it’s a good sign maybe you shouldn’t be president.

Nevertheless..

Donald Trump stamped his foot and held his breath until he turned Red (if he held it until he turned Blue the Democrats might laugh at that too) and a number of our “leaders,” who seem to have the backbones of overripe bananas, changed a policy that has been in place since Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency and kissed Donald Trump’s ass by ordering the flags to be flown at full staff on his Inauguration Day.

Which I think is a bad idea, so I drew a cartoon demonstrating the right way to fly the flag when Donald Trump becomes president once again.

P.S. Just in case you’re not up on your flag protocol and so few of us are, flying the flag upside down is a sign of distress and extreme danger and if people are going to continue to kiss Trump’s ass and change any rule he doesn’t like in an effort to suck up to him (and get ready, they will) a sign of distress seemed appropriate.

So if a rule is inconvenient you get it changed or hire lawyers to get around it or pressure someone to look the other way while you break it and do that often enough and you might begin to think the rules don’t apply to you and you can do pretty much anything you like including, but not limited to:

• Avoiding the draft

• Banging porn stars

• Falsifying business records

• Being convicted of 34 felonies and not being fined or going to jail

And in your spare time…

• Encouraging your followers to overthrow the government.

And whether you like it or not, so far Donald Trump has been right about all that – apparently he can do whatever he feels like doing – so it’s not out of character for him to announce he’s planning to rename the Gulf of Mexico and start calling it the Gulf of America, annex Canada and make it the 51^st state and then buy Greenland or take it by force if necessary and while he’s at it, maybe do the same thing with the Panama Canal.

And these are countries that, at least up until now, we got along with.

Anyway…

The first cartoon in this section was based on the premise that the only countries Trump hasn’t already insulted are fictional, but if they were real, with Donald Trump’s World Class diplomatic skills, we would probably soon be at war with Groucho Marx and Freedonia and if you don’t get that reference you need to stop reading this immediately and go watch Duck Soup (which in 1933 was slang for something that was easy to do, although it seems pretty hard on the ducks) and to get you started here’s a clip of Groucho explaining the rules of his new administration through song and dance:

As you may have noticed some of Groucho’s rules may also apply to the Second Trump Administration although I doubt they’ll be presented in such an entertaining manner, but if Donald Trump starts dancing around while singing about his plans for the next four years, I’ll enjoy Inauguration Day a lot more than I currently intend to.

In ice hockey “checking” is using your body to “separate an opponent from the puck” by knocking the living snot out of them and I unintentionally depicted an “illegal check” because you can only check someone with a puck and I neglected to draw one.

But upon further review I decided my oversight was OK because if Donald Trump played hockey and wanted to check someone, an illegal check seems quite likely.

In any case…

As you’ve probably already heard, Meta (the people behind Facebook and Instagram and the eventual World Dominance by their AI Robots) will no longer use third-party fact-checking and will instead count on users of their platforms to offer corrections, but as I discovered when writing about baseball, that’s a really really bad idea because generally speaking, normal people often have severe cases of OSTD (Other Shit To Do). Which means social media is overrun with unemployed people who occasionally skip their meds, live in their parents’ basement and play video games while wear nothing but boxer shorts all day.

Timeout for an Underwear Anecdote

I may have told this story before (that’s a safe bet because at my age I’ve told every story before) but after getting fired by the San Diego Union I was unemployed in San Diego, but still working as a freelance cartoonist from my apartment and with the mild Southern California weather (this was before the state caught on fire) would often wear nothing but boxer shorts.

It was kind of like my own personal pandemic: I wasn’t going anywhere or seeing anyone, so why put on pants?

But then one morning I went to check my mailbox which was a brisk 100-yard walk away from my apartment and while I was getting my mail out of my mailbox realized I was still wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

My first thought was: “Thank god I’m not a Tightey-Whitey guy.”

And my second thought was: “I really need to get a job.”

Because jobs not only provide a paycheck and health insurance and co-workers to bitch with and about, but they also provide us with a reason to shave, shower and get dressed (hopefully in that order) and when the pandemic forced people to work from home, a former co-worker told me about a guy who showed up for a video conference stark naked because while he knew he could see other people on his computer, for some reason he didn’t realize other people could see him.

So go ahead and get dressed every morning, people.

Little-known historical fact: the Fall of the Western Roman Empire dates back to 476 AD when the last Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, started showing up for work wearing nothing but boxer shorts (the above sculpture depicts the day he showed up at the Coliseum looking like a D-bag with his sweater tied around his neck) and pretty soon everyone was copying him and standards fell and they started playing rock and roll and doing the Peppermint Twist and grew those fucked-up lumberjack beards that for some reason men seem to think women like and somewhere in there Rome was sacked by the Vandals for a 12-yard loss and Romulus had to leave the game and go into one of those little blue tents they now have on the sidelines so fans can’t see the Horse Tranquilizer Injections they use to get players back on the field.

(You see a guy limp off the field, supported by a coach and a trainer and three minutes later he comes back in the game doing cartwheels: did you think that was due to a pep talk?)

And Now A Brief History of Fact-Checking

According to the Associated Press, “fact-checking” is an odd concept because theoretically all journalists and news organizations should be doing it already, but it became a “thing” about three decades ago to counter “he said-she said” stories.

“He said-she said” stories are the ones where a reporter quotes someone with a degree in biology talking about evolution and evens things up by quoting someone with a degree in nothing whose religion requires speaking in tongues and caressing live rattlesnakes and then the reporter acts like both opinions are equally valid:

“The professor whose been studying this issue his entire life says evolution is real and irrefutable, but Billy Bob the Faith-Healing Hillbilly begs to differ.”

Fact-checkers also monitor claims made in political ads and debates, but by 2012 were under attack, mostly from Republicans claiming fact-checkers were biased, but as Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, pointed out in that AP article:

“That attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”

And if you really want to be depressed, the AP article also pointed out that without fact-checking, politicians have even more reason to lie especially because Donald Trump has demonstrated lying works.

So instead of fighting it I suggest we all go with the flow and start making up our own lies because when you get in an argument with somebody who isn’t bogged down by facts and feels free to make shit up, you better start quoting non-existent Bible verses and Fictional Treaties and things the Mahatma Gandhi never said and explaining the Fall of the Roman Empire was due to inferior offensive line protection and let’s hope the Chiefs get that problem worked out by tomorrow because Patrick Mahomes is getting hit way too often and we don’t want to see him get sacked by Vandals or Texans or, even worse, Vandalizing Texans.

Today’s Lesson

Donald Trump is going to do whatever the hell he feels like doing because the brown-nosers in Washington won’t stand up to him, Canada might want to consider building a wall of their own, bad policies are best presented through interpretive dance, boxer shorts caused the Fall of the Roman Empire and because fact-checking is a thing of the past, feel free to start lying your ass off.

I know I will.

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