The Cartoons Are Back!

Whether you wanted them or not...

OK, it seems that somebody went overboard writing about the Beatles and I could tell I was getting carried away when I was telling a friend about all their accomplishments and she went from actually being interested to giving those non-committal “uh-huh” and “really” and “you don’t say” responses, so I started making shit up and claimed the Beatles created Daylight Savings Time and Ringo Starr walked on the moon and George Harrison invented the lightbulb, just to see if she was still paying attention.

She was…barely.

In any case, my recent obsession with the Beatles means I have ignored a bunch of cartoons so today we’ll make up lost ground which will probably piss off any Conservatives who were hoping it would stay lost.

And we’ll start with…

At last count, House Republicans had approximately 372 people who want to be Speaker and none of them have the required number of votes so the House can’t do anything until the Republicans get their shit together and right now their shit seems to be spread over all 50 states and 16 U.S. territories which may or may not include certain parts of Florida.

(Hey, you visit Key West and tell me you feel like you’re still in the United States which, come to think of it, is one of the reasons I like it so much.)

The American political system is built on the premise that nobody will get everything they want (which doesn’t apply to billionaires because you could get a majority of U.S. Senators to serve as Jeff Bezos’ Love Slaves) so you gotta compromise, which the House Republican Extremists are unwilling to do.

If the Republicans can’t get along with each other, what are the odds they’ll get along with the Democrats and be able to govern effectively?

An article I read on the CNN website also said Republicans can’t get anything done because way too many of them are emulating their hero – The Trumpster, which would be a great name for a villain who fights Batman – and are engaged in “stunt politics” and right now seems like a good time to look at the next cartoon:

The above cartoon was inspired by an article that said circuses were trying to make a comeback, but doing it without live animal acts.

If you say you’re “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” you’re saying you’re in a difficult situation where you to have to choose between two equally unpleasant alternatives and I would have used “rock and a hard place” but I vaguely remember using that recently, plus the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea are way more fun to draw.

The cartoon was inspired by a Kansas City Star article headline that said “After setbacks for Jordan, House looks at its options” which, as the cartoon illustrates, aren’t so hot.

According to the Oxford Language Dictionary of Phrases Nobody Under The Age of 72 Says Anymore, “There but for the grace of god go I” is a saying used to acknowledge that you’re lucky not to be in the same situation as somebody less fortunate.

(Frankly, I’m not sure God has a whole lot to do with it, but let’s move on because we have smaller fish to fry.)

The above is an example of what I consider a “contradiction” cartoon: the image and the words contradict each other. Uncle Sam is happy he isn’t in the same situation as Israel while ignoring that fact that he soon might be.

It’s easy to see the war between Israel and Hamas as something that’s happening someplace else to somebody else and doesn’t have that much effect on us, but as the cartoon points out we might get sucked in – which might be a good thing – but we ought to decide to do it, knowing the possible consequences.

We have a history of allowing ourselves to be slowly drawn into situations – first some military advisers and then some soldiers to protect the advisers and then more soldiers to support the first soldiers and then air support to protect all those soldiers – and before you know it we’ve lost over 58,000 American lives in a place we no longer seem to care about.

So here’s the difference between working for a newspaper and a syndicate:

At a newspaper you have to show your ideas to an editor and the editor will say yes or no and if they said no and I thought they were wrong I’d make an argument for publishing the cartoon anyway and if they said no again, the argument was over.

(I’d just save the sketch and use it in my slide show called The Stuff They Wouldn’t Print in hopes of embarrassing the editors for turning down such great cartoon ideas, although I’m pretty sure some people saw those questionable sketches and said, “Thank God for editors.”)

With a syndicate, I go ahead and draw the cartoon and send it in and they get to decide whether to send it on to client newspapers.

In some cases – and this was one – I wonder if someone was going to find the cartoon tasteless or insensitive, but I learned to avoid prejudging what someone was going to think because people will surprise you.

I mean just look at who Taylor Swift is dating.

Anyway…

I read several stories about Israeli intelligence failing to detect the Hamas attack and why that might have happened and the metaphor that occurred to me was getting caught with your pants down, which dovetailed with “The Gaza Strip” but I’ve got no objection to anyone finding the cartoon objectionable.

If you want to understand the above cartoon it helps to know a federal judge imposed a “narrow gag order” on Donald Trump during his election subversion case, which is one of approximately 2,724 legal cases involving Donald Trump so it’s pretty easy to get confused.

Swear to God – or whatever imaginary being you currently worship – I read about Trump’s election subversion case in Washington last Tuesday morning and by last Tuesday evening I was reading about Trump’s fraud case in New York and according to the Associated Press, he’s also got cases going in Florida and Georgia.

If Ed Sullivan was still on TV I’d look forward to seeing Trump do that thing where he keeps a bunch of plates spinning on sticks while we all watch to see what plate falls off first. (OK, that definitely needs to be a cartoon and soon will be.)

And now that I think about it, the fact that we found that kind of crap entertaining and millions of people tuned in every Sunday night to watch it means our standards of entertainment were incredibly low – “Look, dogs jumping over each other!” – and these days we need a minimum of two Manning Brothers, an NFL game and guest star Will Ferrell cracking jokes while Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce re-enact the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet to get through a Monday night.

And now you can do that thing where you watch four football games at once which seems to indicate we have developed the attention span of a meth-addicted house fly.

Anyway…

The judge in Washington barred Trump from making statements targeting prosecutors, possible witnesses, the judge’s staff and the umpiring crew working the American League Championship (and I only made one of those up) and said Trump would not be allowed to conduct a smear campaign against the prosecutor and court personnel, although Donald is still allowed to yell at his TV screen when the home plate umpire calls an obvious strike a ball.

In any case…

I imagined Uncle Sam wondering if the judge would expand the gag order and make Donald shut up all the time which isn’t going to happen and might suck for the rest of you, but provides valuable cartoon material for me.

OK, that’s it for now so try to remember all the valuable political insights I’ve offered today…

And the fact that John Lennon invented the harmonica.

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