The DOGE Days of Winter

So me and a buddy meet in Denver, Colorado for a ski vacation and we’re driving to the ski resort when he starts complaining about paying taxes and how the government has never ever never done anything for him, so spotting what appears to be a very large fish in a very small barrel I point out that the government helped build the airport we just flew into, the highway we were driving on and the ski resort we were driving to.

Because he’s got a sense of humor and the all-too-rare ability to laugh at himself (which is a big part of why he’s my buddy) he starts laughing and says: “Yeah, but other than that…”

Which reminds me of this classic scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which they ask what have the Romans ever done for us?

Like pretty much everybody in the US of A I complain about the government whenever it wants me to pay taxes or calls me for jury duty or requires me to stand in line for a taxpayer funded pre-flight airport prostate exam.

And yes, the government can definitely be inefficient and wasteful and suffer from fraud and abuse and lazy employees and poorly thought-out projects and (fill-in-the-blank with your personal complaint) but when I think about it, to one degree or another, all the companies I ever worked for had the same problems.

For example:

At one point the people (or maybe it was just one person) who ran the Kansas City Star decided we needed our own “signature coffee” and had employees try different coffee samples and vote on the one we liked best which was one of those “Rearranging-Deck-Chairs-On-The-Titanic” corporate exercises when what the employees really cared about was the ice water swirling around our ankles.

When you look at what private industry gets up to – like SpaceX wanting a flight attendant on their private jet to give company executives “massages” – you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that private industry is way more efficient than government.

Look at all the overpaid CEOs who fire hard-working employees so the CEO can afford to get yet another divorce and marry his kids’ nanny that he’s been banging on the side for the past 13 months and then they can move to his private island and live Happily Ever After which means right up until the former nanny finds out he’s now banging the housekeeper.

Governments and corporations are made up of people and as you may have noticed already (and if you haven’t, write this down) nobody’s perfect.

When we think about it (and we mostly don’t) while none of it works perfectly, our government builds roads and schools and provides police protection and court systems and airports to fly into and parks to enjoy and I could keep on going, but right now let’s get to today’s point because government (at least theoretically) also tries to stop greedy, short-sighted assholes from polluting our water or drilling for oil in the middle of the Redwoods or selling harmful products to an unsuspecting public and while it certainly doesn’t prevent all that stuff, just imagine how much worse things would be if government didn’t prevent any of that stuff.

Turns out you won’t have to imagine what would happen if all the greedy short-sighted assholes were turned loose because due to the efforts of Elon Musk and DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) it looks like we’re in the process of finding out.

If You Like Robbing Banks, Fire The Cops

Google “have Elon Musk’s companies ever been fined” and you’ll be offered numerous articles about lawsuits and fraud and shitty working conditions and according to the following document from the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Department of Labor had over a dozen open investigations into Tesla and SpaceX regarding unfair labor practices, safety violations and discriminatory work practices when Trump fired the DOL Inspector General and the Chair of the National Labor Relations Board and effectively shut down those investigations and that’s just one example.

Here’s the link for more:

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02.13_fact_sheet_re_musk_investigations.pdf

It’s a two-page document and if you read it, what immediately becomes clear is that while Trump and Musk present their firings as making government more efficient, in reality they’re getting rid of the people who enforce the rules that stop them from doing whatever the hell they feel like doing whenever the hell they feel like doing it, which is what led to the cartoons you just saw.

And Now A Few Words About Depicting a Crucifixion

As I write this I have no idea if my syndicate sent that crucifixion cartoon to client newspapers or, if they sent it out, whether any client newspaper used it. If you’ve been following along you know a cartoon I drew about flying a flag upside down (a sign of distress) on Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day caused some people to get their Fruit of the Looms in a bunch and the Latrobe Bulletin vowed to never print another political cartoon.

Because let’s face it, who really wants to see opinions on their opinion page?

Which brings up an interesting question: why go to an opinion page to see other people’s opinions and then get upset when you got exactly what you were looking for? It’s like going to a Chinese restaurant and getting pissed off because they served Orange Chicken instead of tacos.

If you want some good news – and these days who doesn’t? – a lot of readers that hadn’t seen the offensive flag cartoon said they now wanted to it and I got a significant boost in subscribers so as I’ve been saying all my career, controversy is good business if you don’t mind pissing off a significant percentage of the population and I definitely don’t because a significant percentage of the population pissed me off first.

Having said all that, we’ll get to the point I meant to make before I started pontificating (which may or may not make me a pontiff, the rules are murky): is it in bad taste to depict a crucifixion in a cartoon?

I’ll answer with another question: Is it in bad taste to depict a crucifixion on a car’s dashboard?

Or a coffee cup?

Or a trucker’s hat?

All those products are sold in Christian stores so if you didn’t think it was blasphemous to make money by putting Jesus on everything but a stripper’s G-string I can’t get too worried about depicting a crucifixion in a cartoon about actual living people who are being sacrificed so Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t have to worry about paying fines for all the shady bullshit they get up to.

Timeout For A True Baseball Story

That “Jesus on a stripper’s G-string” line reminded me of a 100% true baseball story, but as is so often the case I’m going to leave out the names to protect the guilty.

Anyway…

At the end of every season ballplayers have to empty their lockers and ship all their personal crap back home and a ballplayer described seeing a teammate packing up his stack of Bibles and on top of the stack of Bibles were some Glow-In-The-Dark anal beads.

I was told that story to illustrate what a bunch of hypocrites some of the team’s Bible Thumpers were, but the part I fixated on was the anal beads glowing in the dark which made me think whoever came up with that idea was a goddamn genius. Think of all the products that would be vastly improved if they glowed in the dark and that certainly includes sex toys you don’t want the hotel maid to find the next morning and by now I’m guessing I’ve put an image in your head that will be hard to erase and all I can say in my defense is:

“You’re welcome.”

As you may have already heard our Petulant President decided that the Gulf of Mexico should henceforth be called the Gulf of America and the most surprising thing about this sentence is I just used the word “henceforth” for the first time in my life.

No idea why “henceforth” suddenly sprang to mind except I’m reading Patrick O’Brian’s naval warfare novels set during the Napoleonic Wars (I’m on book nine of 20) and the characters use a lot of ornate 18^th Century dialogue like “I wish you joy” instead of “Good for you” and “I am with child” instead of “I can’t wait” and “Never in Life” instead of “Not while I’m alive” and henceforth I plan on never ever using “henceforth” again.

Gadzooks, it makes me sound like a nattering nabob of negativity.

(A line inspired by Spiro Agnew, a name that may or may not be an anagram so get to work on that and see what you come up with.)

The lesson here is be careful what you read, watch or listen to and the people you associate with because all that stuff is going to soak into your brain and make you smarter or dumber which goes a long way in explaining why people buy MAGA hats and Trump coffee mugs and Trump Victory Blankets (whatever the fuck those are) and if you want to read about our Patriotic President cashing in on the presidency with 168 different products sold in the Trump Store, here you go:

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/trump-store-launched-168-products-to-profit-off-presidential-transition-period/

So where were we?

Right, Trump and the Gulf of America.

The rest of the world didn’t seem to care what Donald Trump wanted and wasn’t going to change their maps just because Donnie stamped his foot and held his breath and if you want to know how to handle a tantrum thrown by a brat you can’t do a whole lot better than Andy Griffith:

And because the rest of the world kept right on referring to that body of water as the Gulf of Mexico, the Associated Press did the same thing, so in retaliation Trump started banning the AP from White House functions and the latest thing I read said he wouldn’t let them on Air Force One either.

So this is the guy the Republicans are sucking up to, but Democrats find loathsome and when I hear the words “Gulf of America” the cartoon you just looked at is what I imagine.

BTW:

When people say things have never been this bad, don’t forget we had a Civil War which killed approximately 620,000 people and the McCarthy Era in which anyone Joseph McCarthy didn’t like was called a communist and over 10,000 people lost their jobs and we weren’t exactly getting along all that great during the Vietnam War either.

I’d like to think, “This too shall pass” and if I’m wrong – which I often am – bake me a cake with a file inside and mail it to whatever reeducation camp I’m sent to.

P.S.

That last bit assumes I’m being watched and if I am, I wonder how long it will take for the Trump Store to start selling Trump Glow-In-The-Dark Anal Beads and when they do I definitely want my cut.

Have a good weekend.

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