The Final Final Four

Plus a Brief History of Hypocrisy...

Pretty much everybody (including me) wants to get your attention and one of the ways sports journalists do that is to make preseason predictions which people then argue about like they’re in a Middle East Real Estate Dispute (much more on that shortly) but completely forget once the season starts.

Face it: if anybody knew for sure who was going to win the World Series, they’d bet their house on it, which, unfortunately, is an excellent way to wind up living in a van down by the river.

(If you didn’t get that last reference, you definitely need to spend way more time watching old Chris Farley clips and being an incredibly efficient guy when it comes to wasting your time, I’ve thoughtfully provided one.)

Anyway…

The way things have been going so far this year – earthquakes, bridge collapses and really weird weather events – I decided to turn a sports journalist tradition on its head and illustrate who I hoped wouldn’t be in the Final Four.

Google “how many trials is Donald Trump involved in” and you’ll get plenty of options because numerous news organizations have decided the general public needs a guide to keep track of all the various kinds of legal dog shit our ex-President has stepped in and is now tracking on our National Carpet.  

Just in case you’re interested:

I’ve provided a trial guide from the Associated Press, but I also could have used one from the BBC, CNN, CBS, PBS, NBC, CIA, NFL, NBA, MLB, NWA or the AFL-CIO. (OK, clearly I started exaggerating for comic effect because there actually is no Trump Trial Guide from NWA and, man, does the internet dance around describing what those letters stand for.)

https://projects.apnews.com/features/2023/trump-investigations-civil-criminal-tracker/index.html

With four indictments and bond postings and gag orders and outraged ALL CAPS SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS about how unfair it is to expect Donald Trump to obey the law, it’s hard to keep track of just what legal chain saws Trump is juggling on which day, a state of confusion I tried to depict in the above cartoon. 

As noted in a previous post Donald Trump is (or at least was) short on cash and has started selling God Bless the USA Bibles for $59.99.

In a Bible-promoting video Trump said “We must make America pray again” and if he includes all the prayers being offered that he never gets anywhere near the White House again, I think you could safely say: “Mission accomplished.”

As soon as I wrote that last paragraph I thought, “That’s a cartoon and I need to draw it” so I did and here it is.

Trump also said “It’s my favorite book” but if it’s his favorite book you’d think he might want to actually read it and there’s pretty much zero evidence that Trump has ever read the Bible or, if he has, absorbed any of its lessons.

Feel free to question any of the above conclusions, but if you really want to criticize my Bible cartoon you might want to ask what year the TV screen I depicted was manufactured.

Because pretty much everyone in America with the exception of my 98-year-old mother has a flat-screen TV and flat screens don’t have that distinctive TV tube shape so I fudged and drew one anyway to let readers know they were viewing a TV ad.

This is the kind of all-consuming important stuff cartoonists think about instead of trivial issues like when our taxes are due or how many days ago we were supposed to pick up our kids from soccer practice.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-god-bless-usa-bible-greenwood-2713fda3efdfa297d0f024efb1ca3003

And Now Yet Another Anecdote About My Mom

My mom lived through the Great Depression (although if you use that description she’ll ask what was so “great” about it) which means she never ever never throws anything away because you never know when you’re going to need a broken rubber band, three-and-a-half inches of dirty string or two swallows of milk that’s gone sour.

That being the case…

I come home for one of my periodic visits and I’m watching TV in her split-level house on the middle level, but the sound’s coming from downstairs and I ask what the hell and turns out the downstairs TV has a picture out, but the sound’s OK and the TV on the second level has a picture, but no sound, so she turned both TVs on at the same time.

Which means…

If you want to change the channel or adjust the volume while watching TV upstairs, you need run downstairs and make the same adjustment. Which if you think about it – and I just did – is a brilliant plan for keeping in shape, which my mom claims it’s done for her and she’s about to turn 99 so maybe she’s got a point.

She also saved approximately $2,000 because she didn’t buy a Stairmaster and would be dumbfounded (which also describes the origins of Donald Trump’s Save America PAC) by anyone who would buy an exercise machine when they have stairs in their house.

(And I just realized I could really use a broken rubber band and three-and-a-half inches of dirty string, the sour milk, not so much.)

Far be it from me to speak for All America unless All America starts paying me a decent salary and provides me with a podium, but I’m under the general impression that a lot of us of us see Israel as the Good Guys in the Middle East because all things considered they seem just a little bit less batshit crazy than the alternatives.

A Good Guy image that’s taken a beating recently and you now have college kids protesting against Israel and the way it’s conducted its fight against Hamas which would be a lot simpler if Hamas didn’t carry out terrorist attacks and then hide among civilians.

And now some Semi-Recent And Yet Forgotten History.

In one of my favorite “kids today” Grumpy Old Men stories, me and my brother went to see The Eye of the Needle – a 1981 WW2 film starring Donald Sutherland playing a German spy in England – and after the movie ended, two young women seated in front of us were having an argument and finally one of them turned around and said:

“I thought we fought Japan in World War II.”

To which I said:

“The Germans were slightly involved.”

Just in case somebody else is late to the party and needs a semi-recent history lesson (and yeah, we could go way farther back, which is a big part of the problem) here’s a story about the 1972 PLO terrorism attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and helps explain why Israel is still a bit touchy when it comes to terrorists:

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/04/1116641214/munich-olympics-massacre-hostage-terrorism-israel-germany

Short version: Israel was forced to rely on the German government to deal with the PLO terrorists, but the German government failed miserably and got all the Israeli hostages killed, which led Israel to say the hell with it, if you guys won’t deal efficiently with terrorists, we will.

Fast forward to 1976.

Israeli commandos rescued 103 hostages being held by terrorists in Uganda while the rest of the world dithered and we all thought (I’m once again speaking for All America even though it didn’t ask me to) it was pretty cool and we were grateful that somebody would do something about terrorism besides hold meetings and issue statements, so we made a movie about it.

During the raid, five of the Israeli commandos were wounded and one was killed and he was Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which might help explain why Benjamin’s such a hard ass when it comes to terrorists.  

Here’s a brief story about the Entebbe raid:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Entebbe-raid

But as you may have heard and also experienced, no good deed goes unpunished.

After the Entebbe hostage-rescuing raid, the United Nations Security Council had a meeting to consider a complaint made by the Chairman of the Organization of African Unity that charged Israel with an “act of aggression.” UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim said the raid was "a serious violation of the sovereignty of a Member State of the United Nations" and the US and the UK sponsored a resolution that condemned hijacking and deplored loss of life and reaffirmed the need to respect sovereignty and territorial integrity and see the dentist at least twice a year and while all these meetings and resolutions came to nothing, you can kinda see why Israel might say:

“Y’all can kiss our ass and by the way you’re welcome, you ungrateful hypocrites.”

(No idea why Israel has a Southern accent, but that’s the way I imagined it.)

All that is a very incomplete history of events in the Middle East, but right now not too many people are talking about why Israel might react the way it does and take such a hard line on terrorism, but all those semi-recent events were part of my thought process when I drew the cartoon.

Which was based on…

A recent Israeli Defense Forces airstrike that killed seven humanitarian workers trying to bring food to hungry Palestinians in Gaza. Pretty much everybody has condemned Israel and Israel’s top military commander admitted they screwed up and that also hurt Israel’s image which is why I drew what I did. Israel has now dismissed two of the military officers involved in the airstrike and has reprimanded three more and here’s a story about that:

https://apnews.com/article/israel-world-central-kitchen-gaza-aid-workers-

But just in case you forgot and apparently a lot of us have…

In the excellent WW2 TV series Masters of the Air about the air war in Europe, we’re reminded that the Americans used “daylight precision bombing” which meant they flew during the day and tried to hit specific targets which also meant the American bombers were easier to see and shoot down and the British said screw that and the B-17 it flew in on and were using night time “area bombing” which meant they just hit whatever they could in Germany, including civilians, because the Germans sure as shit weren’t worried about civilian casualties when they were shooting V-2 rockets into London.  

According to the internet, Allied strategic bombing killed 350,000 to 500,000 German civilians and let’s not forget we’re also the country that dropped atomic bombs on Japan and killed an estimated 214,000 Japanese, most of whom were civilians, so it’s kinda understandable if Israel thinks we’re being giant hypocrites to complain that they’re not being careful enough to avoid civilian casualties now.

https://www.icanw.org/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_bombings#:~:text=

When we do it, it’s OK; when they do it, it’s a preventable catastrophe.

And now that I’ve pissed off my daily requirement of readers, it’s time to go watch the last two episodes of Masters of the Air and get ready for tonight’s Final Four games and my pregame prediction is that Death is favored in the long run.

You can bet your house on that and if I’m wrong we can both go live in a van down by the river.

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