The Free Lunch

So Donald Trump decides to start a war with Iran without getting congressional approval (although I’m pretty sure he got the okey-dokey and a high five from Israel) and tells everybody it will last “four-to-five weeks” and all that happened five months ago.

The reasons for fighting the war have varied, depending on what random thought is floating through Trump’s head at the time he’s asked and we seem to have settled on keeping the Strait of Hormuz open even though it was open before Trump attacked Iran.

In more recent news, Defense Secretary and National Bonehead, Pete Hegseth went to Congress and said the war has cost $37.5 billion so far and according Reuters News Agency:

“It was unclear how the Pentagon arrived at the figure.”

I’ll take a wild guess and say a dart board was involved.

And just last month Trump asked for $90 billion in additional funding and they also need another bajillionkatrillion dollars in the near future and the point I wanted to make in the cartoon is that the people doing all the spending aren’t paying the bills.

We are.

And we’re not only paying for it, according to polls, the Iran War is the most unpopular war in our history since polling started, although I gotta think the Civil War would have polled badly had anyone thought to ask the participants:

“On a scale of 1-to-10 how interested are you in walking to Georgia and shooting your first cousin? And by the way, he’ll be shooting back.”

So we’re paying for something we don’t really want which sounds like about 93% of the channels currently available on YouTube TV.

Whenever Donald Trump or someone in his administration does something goofy and someone says, “You can’t make this stuff up” I respond: “With these guys in charge, you don’t have to.”

In a move so colossally dumb that people were Googling it to find out if it was actually real: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth decided that male military personnel need to be tested for low testosterone and if they don’t have testosterone squirting out their ears, get their manliness tanks topped off.

When asked what concern Hegseth was hoping to address by shooting up troops with testosterone, the Pentagon referred to Hegseth’s remarks that mentioned keeping the troops “strong, resilient and capable” and that the rigors of the modern battlefield demand “maximum psychological and mental readiness” and then Hegseth added, “I think it would be awesome if they all looked as buff as those dudes wearing leather Speedos in The 300, which isn’t even the slightest bit gay.”

(Just kidding, he didn’t actually say that stuff about psychological readiness.)

When asked by the Associated Press, the Pentagon did not respond to questions about just what scientific studies justified the testosterone testing move.

Just in case you were wondering…

Testosterone declines naturally as men age which results in erectile dysfunction, low libido, mood changes, weight gain and a crippling lack of desire to mow lawns, trim hedges or give a flying fuck.

For years, experts have debated whether testosterone should be replaced, but Robert Kennedy Jr. thinks it should, which pretty much cements my suspicion that it’s a bad idea.

Y’know…

As a man with a 100-year-old mother who doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself all that much the last decade or so, I’ve come to think we’re living longer than we should and I found an article that says we’re not only living longer (life expectancy is now 79 years unless you were born in Gaza, then it’s more like 79 days) we’re living better.

Whoever wrote this article definitely didn’t talk to my mom or they would have gotten an earful about the deterioration of her eyesight and how her dentures don’t fit, both of which she adamantly refuses to do anything about because endless complaining is her new hobby and if she didn’t have problems what would she talk about?

OK, so we want to live longer, but don’t accept what happens when we do.

We still expect raging hard-ons (I was going to write “men” expect raging hard-ons, but from what I hear about retirement homes, apparently there are a few 75-year-old women who wouldn’t mind seeing one either) and we want hair that isn’t gray on the top of our heads and don’t like wrinkles either, so we dab Preparation H around our eyes (it reduces swelling, but makes us look like assholes) and I’d go on, but I’m definitely part of the problem because I don’t want to die either.

As my mom said when asked who wants to live to 100 anyway:

“A 99-year-old.”

So no matter how old we get, it seems like we’re always going to want one more day because we’re just about to start living right and lose 20 pounds and get in shape and apologize to all the friends that need apologies (which in my case is every single one of them) and I’m guessing I’ll be thinking all that on my deathbed.

Wait a second...

I spend way more time on my couch, so I’ll probably be thinking that on my deathcouch and let’s hope my family finds me before I start to smell because it’s a really really nice couch that I spent quite a bit of money on, so while they’ll probably put me out with the recycling, they’re going to want to keep that couch.

Just in case you missed it, here’s a story about buying it:

On the upside, Hegseth’s testosterone fixation provided me yet another easy cartoon idea and as far as I’m concerned you just can’t have too many of those.

In an effort to fill the bottomless pit of insecurity that Donald Trump is obviously living in, some ass-kisser at the U.S. Mint decided that what this nation really needs is a $1 coin with Donald Trump’s image on it.

In announcing the coin’s creation, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the coin:

“Celebrates the strength of American values, and the promise of a nation dedicated to preserving the freedom for all…unless you’re a woman, a Black dude selling cigarettes on the sidewalk, observably gay, or an immigrant doing a shitty job us White Americans don’t want to do and then you’ll be lucky if ICE doesn’t shoot you during a routine traffic stop.”

About halfway through the above cartoon I thought “I don’t know…this is a pretty sophomoric gag” but then thought, “I’m drawing it about a pretty sophomoric guy” and finished it.

Unfortunately for me…

As I was about to send the sophomoric coin cartoon to the syndicate, a better idea occurred to me so I drew it in a hurry and here it is:

An Explanation, Not An Excuse

There are turning points in our lives, but generally speaking we only recognize them when looking back and looking back a Big Moment for me was the time I was working in advertising and drawing a cartoon of a VW bus.

I didn’t like the way it was coming out so I chucked the first attempt and started another, but then looked at the time sheet I had to fill out (the advertising agency charged in 15-minute increments) and realized there was no way to justify the 45 minutes I’d already spent on the first cartoon.

Projects have a budget and if I exceeded the time allotted for the bus cartoon, I’d cost the agency money and they weren’t all that thrilled with me to begin with. So I went and got the first attempt out of the trash, wiped off the coffee grounds and finished it.

A lesson I took with me to newspapers.

They may exist (if so, they won’t last long) but I’ve never heard of a newspaper reporter with writer’s block; deadlines don’t allow it. At some point you have to start writing whether you feel like it or not, have a good idea or don’t; you just have to get going or you’ll miss your deadline.

A lesson summed up by former Kansas City Star baseball writer, Bob Dutton:

“It’s not the best I can do, but it’s the best I can do right now.”

Which is pretty much what I was thinking when I drew that coin cartoon.

BTW: Just like a whole bunch of other stuff Trump has done; minting the coin is probably illegal because it violates a federal law that says you can’t put a sitting president’s image on a coin because you don’t want a bunch of money with a guy’s picture on it and then find out the guy’s an asshole, cheats on his taxes, abuses women, uses the presidency to enrich himself or even worse, gets convicted of 34 felonies.

But already we know all that about Trump and we’re putting him on a coin anyway.

In what seems like a highly-appropriate detail: the Trump coin does not contain “precious metals” but does have a “gold-like finish.” Hey, just like Rosie Ruiz and now those of you who aren’t older than dirt need to Google her.

So Trump’s coin is just as phony as the 3-dollar bill I put him on.

According to the clearly untrustworthy internet, Samuel Johnson said: “A pun is the lowest form of humor.”

And Oscar Levant said: “A puns it the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.”

I looked it up and Samuel Johnson was a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor and lexigographer (creator of dictionaries) but nowhere does it say Sammy was a standup comedian, so he sounds like one of those killjoys who stand around at office parties and make snotty remarks about anyone else’s attempt at a joke, but would eventually get shitfaced and hook up with Debbie Downer in the supply room and when he got caught with his silk knickers around his ankles and someone quipped, “Hey, maybe we should start calling her Debbie Go Downer!” Sam would pop off with that line about puns.

All of which I hope distracts you from the fact that I don’t consider the topical depression cartoon all that great and if you need to re-read that bit about deadlines, go ahead, I’ll wait here.

Having the same attention span as a two-year-old on a sugar high, despite the war with Iran cranking back up, the Russia/Ukraine war continuing, gas prices going through the roof, inflation continuing to rise and the adoption of the highly-questionable electronic strike zone in the Big Leagues, Donald Trump has decided it was time to do something about our mortal enemy…

Canada.

Trump has decided a 50% tariff on Canadian goods will go in effect on August 19^th and the AP lists the products we get from them:

Honey, liquor, cement, dairy products, hockey sticks and hockey players.

Oh, yeah, clearly our Scrooge McDuck Money Bin will be overflowing once those Canadian tariffs kick in.

Today’s Lesson

Back when Hillary was running against Trump, former Sports Illustrated writer John Garrity and I were having lunch when John pointed out that Hillary was getting hammered over what happened at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya (an incident she handled poorly) but Trump was getting a mostly free ride because he had so many scandals, foibles and fuck-ups (which would make a great title for a Steely Dan album) that the media couldn’t decide which one to focus on.

And even if they did decide to focus on one, there would be three more by the next day.

So if you’re looking for today’s lesson, here it is: if you’re going to screw up, screw up a lot and screw up so often your critics can’t keep up and if you do that long enough you too might wind up on a coin containing no precious metals.

It’s something to shoot for…

And at.

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