This Just In: Pot Criticizes Kettle

Do as we say, not as we did...

So apparently another misguided would-be assassin decided to take a shot at Donald Trump and while I think reelecting Trump would be a huge mistake, I’m not in favor of shooting him.

Ridiculing Trump: A-OK, shooting people we disagree with, not so much and last time we tried that on a large scale we had a Civil War which I’m guessing most of would like to avoid this time around if at all possible.

Here’s a link to what I had to say the first time someone took a shot at Donald Trump:

https://leejudge.substack.com/p/the-blame-game

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention which increasingly seems like a reasonable attitude…

Donald Trump and JD Vance have suggested that the Democrats’ rhetoric caused someone a few face cards short of a full deck to once again try to assassinate Trump, but Trump’s rhetoric about Nancy Pelosi ruining America is in no way responsible for yet another nut job (we seem to have an endless supply of them) showing up at her home and attacking her husband with a hammer.

Or Trump’s urging a gang of morons to “fight like hell” is in anyway responsible for the violence on January 6^th.

More recently…

Trump and Vance also take no responsibility for the bomb threats that shut down schools and locked down hospitals and closed City Hall in Springfield, Ohio after they told enormous lies about immigrants fricasseeing French poodles and charbroiling Chihuahuas.

In the original article I also pointed out that we have no shortage of people willing to wildly misinterpret what they see and hear and John Lennon’s songs are not responsible for Mark David Chapman killing him and Paul McCartney’s songs are not responsible for the Manson Family murders and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is not responsible for John Hinckley Jr. shooting Ronald Reagan.

Nevertheless:

The current Republican position is that when they say Democrats stole the 2020 election or call Kamala Harris a fascist or say the Democrats are ruining the country by allowing Mexican rapists to run wild and pet-eating immigrants are “poisoning” our blood, all that inflammatory rhetoric is justified.

But when Democrats say Donald Trump is a danger to Democracy, it isn’t.  

All those points will soon be in cartoons that I haven’t yet drawn, but will soon and in the meantime here’s an essay about a couple cartoons I have drawn.

As previously noted, during the Presidential Debate, Donald Trump made the claim that immigrants are eating other people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio which is yet another Urban Legend and if you want to see a looooong list of the batshit crazy things people believe or have believed (like Wikipedia being a good source of accurate information) here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_legends

Despite the mayor of Springfield saying there’s absolutely no truth to the rumor, people (and I use that term loosely) started calling in bomb threats and Springfield schools had to be evacuated, hospitals locked down and City Hall closed and now seems like an appropriate time to remind you that if the median IQ is 100, millions of Americans are walking around, getting married, having children, driving cars and voting in Presidential Elections with two-digit IQs, a fact which goes a long way in explaining the MAGA crowd and the popularity of heavy metal.

So despite having plenty of real problems to worry about, we’re now stuck in a Cul-De-Sac of Stupidity and debating the imaginary dietary habits of immigrants and Vice Presidential Ass Kisser JD Vance said Trump was right and immigrants were eating pets, but when given the chance to provide evidence, JD said it came from “firsthand accounts from my constituents” but unsurprisingly neglected to come right out and name one.

Just in case you want to use this time-honored bullshitting technique perfected by our 45^th President, just start any sentence with: “Many people say…” or “Many people believe…” and then fill in the rest with whatever lie you’re currently promoting because nobody can prove someone, somewhere isn’t saying it or believing it and “many” is subjective and could be as few as two if you’re talking about women and/or men you hooked up with on the same night.  

Meanwhile…

The morally-flexible Vance admitted the pet-eating rumor might not be true, but encouraged his followers to keep spreading it anyway. (Man, that’s the kind of intellectually rigorous thinking you want a heartbeat away from the Presidency, isn’t it?)

Vance also rejected the idea that his rhetoric led to the bomb threats which is an interesting position (if by “interesting” you actually mean “fucking hypocritical”) because MAGA Republicans are quick to blame the Democrats’ rhetoric every time someone takes a shot at Donald Trump which seems to be happening with increasing frequency.

Anyway…

Turns out Trump has been hanging out with a Right-wing Internet Nut Job named Laura Loomer who promotes crazy conspiracy theories to get attention (which seems to work really well, so I might start doing it) and Mainstream Republicans said they were concerned about her negative influence on the impressionable mind of Donald Trump which brings up what seems to be a logical question:

Since when?

Trump has a long and rich history of associating himself with people and organizations who feed his ego while simultaneously making sure he’s misinformed and just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a partial list:

• Sidney Powell

• Rudy Giuliani

• QAnon

• The Proud Boys

• Neo-Nazis

• Anti-vaxxers

• The Heritage Foundation aaaand…

• Racists of all sorts.

The evidence suggests you could believe that Bigfoot owns a Jewish Space Laser while leading The West Coast Chapter of Cannibalistic Pedophiles and as long as you kissed Donald Trump’s ass at the same time, you’d be welcome to hang out and become part of the Trump Think Tank.   

In any case…

When Trump was asked about some of Laura Loomer’s racist rants, he did what he always does when confronted with distasteful facts about his sketchy associates:

Trump pretended he was unaware of them.

So the same guy who claims to have inside information the rest of us lack (like getting his ass kicked in the debate because Kamala was being coached through an earpiece disguised as an earring) claims to be totally unaware of information we all have like QAnon being made up of an unstable collection of mental asylum candidates and Project 2025 being created by former Trump Administration associates overly-interested in creating a Fourth Reich.

Semi-recently I was reading John Sandford’s Dark Angel, a novel published in 2023 that depicts some fictional events concerning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and one of the characters says he thinks the war will last a few days or a week at most and another character – who happens to be a Russian criminal – says he’s worked with the Russian army and it was incredibly corrupt and inefficient and, come to think of it, the Ukrainian army wasn’t all that much better, so due to both sides’ disorganization the war would probably last longer than people thought.

A fictional scene that – along with Ukraine blowing up some Russian bridges – made me think it was a good time to draw a cartoon about the war lasting way longer than people originally believed it would.  

Today’s Lesson

1. In every election ever held, people criticize their opponents which doesn’t automatically make them responsible for what future straitjacket models do and right now Donald Trump and JD Vance are trying to intimidate their critics and suggest you can’t say anything negative about them because some lunatic might show up with the kind of semi-automatic assault rifle they do their best to make available to unbalanced members of the general public.

2. Trump is willing to hang out with radicals of all sorts as long as they kiss his ass and feed his ego.

3. Don’t go around starting wars because they might not go exactly the way you imagined and while we’re on the subject, maybe quit honking horns, making obscene gestures and yelling insults at other drivers who piss you off because you never know what can of insane worms you’re opening.

And now I’ve got some cartoons to draw.

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