This Week’s Cartoons, Part 1

An essay about puppy killers, old girlfriends and bad presidents...

Generally speaking, once a week I post the cartoons I’ve drawn recently and explain why I drew them, but this week I have way too much to say about the current campus protests, so I’m going to break this up into two parts and talk about the other cartoons today and the campus protest cartoons tomorrow. But don’t worry; when a politician kills a puppy with a shotgun, there’s still plenty to talk about.

Kristi Noem is governor of South Dakota and right up until she bragged about killing her puppy with a shotgun, was considered a possible running mate for Donald Trump.

First off, you might wonder why anyone would kill a puppy with a shotgun and if they did, why they would tell everybody and not only tell everybody, but brag about it and try to portray it as an example of her ability to make hard choices.

Apparently Kristi thought her puppy was a pain in the ass and when you’ve got the mood swings of Jack the Ripper with a migraine, Kristi thought shooting a puppy with a shotgun was the logical choice. (Which ought to worry the living shit out of her family, assuming they’re still alive and haven’t relocated to an undisclosed location in the Witness Protection Program.)

According to the internet: Kristi took her puppy out to hunt pheasants, but the puppy behaved badly and killed some chickens and then tried to bite Kristi (and right about here I’m thinking most of us believe the puppy had the right idea) which made Kristi realize she “hated that dog” so she shot it and after killing her puppy, decided that while she was at it (the same logic that inspired the Manson Family) to also kill a goat that was “nasty and mean” which ironically enough, also seems to describe Kristi.

Turns out Kristi didn’t kill the goat with the first blast (I’m not sure how you screw up shooting a goat at point blank range with a shotgun, but Kristi managed) and had to go back to her truck to get more shotgun shells while the goat laid there and probably thought:

“What the fuck brought that on?”

But instead of proving she can make tough decisions, Kristi’s story pretty much horrified everybody on both sides of the political kennel fence and according to dog experts a 14-month old wirehaired pointer shouldn’t be expected to hunt pheasants efficiently and aren’t fully trained until they’re until they’re 3-to-5 years old. So a lot like potty-training kids, which most people manage to do without resorting to a Remington 12-gauge.

South Dakota’s Senate Minority Leader (a Democrat) said the disclosure about shot-gunning a puppy may have been more calculated than stupid because apparently the story about Kristi killing a puppy while having a temper tantrum had been floating around state government for years, so maybe Kristi was afraid it would get out and ruin her chances of being Trump’s running mate.

So being a political genius, Kristi decided to tell the story and ruin her chances all by herself.

Now here’s an article from a former Republican and firearms company executive who’s running for governor of Montana and is also a hunter and bird dog owner, who calls Kristi a phony:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/may/01/trump-republican-kristi-noem-shoot-dog

According to a CNN poll, when they look back on it, 55% of Americans see Donald Trump’s presidency as a success and I thought it worthwhile to depict what those voters and their guide dogs must look like. (Give them credit, at least they haven’t shotgunned their seeing eye dogs – yet.)

And now a couple things about polls:

Read the fine print and CNN used a company called SSRS to conduct the poll and apparently their slogan is “redefining research” which may or may not be true because if I read that fine print correctly, they talked to 1,212 people and then told the rest of us what 333.3 million people think.

One percent of Americans would be approximately 3,333,000 people so they’d have to talk to 2,750 times as many people as they did to reach just one percent which is one of the many reasons we shouldn’t take polls all that seriously and why they’re wrong as often as they are.

That’s like interviewing a farmer in Maine and then telling us what surfers in California think.

But if we called bullshit on polls the media would have a lot less to write about so just like the Emperor’s New Clothes, let’s go right ahead and pretend they’re terrific and we’re not getting an overly-generous view of the Emperor’s butt crack.

Nevertheless, they were at least some voters who think Trump’s presidency was a success; so how about them?

We often get nostalgic when we think about the past and back in my single days I’d sometimes think about a woman I dated and wonder what happened to that relationship and why we quit dating and on more than one occasion made the mistake of reconnecting and saying we ought to go out again and then five minutes into the reconnection date remembering why I stopped seeing her:

“Oh, yeah, I forgot she’s (fill-in-the-blank with the undesirable quality of your choice like “racist” or “an egomaniac” or “nutty as fruitcake”).

And I’m guessing that’s not a One-Way Street and the women in question were also remembering why they stopped dating me.

Anyway…

Just in case you’re nostalgic about the Trump presidency, let me remind you, Trump:

• Lied incessantly.

• Ridiculed people with disabilities.

• Promoted false conspiracy theories.

• Failed to condemn white supremacists whose violence caused the death of a counter-demonstrator and said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

• Pissed off world leaders with the exception of the dictators he likes to emulate.

• Incited a riot at the capitol, encouraged the overthrow of the government and got a lot of people who listened to him sent to jail.

• Is the only president to be impeached twice and if we reelect him, has a pretty good chance at a three-peat.

• Downplayed and mishandled the pandemic and helped cause thousands more deaths than necessary.

• Mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask and ignored the advice of health experts, but then got COVID and started wearing a mask himself.

• And don’t forget he held a Rose Garden event to announce a Supreme Court nominee and many of the attendees did not wear masks or practice social distancing and after the event over a dozen people in Trump’s orbit tested positive for COVID.

• Gave tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy which failed to produce the economic benefits he promised, unless you’re a corporation or wealthy and then I’m guessing you think those tax cuts worked out OK.  

• Tried to divide the country instead of bringing it together.

(That’s a very incomplete list of Donald Trump Presidential Disasters so feel free to add your own.)

Considering the Trump Presidency a success and thinking he should be reelected is kind of like getting food poisoning at an All-You-Can-Stand Buffet and then going back the next week and asking for seconds because you remember the food tasting pretty good, right up until you vomited up a kidney.

Even if you’re a maniacal Trump supporter, he can’t be considered a success because he tried to overthrow the government and steal an election, but failed.

OK, that’s it for today and if I didn’t totally piss you off already, come back tomorrow and the stuff I drew about student protests will probably do the trick.

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