What do Bill Murray, Barack Obama and Elmer Fudd have in common?

Maybe nothing, but they all get mentioned in today’s story…

I drew this cartoon last Monday because last Thursday was Groundhog Day and to understand the cartoon you need to know there was a 1993 movie called Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray in which he’s forced to repeat the same day over and over until he quits being a self-centered asshole and gets it right.

And the fact that unarmed Black men are still getting killed by the police would seem to indicate we haven’t got it right yet.

In this particular case, the police were also Black men, who you might think would be a little less inclined to mistreat other Black men, but then I remembered the 1971 “Stanford Prison Experiment” in which college students were divided into “guards” and “prisoners” to see how they reacted psychologically and the experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but ended after only six days because the “guards” quickly became too sadistic and the “prisoners” were suffering severe psychological damage.

Way back in 1887, Lord Acton wrote:

“Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Which is worth mentioning because if being in complete control of other human beings can turn you into a sadistic asshole in six days, imagine how batshit out of control you might get in six years, especially when your power is not imaginary and others who share the same power encourage you to think in terms of “us” versus “them.”

I’m not a “defund the police” advocate, but “retrain the police” or “reorganize the police” or “just tell the police to quit killing unarmed Black men because this is getting fucking ridiculous” seem like ideas worth considering.

Also…

It occurs to me that in the past skeptics could dismiss Black peoples’ complaints of mistreatment by the police, but now we have cell phones that make videos and the police have body cams and dash cams, so the rest of us get to see the racism and mistreatment people in the Black community have been telling us existed and we tried to ignore because it didn’t happen to us.

According to a website called Investment Monitor the United States is still the second-largest manufacturing country in the world, but is no longer dominant and manufacturing’s share of our gross domestic product has fallen from 27% to 12% and I’d be happy to tell you more about that, but when I clicked on the article’s link I got a message that said they valued my privacy, but if I wanted to read the entire article I had to “Accept All Cookies” which allow someone to store your computer data and maybe sell it to a third party, so it sounds like they really didn’t value my privacy nearly as much as they claimed to. 

So then I went to Business Insider and they listed a bunch of stuff we no longer make here in the USA like: lightbulbs, Rawlings baseballs, Gerber baby food, Etch-A-Sketches, Converse shoes, steel rebar, dress shirts, Mattel toys, vending machines, Levi jeans, televisions, cell phones and Dell computers like the one I’m currently writing on.

https://www.businessinsider.com/basic-products-america-doesnt-make-2010-10#mattel-toys-7

I have no idea if any of that is accurate, but someone on the internet said it was and that’s usually enough to get people to believe Donald Trump got cheated out of the presidency, the pandemic wasn’t real and Nigerian princes have a scheme to make us rich if we’ll just send them our bank account information, so let’s quit worrying about it, accept that America doesn’t make as much stuff as we used to and move on to the cartoon.

According to the BBC, mass shootings (defined as an incident where four or more people are injured or killed) are on the rise and according to the following article we still kick ass when it comes to gun-related killings as a percentage of homicides – 79% – while those slackers in the United Kingdom only manage a measly 4%.

Which might be explained by the fact that we’re the only country that has more than one gun for every resident (120 for every 100 residents) and I don’t own any so somebody somewhere must have two.

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/mass-shootings-by-country/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081

Some days I have to scramble to find a cartoon idea and some days the news puts one on a tee and yells, “Batter up!”

I read a story about Republicans being divided between Trump supporters who also support his “Make America Great Again” agenda and Republicans who think the GOP needs to move on from Donald Trump because they keep getting their asses kicked in elections and I thought:

“Oh…you mean the sane ones.”

And now a word about that “Make America Great Again” slogan:

Some people counter that America always has been great (which, depending on your skin color, religious affiliation or income level is debatable) so you don’t need to make America great again, but to me the MAGA slogan has always seemed like a racist’s dog whistle because people way out there on the Right didn’t start talking about “taking back our country” and the need to “Make America Great Again” until we had a Black president.

Take back our country from who?

The president who won two elections by the old-fashioned method of actually getting the most votes? (My computer thinks that “who” should be “whom,” but my computer is one of the last Dells made in America, so it’s probably behind the times.)

So now Republicans control the House which means they can start investigations and apparently they’re going to look into Hunter Biden’s activities which led to the cartoon you see here.

I had momentary misgivings while drawing the cartoon because the visual metaphor I used in the cartoon is an elephant gun, but this time the elephant was hunting Hunter. I briefly thought maybe it was a bad idea to refer to possible gun violence because every once in a while people will take a cartoon literally, get upset and say I’m suggesting Hunter might get shot.

Yeah, but…

By a cartoon elephant, standing on two legs, wearing a safari outfit and a pith helmet.

Which – off the top of my head – seems pretty unlikely, so a critic would have to take the cartoon gun literally and ignore everything else depicted in the cartoon, but face it, political correctness doesn’t always have to be logical.  

According to the following article from June of 2020, they made some new Looney Tunes cartoons and Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam were no longer going to carry guns because that upset some people, but Elmer and Sam were still going to provide plenty of cartoon violence with sticks of dynamite and in one cartoon Elmer tried to kill Bugs Bunny with a scythe…so…guns were bad, but apparently IEDs and decapitation were still OK.  

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/entertainment/looney-tunes-reboot-guns-trnd/index.html

But according to this next article from July of 2021, Elmer got his gun back the next season, but Pepe Le Pew was cut from Space Jam: A New Odyssey because some people complained his behavior toward Penelope Pussycat (he makes unwanted romantic advances because he thinks she’s another skunk) promoted “rape culture.”

https://movieweb.com/looney-tunes-elmer-fudd-guns/

Linda Jones, daughter of Pepe’s creator Chuck Jones, said she doubted anyone watched a cartoon skunk and was then inspired to go out and rape someone. And I kinda doubt that mass shootings happen because someone watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon when they were six.

Feel free to disagree.

OK, so George Santos (if that is his real name) lied about pretty much everything and now that he’s been caught, he promised he’s done lying, which – to my ears – sounds a lot like a lie.

When you tell so many lies it must be hard to remember what’s false and what’s real which – according to this video clip from Seinfeld – might be an advantage:

Just in case you didn’t watch the video, George is helping Jerry beat a lie detector test and tells him:

“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

So if the imaginary George is right, the real George is not lying if he believes all the lies he told. (One of my favorite moments of the show is when someone admits to “living a lie” and George asks: “Just the one?”)

OK, that’s all I got for today and looking back it seems way more than enough.

Enjoy your weekend.

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