Where’s Donald Trump when you really need him?

As I’ve said before and seem likely to do again, anytime they have to make up new words to describe the weather like “thunder sleet” or “bomb cyclone” or “shit storm” we may have broken the planet and right here in Kansas City we were part of the polar temperatures that swept much of the country and at one point I went outside for a what turned out to be a really, really, really short walk, mainly because with the wind chill, it was 27 below.

And after the January 6th committee turned in its final report that said the insurrection could pretty much be blamed on Donald Trump and maybe he should be barred from holding public office, Trump reacted by telling a bunch more lies including the one about him not losing the election, which struck me as a pretty good deal because the rest of us could really use the hot air.

So the January 6th committee wrapped up their work and recommended Donald Trump be charged with four criminal offenses:

1. Obstruction of an official proceeding…

2. Conspiracy to defraud the United States…

3. Conspiracy to make a false statement, and…

4. Having the worst combover in the long history of stupid stuff men do to hide the fact that they’re going bald.

Just kidding, number 4 was actually:

4. Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by assisting, aiding or comforting those involved in an insurrection.

And just in case you were wondering, an insurrection is defined as: “A violent uprising against an authority or government” which is an unusual thing to have on your resume when you were the president of the government in question.

Now it’s up to the Justice Department and the Attorney General to decide if they’re actually going to charge Trump with a crime and one of the committee members called their findings a “roadmap to justice” but as the cartoon indicates, I don’t have much faith that anybody else is actually going to do anything to a guy who has ignored pretty much every rule he ever encountered (including the ones on a golf course) and hasn’t seemed to suffer any serious consequences for all that rule breaking.

As Donald Trump might say and probably has: “Rules are for losers.”

When you draw a cartoon that predicts the future you mostly want to be right, but I really hope I’m wrong about this one.

And speaking of repeating yourself, here’s another rerun: a lot of cartoons and jokes are constructed around some missing information which the audience has to supply and when they mentally supply that information, that’s the feeling of “getting it.”

In the old Henny Youngman joke:

1. “Take my wife” (at this point the audience thinks Henny means as an example)…

2.  “Please” (and at this point the audience gets that Henny means literally).

Which makes my point and just goes to show you it was way easier to be a comedian back then than it is now and I’ve had a number of people tell me I’m funny and I really ought to be a standup comedian, which means they don’t know how hard that actually is and how depressing it must be when you’re doing your third set at 1AM in some third-rate comedy club in Bumfuck, Minnesota and a drunk is yelling, “You suck!”

And if you don’t believe me about the emotional cost of being funny for a living, here’s an article about 15 comedians who struggle and/or struggled with mental health issues:

https://www.cracked.com/article_32967_15-comedians-speak-out-on-mental-health-and-life.html

OK, so where were we?

Right…missing information…and in this cartoon the audience has to supply the information that Uncle Sam is on a “slippery slope” and I drew this cartoon after it was announced the U.S. was supplying Ukraine with $1.8 billion in military aid including, for the first time, Patriot surface-to-air missiles.

Which might actually be the right thing to do, but far too often (and once would qualify) the U.S. decides to do something that doesn’t seem all that drastic to begin with — like sending in military advisors — and when that doesn’t work we maybe add some arms or troops and suddenly we’re in a war we didn’t plan on fighting.

And if you really want to be cynical, which is the right thing to do about 87% of the time: there’s a whole military-industrial complex that makes money off wars and they might advise a president do something that they know isn’t going to work, which will suck us further (or maybe it’s farther…but I don’t want to start a war over it) into the situation, which is OK if that’s what we really want to do, but getting into a shooting war by accident or because we didn’t look far enough ahead seems like a really bad idea.

So this is yet another thing I’d really like to be wrong about.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/europe/zelensky-biden-kremlin-reaction-russia-ukraine-intl/index.html

Recently, the Taliban barred women from attending universities in Afghanistan and according to the Taliban’s minister of higher education, that’s because educating women isn’t an Afghan tradition, but instead part of Western culture brought to the country during the presence of U.S. forces, so I guess going over there wasn’t a total waste of time, although it might be healthy to remember that these are the same guys we helped arm when they were fighting the Russians, which brings us right back to moves that don’t seem that serious at the time they’re made, but then come back and bite you in the ass.

Anyway…

If we all refused to do something because it’s not one of our traditions that would mean we’d still have slaves because we didn’t have a tradition of freeing them. (Theoretically, man and/or womankind is supposed to get better, not keep doing the same stupid stuff over and over.)

I started thinking about Afghan fighters and all the armies they’ve defeated (I’m pretty sure one of the requirements for having your own country is invading Afghanistan and getting your ass kicked) and how brave they are when facing foreign armies, but Afghan women with an education scare the shit out of them.

I don’t see how we can be pissed off about the Russians grabbing Brittney Griner and detaining her for having cannabis vape cartridges so they could trade her for an arms dealer, but be OK with Guantanamo Bay.

If those guys are proven terrorists I have absolutely no problem with the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” solution, but before you do that you better have some rock solid evidence and a bunch of those guys have never received a trial or even been charged with a crime and many of them have been tortured at “black sites” and all of them have been exposed to physical and psychological trauma associated with being detained indefinitely.

Three presidents have promised to close Guantanamo Bay, but didn’t do it and that includes Joe Biden. (Unsurprisingly, Trump was pretty much OK with it.)

If you wonder why three presidents promised to close Guantanamo and haven’t, here’s another cynical theory: they can promise all kinds of stuff when they’re running for office, but once they get elected, somebody drops by the White House and points out that if we let those detainees go, they all have stories to tell and maybe some fairly famous people are going to be charged with war crimes.

Just a cynical theory, but as cynical theories go, not a bad one.  

https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/20-years-later-guantanamo-remains-a-disgraceful-stain-on-our-nation-it-needs-to-end

Right here in the Wholesome Midwest we’re going through another round of book-banning, which is kinda stupid because in the Internet Age taking a book out of a library might make the book-banners feel better, but doesn’t mean kids don’t have access to it.

We’ve also got someone worried about “drag shows” because some kid might see one and decide he wants to try on some Jimmy Choo high heels and the weird thing about people who get upset about homosexuality or cross-dressing or (fill-in-the-blank with the sexual act of your choice) is that they believe it’s clearly wrong and abhorrent.

But…

Also an incredibly attractive lifestyle that will suck in any kids exposed to it.

Which might explain all the rabidly anti-gay dudes who eventually get caught handing out blow jobs in men’s rooms. I’m not a psychiatrist and I don’t play one on TV, but I’m under the general impression that repressed feelings will eventually find some way to express themselves (like turning you into a book-banning asshole).

As the cartoon points out: the people who are “protecting” kids from books, seem to be OK with exposing them to bigotry and ignorance and homophobia and, by the way, if you think about it, they not only want to decide what their kids can read, they want to decide that for your kids as well, so their position that the parents ought to be the ones to decide what kids see is pretty much bullshit.

OK, once again that’s it for the day and I’ve got to get going and rebook my trip to LA that Southwest Airlines cancelled and one of the few good things about my profession is the ability to turn a personal grudge into a political cartoon and as soon as I get them done (yeah, my grudge will require at least two Southwest cartoons) I’ll post them here.

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