Someone Wrote That Time Machines Do Exist — They're Called Dreams & Tom Tomorrow's Time Machine Is A NIGHTMARE!

The following letter from Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) accompanied today's 'toon:

Those of you with long memories — or who have recently finished reading the big TMW25 compilation — may remember that I wrote a similar cartoon the *last* time a Republican won the presidency while losing the popular vote. This time it feels even more appropriate, given that Donald Trump is the walking personification of everything the Electoral College was intended to prevent.

There’s an old Sting song about the threat of nuclear war, with the refrain “I hope the Russians love their children too.” The banality of the sentiment became a running joke for me and my wife when we were in Moscow at the start of summer (as part of an academic junket, and before Russia became such a major point of controversy in the election of 2016) — we’d walk around the city as ordinary Russians went about their lives and say to each other straightfaced, “I certainly hope they love their children!” But now I’m actually feeling it: I hope the Republicans love their children too. Because our best case scenario — and it’s not a good one — is that the unstable sociopath is impeached by his own party as quickly as possible, and Pence becomes president. Which is a terrible outcome, I understand — seriously, honestly, no need to explain that to me. But Trump is so utterly ignorant and unmoored from reality, that I think we would be better off with literally any other human being in his stead. We might as well be giving the nuclear codes to an orangutang.

There are hundreds of competing takes right now, but I don’t really know what the big lessons of the last election were. On the one hand, it’s the candidate’s job to persuade people to vote for her. On the other, Clinton got 2.5 million more votes than Trump, so clearly she did persuade people — just not the right ones in the right states, as required by our maddeningly stupid and antiquated system. To paraphrase something somebody said on Twitter recently, presidents should be chosen by human beings, not by empty acreage. I don’t really care who the cows and corn stalks want for President — the person who gets the most votes should win the election. This isn’t rocket science.

Until next time,

Dan (aka Tom)

If this is (fair & balanced) 2016 realism, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Mysterious Stranger
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perksin)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2016 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




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