After This Weekend's Bat-Guano Crazy Diversionary Attacks, ¡Basta Ya! (Enough Already!)

In the e-mail which brought today's TMW 'toon to this blogger's In Box, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) wrote the following message about today's 'toon:

Another week, another cartoon that went through about 15 revisions in my flailing attempts to even keep up with the news cycle, let alone stay ahead of it. The weekly deadline does not readily adapt itself to the times in which we live. Fortunately my multi-panel format is pretty adaptable — I can always change a line here or a panel there. In this case, I had to rewrite the last panel before I even started on the art — I started writing this one after the big speech, and just assumed that there would be a crazy tweetstorm that would undermine the absurd “presidential pivot” narrative that gullible mainstream punditry embraced like a drowning man grabbing for a reed. But then the Sessions story broke, and I decided to have Baby-Man Skyping with his mentor, Vladimir Vladimirovich, complaining about how unfair it all was. And I finished that one up and filed the various versions with my various outlets … and *then* the crazy tweetstorm that I had initially predicted dropped, and I realized that with a bit of careful rewriting I could add in a reference to the wiretapping allegations. This gets tricky, because at this late point in the process I’m trying to fit extra words into a limited space, hopefully without revising the art too much, while keeping the new bits consistent with the original point of the cartoon.

But while I wanted to reference the craziness of the President accusing his predecessor of wiretapping him — based on a Breitbart story, apparently — I didn’t want to suggest that the possibility of the wiretap itself was utterly absurd. It’s entirely possible that DOJ or FBI had Trump wiretapped last summer! So if Trump insists that we investigate the situation, I’m all on board. Either we find out that it’s entirely a figment of his imagination, adding further evidence that he is delusional and unfit to serve, or we find out that there really was a wiretap — and we find out why. It’s a no-win situation for Trump, and his decision to highlight it would seem inexplicable if you were still of the opinion that he is anything other than an instinctively reactive creature. I am not of that opinion.

Thanks again to my Twitter pal @DavidKlion for help with the Russian — it’s not necessary to know this to understand the cartoon, but Putin’s Cyrillic translates as “My God!”

Until next week ...

Tom (aka Dan)

Kudos to Tom (Dan) for providing a translation for Putin’s Cyrillic oath in the final panel. In yesterday's post, El Douche became known as Il Senza Cervello -Duce- Doccia (The Brainless -Leader- Douche)). All of the facial expressions (an homage to Benito Mussolini) inspired Il Douche in this blog. If this is a (fair & balanced) visit to the mental health facility known as the Oval Office, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Unbelievable Baby-Man & The Big Speech
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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 © 2017 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




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