In the e-mail bringing today's 'toon to this blogger's In Box, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) included this introduction:
This was (I assume obviously) inspired by the sycophantic praise at Bush’s first full cabinet meeting, particularly Reince Priebus’ bit:
"On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you've give us to serve your agenda and the American people," Priebus said.
"And we're continuing to work very hard every day to accomplish those goals."
The only thing missing was the honorific “Exalted Leader.”
I’ve had the idea for this in the back of my head for a few weeks — some series of panels discussing Trump’s truly tremendous, record-breaking … failures. When I saw the video of that cabinet meeting, I knew that my setup had just been handed to me on a silver platter. Because I worry about things like internal consistency, the only question for me was how to make the riff work with these particular speakers. I played around with the idea of a final panel in which my recurrent mad scientist, Dr. Von Philbert, had just had an accident with his experiment “truth ray,” but it seemed overly complicated and distracting. Ultimately, I decided to let the title of the cartoon do the heavy lifting: “THE HONEST CABINET.”
Meanwhile this week we had a near-massacre of Congressmen practicing their baseball game, on the day House was scheduled to make it easier to buy silencers for guns (they shelved that one momentarily). This latest nutjob-with-a-gun-and-a-history-of-domestic-violence turns out to have been of the left-wing variety, so both the Fox News types *and* mainstream liberals are trying to blame it on … Bernie Sanders. Sigh.
Maybe I’m just getting older, but it sure seems like political conversation gets stupider every year. At least there is, as they say, plenty of material ...
Until next time!
Dan (aka Tom)
This incredible moment in the first meeting of the full Cabinet a week ago on June 12, 2017, allowed Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) to create an alternate universe in which the Cabinet members — VP Mike Pence, AG Jeff Sessions, SecState Rex Tillerson, and WH StaffChief Reinhold Richard "Reince" Priebus spoke their innermost (and honest) thoughts. Instead of uttering the drivel of hero-worship, the alt-Cabinet spoke truth to power. If this is a (fair & balanced) depiction of the power of political cartoons, so be it.
[x TMW]
The Honest Cabinet
By 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)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2017 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
