Along with today's 'toon, Tom/Dan sent along this additional message:
The unfolding tale of Trump and Russia got a lot stranger last week, as we learned the details of Donald Junior’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, set up by the extremely peculiar British publicist for the wannabe-pop-star son of the Russian oligarch friend and sometime business partner of the Trump family who wanted to pass along some dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia’s prosecutor general. I think I got that right! It’s an overused metaphor but we are definitely down the rabbit hole now.
I wanted to write a cartoon illustrating the absurdity of the pro-Trump narrative by taking them at their word, but even that got complicated as the story changed several times over the day and a half that I spent working on this one. I fully expect something new to break which will render it instantly out-of-date, I’m just hoping that it doesn’t happen until maybe Tuesday or Wednesday.
The fifth panel originally referred to the oligarch as someone “with deep ties to the Kremlin,” but I thought my Russia-knowledgeable friends would laugh at the redundancy. There are no oligarchs in Russia without ties to the Kremlin, that’s just how the system works there. And yet, for the more general audience, I needed something to indicate that general idea, so I finally settled on “well-connected oligarch.”
This weekend, celebrating my brilliant and amazing wife’s birthday; next week, off to Ireland for a whirlwind visit to the Galway Arts Festival.... With everything in the news, you may be wondering, Dan, how on earth can you get a cartoon done a week ahead of time? Yes, well. That is, in fact, the challenge these days. Under any other administration, I could take a week and do a cartoon about something silly and insignificant, but with the American political system teetering on the brink of crisis from day to day, it’s a bit trickier. I wrote a generic cartoon about Trump last week that I’ve been saving to cover the week away — I *think* it’s mostly newsproof, but these days you simply never know. I’m planning on uploading an old evergreen that has nothing at all to do with Trump, just in case. Getting work done ahead of time so I can travel has always been a balancing act, but in the era of Trump, it’s a balancing act on a highwire over a shark tank while people on the sides prod you with long sticks. Also you’re juggling dinnerware.
Until next time ….
Until next week ...
Dan (aka Tom)
This blogger is rotten sick of all of the treasonous claptrap that continuously batters his senses. Like the Traitor-in-Chief who screams at the TV monitors scattered throughout the West Wing, this blogger shouts "¡Basta ya!" at the radio that blares NPR "news." Since January 20, 2017, this country has flown over the cuckoo's nest. If this is a (fair & balanced) assessment of deteriorating mental accuity, so be it.
[x TMW]
The True Story (Subject To Revision)
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
