Along with today's 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:
Hey, all
Well friends, we’re two weeks into a new year and life in the stupidverse continues get dumber, and more infuriating, every day. And with the most recent stories coming out over the weekend about Trump/Russia connections, you have to imagine that Trump is going to start acting like a cornered rat. There’s been a lot of skepticism on the far left about the Russia stuff, but as someone said on Twitter this week, just because MSNBC talks about it too much, doesn’t mean it’s not true. There were so many strange notes from the start — as when the Trump people made one single change to the RNC platform, watering down US support for Ukraine for no apparent reason. And of course, the infamous Trump tower meeting, presented as an “innocent” meeting about adoption — which, if you understand anything about the Magnitsky Act, was essentially an admission of something fishy going on right there. Putin suspended American adoption of Russian orphans *in direct retaliation* for the Magnitsky sanctions, so a meeting about adoption is *by definition* a meeting about lifting sanctions. Political candidates, and/or their representatives, aren’t supposed to be meeting with foreign powers to discuss policy before they are elected, in my understanding — the United States has one president at a time. And of course, Trump’s bizarre, ongoing obsequiousness to Putin, possibly the only person with whom he’s ever come into contact and not given a derogatory nickname. Add in the Trump Org’s reliance on Russian money; the fact that Trump has been dealing with Russian oligarchs (i.e., Putin-connected kleptocrats) for years; what we now know about Manafort; and a thousand other data points, including most recently the fact that Trump did not allow any record to be made of his private meetings with Putin, even for the classified files.
At a certain point, when smoke is pouring out of the building, you have to acknowledge that there’s some sort of fire in there somewhere. Honestly, I don’t think we’re getting out of this without seeing the pee tape.
Nonetheless, I’ve treated the Russia stories with some caution, just because it’s so hard to separate uncertain fact from possible fiction. But here’s one of my early attempts to address the whole thing, from September 2016. It holds up pretty well, as an examination of the qualities in Putin which Trump undoubtedly finds admirable, though from all we now know about Trump and his team and their interactions with Russia, it’s clear that I didn’t take it far enough. (The Cyrillic word in the final panel translates loosely as “loser.”)
So it’s that time of the year, when cartoonists sort through their year’s work and submit to various contests. I’ve been putting this off — as most of you know, I had a pretty rough year, what with a few minor details like an unexpected divorce and the general collapse of everything I knew in my life — and my lived experience of creating work this year was one of struggle and writer’s block. People kept telling me that I was turning out decent work, but the human mind being what it is, I assumed this was pity-praise, kind words for the broken guy. BUT AS IT TURNS OUT — I’m somewhat shocked at how well this year’s work holds up. Sure there were a few here and there where I was clearly vamping, but that’s true any year. Overall, it’s as decent a body of work as any other year, which is not a bad thing to realize. The truth may be that writing is just hard, whether the metaphorical ship of your life is sailing through smooth waters or about to be capsized in the Horse Latitudes.
Welp! Until next time, if we still have anything resembling a functioning country in seven days,
Dan/Tom
And so, we are left to start mid-January 2019 with gallows humor... "If we have a functioning country..." this week. In the heat of the kitchen that is Washington, DC the Dumbos have gone all-in with T-R-E-A-S-O-N. If this is not a (fair & balanced) demonstration of a high crime worthy of impeachment in lieu of an orange jumpsuit with accompanying wrist and leg manacles, so be it.
[x TMW]
The Stupidverse, Redux
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 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 © 2019 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
