In the e-mail that brought today's 'toon to this blogger, Tom/Dan wrote:
Well gosh, Mueller may not have indicted anyone but as it turns out the Mueller report is a whole lot more damning than Barr’s brief summary of it suggested. People smarter than me (of which there are many in the world!) are calling it a roadmap to either impeachment or post-presidency indictment. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Democratic party seem to be pursuing the usual strategy, bringing a feather duster to a gun battle, per Steny Hoyer’s quote. I don’t think you should game out impeachment politically — it’s the right and necessary thing to do, and would also shake loose much more information, like those elusive tax returns. As my friend and colleague Ruben Bolling pointed out on Twitter recently, there’s this collective idea that the impeachment of Bill Clinton hurt Republicans — who, within two years, controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. (Insert thinky-face emoji here.)
I cranked this cartoon out after the Mueller report dropped, pre-empting the one I had already finished, on Ilhan Omar. If that one doesn’t feel like pre-history by then, I will probably run it next week. I’m taking a few days off and getting out of town next week (on! an! actual! vacation!), so I am unlikely to be responding to whatever the news of the week may be (and lord knows the news cycle is an unpredictable monster these days). The Trump years have forced me to accept the fact that I am a weekly cartoonist, not a news service — even on the best of weeks, there are fifty stories I don’t have room or time to write about.
The first panel was originally just going to be a straight quote from the report, but after I finished the cartoon it occurred to me that what I ended up going with would be a little funnier (though it relies on the audience’s knowledge of the original quote, or at least the audience’s intelligent ability to glean the probable context of the original quote.) Here’s what the unredacted version looked like
I was working quickly! And it does set up the rest of the cartoon, but I like the redacted panel better.
Until next week…
Dan/Tom:
And there you have it. A redacted first panel is un-redacted by Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins hisself. If this is the (fair & balanced) redacted/unredacted truth, so be it.
[x TMW]
An Extremely Exoneratey Report
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
