In the e-mail which brouight today's TMW 'toon, the 'toonist wrote:
Hey all,
2020 didn’t waste any time trying to outdo the previous year in sheer awfulness. Plenty of material, as people always say to me with great cheerfulness. Notes on this week’s offering….
First panel: Fox news has spent years trying to discredit the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States due to the inconvenient things they’ve been pointing out about Trump and his odd Russia dealings. But suddenly, the unnamed (and probably fictional) intel agencies that told Trump that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack are good now!
Second panel: Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer were literally among those who planned and sold the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq to the public, and now they are being pulled out of cold storage to share their wisdom on this latest mess. Though he was ostensibly a Democrat, I’d lump Joe Lieberman in with the crowd, and I was *not* amused to see him being interviewed on the usually-sensible Ari Melber’s show twice in one week.
Third panel: Pence literally invoked 9/11 as a justification for the assassination. The other guy is supposed to be Pompeo, but he has a sort of weirdly bland face, and I’m not sure he’s been quite public enough for the caricature to be recognizable. But I *really* hate the editorial cartooning tradition of labeling someone with their name, so I try to avoid it, and hope the audience is smart enough to figure it out from context.
Fourth panel: something is very wrong with Trump, that was clearly apparent during the speech he gave, flanked by his top military officers standing there like props. He was more animated during the rally he gave that evening — he obviously thrives on the energy of his wannabe Nuremberg rallies — but he was no more coherent.
Fifth panel: numerous Republicans accused Democrats of loving Iran and Soleimani, going back to the old 2003 playbook when those of us who opposed the war were frequently said to love Saddam Hussein. The "broom closet" line is a nod to this classic Simpsons bit.
Sixth panel: Sarah Sanders is now a Fox News contributor, where she actually said that she couldn’t think of anything dumber than notifying Congress in advance. She should take a quick look at Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Also, Trump really did go around hinting at “something big” coming up to anyone who would listen at Mar-a-Lago.
At least everyone walked the near-war back, for the time being. But it did drive home the point that Trump is a genuine danger to stability, world peace, and all those other irrelevant things that peacenik losers like me worry about.
Until next time...,
Dan/Tom
Well, we are in a fine mess thanks to the willy-nilly decision of The LK (Lyin King) to assassinate the Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani near the Baghdad Airport with a drone attack. That foolish decision created a fog of war in Iran and the Iranian air defense forces mistakenly fired a surface-to-air missile at a commercial flight departing Imam Khomeini International Airport out of Tehran shortly after the drone attack In Iraq. As a result, 176 passengers and crew members were collateral casualties to the assassination of the Iranian general. If this is the (fair & balanced) assessment of the consequences of placing a congenital liar and a criminally incompetent fool in the White House Oval Office (or wherever he has gone at taxpayer expense), so be it.
[x TMW]
Life In The Stupidverse (Special Sort-Of War Edition)
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 © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
