The World's Greatest Democracy?? (Punctuation Marks Added To 'Toon Title For Emphasis)

Along with today's TMW 'toon, the delivery email contained the following message from Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins):

Holy crap, that was a week. Some of you thought last week’s cartoon was too dark? I think it was a lighthearted romp, compared to what we just went through. I mean, I’ve been predicting that none of this would end well since Trump was elected, and I was still unprepared for the sight of MAGA dumbasses literally storming the Capitol of the United States of America. If there’s any bright side to this, it is that the Trump era ends in utter ignominy. We’ve had four years of people rationalizing him, justifying him, telling us to take him seriously but not literally, etc. On his way out the door, he made it utterly clear what he is, what his followers are, and what the entire GOP has been enabling, and I think it’s a stain that won’t wash out easily.

Of course, we had good news last week too. I didn’t even dare hope that Warnock and Ossoff would both win their runoffs, but they did, and Democrats control the Senate, and I sure do like the sound of “Senate MINORITY Leader Mitch McConnell.” A lot of things will be a lot easier and I hope Biden doesn’t waste the opportunity.

And finally, Trump has been kicked off Twitter (and a bunch of other social platforms)! It should have happened years ago, but I’ll take the win — it means that he won’t have any easy conduit for insurrection in his post-presidency, which I fully expect to be awful. After last Wednesday, I doubt he’s even going to be especially welcome on Fox News. He’s certainly not going to get the “oh he’s a nice guy after all” treatment George W. Bush received over the years. It’s a small silver lining to a terrible day, but it’s not nothing.

The only “process” note I have on this week’s cartoon is about the third panel. I realized as I was trying to finish this cartoon on a tight deadline (talk about backloaded weeks!), that Josh Hawley simply wasn’t going to be recognizable without a big label reading ‘JOSH HAWLEY,’ and that’s not really a thing I do in my cartoon. I thought about having him in his signature pose from the famous photograph where he’s raising his fist in support of the soon-to-be-insurrectionists, but it didn’t make sense in the context of the panel. So I settled on having Ted Cruz address him by name.

Until next time…, Dan/Tom

That is the cartoonist's reaction to the events of January 6, 2021, and thereafter. The 'toonist had a stronger reaction to the events of January 6, 2021 — Revulsion, Nausea, & Anger With The Scum That Exists In Our Midst. If this is (fair & balanced) visceral hatred for the more than 75 MILLION WHO VOTED FOR, OR SUPPORTED, THE LOSER IN THE 2020 ELECTION PLUS THE WISH THAT ALL OF THEM BE STRIPPED OF US CITIZENSHIP & EXPELLED TO RUSSIA WITH THEIR LEADER, so be it.

[x TMW]
The World's Greatest Democracy
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 US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the 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.]

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