Peter Brookes gets to do a “torn speech” cartoon here for a couple of reasons, the first being that I admire his artwork.
Another is that I’m willing to forgive a furriner for not realizing that the Democrats never expected to remove Trump from office, and I’m also willing to accept that Dear Leader is treating his “acquittal” as a major victory rather than simply as proof that his Senate lickspittles will indeed look the other way if he shoots someone on 5th Avenue.
And, finally, because he didn’t show Trump tearing up the Constitution, which was a fine concept the first time I saw it and not so bad the next half dozen times but jayzuz enough is enough.
Cartoonists often say they don’t read each others’ work because they don’t want to be influenced, but there’s another rule that says a concept that comes to you quickly has likely come to everyone else just as quickly, to which I would add that you can pencil in the roughs for your work and then look around to see if anyone else had the same idea.
When two the same appear the same day, that’s a coincidence, but the State of the Union address was nearly a week ago. Come on.
When I was a kid, I was allowed to stay up on Saturday night just long enough to slap leather with Matt Dillon at the beginning of “Gunsmoke.”
I was never quite as quick on the draw as he was, but even at six, I was quicker than anybody who’s still commenting on the State of the Union Address now.
And second place in a showdown is called “shown up.”
Morten Morland offers another overseas opinion, and this one is depressingly timely, because not only was the Senate vote only a few days ago, but Dear Leader is still out there taking victory laps.
To repeat, there was never the slightest chance of a two-thirds majority to convict, which means the Democrats shouldn’t be mourning their “loss,” but which also means that for Trump to celebrate is like the Harlem Globetrotters treating a win over the Washington Generals as a major upset.
To depict him as vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial perfectly captures the narcissistic lack of both decorum and perspective this vainglorious clown has brought to the office.
And, by the way, if you want respect, if you don’t want people giggling at you on social media, wash your damn face.
On a more serious side of politicians and respect, Joel Pett floats a bit of speculation about Pete Butigieg, who, if elected would be America’s first openly gay president, the operative word there being “openly,” since James Buchanan’s sexuality was about as big a secret in Washington as Donald Trump’s make-up.
The question is whether the average voter in the boondocks had heard those rumors and cared, but that was then and this is now.
Not only has a majority of people supported same-sex marriage in recent years, but, while Ellen Degeneres faced some bigotry when she came out, she’s obviously plenty popular nearly a quarter century later.
The issue for Butigieg is how successfully the slime merchants would use his sexuality against him, but, then again, Bernie is a commie and Biden is a geezer and there are a whole lot of cartoonists who can’t draw Warren without adding a racist feather.
And John Kennedy was a Catholic, such that his fealty to the Pope came up in his campaign.
I suspect making a big deal of Buttigieg’s sexuality could inspire enough backlash to undo any damage it caused.
But, hey, I thought W was too dumb to be president and Trump was too clearly a conman. If I knew what The People really wanted, I’d be selling it on late-night cable channels.
Pete’s got as much experience in DC as either of those nitwits, and, if you hook him up with a VP who knows Capitol Hill, he’d be fine.
(But I’m still going to go see Warren at the local high school this afternoon and see what she’s got going on.)
And now for something completely different
It is a lovely time of year for dogsledding, and Non Sequitur brought back a number of memories.
One was moving into a house in Maine and, that night, hearing a collection of howls that made me think I’d landed in the coyote capital of New England, only to discover later that there was a musher just over the next hill and I’d been hearing his crew ask for their dinner.
It’s a very musical sound when you know it’s all in good spirits.
As for training, my stepdaughter once adopted an Iditarod veteran only to find she couldn’t house him. I tried to take him in, but my ridgeback declared him a wolf — which was probably somewhat true — and raised strong objections until Monty, a very nice, patient fellow, finally responded that he hadn’t run the Iditarod six times to be pushed around by some candyass housepet.
She found him, instead, a place with a fellow who, like Danae, was just starting a string of dogs, where dear sweet Monty, never a lead dog, ended up King of the Castle.
Which I thought of several years later, back in Maine, when I went to a dogsled race in which a new string was competing.
What you do at a dogsled race is see the dogs off in a staggered start, then go drink hot chocolate until they begin coming back.
Unless you’re covering it for your paper, in which case you go further up the planned route so you can get a shot of them racing majestically through the powder.
Or, in the case of these rookies, a shot of them noticing people ahead and stopping to have a look, maybe scratch an itch, have a little rest and contemplate the world.
That poor guy could have picked 10 dogs off the street at random and finished about as well.
For all anybody could tell, maybe he did.
I was still a very young Catholic child growing up in a very Catholic orphanage in Montréal, but I remember lotsa talk about Kennedy and the way Nixon’s campaign portrayed him as “taking his marching orders from the Pope!”
Sean – to which Harry Truman promptly replied “It’s not the Pope I’m worried about – it’s the Pop !”