CSotD: Are you tired yet?

I have a degree of sympathy for cartoonists who are locked into a schedule by their publishers and can’t simply dash off a piece in response to breaking news.

However, to quote Marcus Aurelius, “Id est quod est,” and you need to adjust to the terms you’re facing.

I once wrote a humor feature for a monthly magazine. This meant that my deadline was two weeks before publication, and then whatever I wrote had to remain relevant for the four weeks the magazine lingered on the newsstand.

This was a greater burden than having to wait until next Thursday, and gives me standing to suggest that we’re done with the Wizard of Oz/Kansas abortion vote cartoons. They were good for about 48 hours; now they’re just repetitive, imitative and lame.

That train has left the station. Think of something else.

 

The Burying Ivana thing is a similar matter. Jack Ohman offers one of the more inventive variations on the theme, and I don’t disagree with the idea of branding Trump as an enemy of justice and law.

But I’m tired of all the hoo-hah over the burial, in part because it’s no longer news, but also because, going by the coverage, you’d think it was a spur of the moment decision, which it was not.

Trump has long planned a family burial plot in a section at Bedminster. The plan has changed over time: At one point, he wanted a mausoleum, but the town wouldn’t approve it, and, at another, he envisioned a larger area open to members of the golf club, a variation he also dropped.

So he has established a 1.5 acre area on the 500 acre property, and I’ll spare you the math: It’s 0.3% of the whole. If he is getting a tax break for maintaining a cemetery, it’s not a whole lot.

The more important thing, in my mind, is that, as a divorced dad, I’m aware that, while I no longer have a wife, my kids still have a mother. I don’t have much use for anyone in the Trump family, but if his kids want to be buried near their mother, it’s not an outrageous, and certainly not a humorous, wish.

Anyway, it’s last month’s news and I’m tired of hearing about it.

 

Though I’m as tired of Trump as the woman in this Kate Curtis New Yorker cartoon.

As noted the other day, I have to wonder how much different our current situation would be if he had simply accepted his defeat and retired to Mar A Lago to lick his wounds and hire someone to write his memoirs (and then not paid them).

Granted, he was a symptom of a much more deeply embedded, well-established disease on the body politic, but he drew the crazies out from under their rocks at a rate and volume that Newt Gingrich and the Contract on America never equalled.

Mitch McConnell and the Federalists may have given us Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, but only Trump could have created MTG, Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorne, and, not only is he not gone, but he’s got a whole slate of unqualified crazies lined up for the midterms.

 

We’ll see how things shake out, but, as John Auchter reminds us, assuming that nobody will vote for a dingbat has not proven a very good predictive model.

There are a lot of dingbats out there, and they vote.

 

As Nick Anderson (Counterpoint) points out, things are looking up, but there is no positive development that can’t be turned to a disaster, filtered through the right lens.

Biden has had a very good streak of successes lately, including the jobs report in which employment was more than twice expected, but it didn’t take long for the opposition to declare it a predictor of future rate increases by the Fed and a deeper recession and all sorts of bad news to come.

And the stock markets responded with a dip of, my gosh, nearly a full percentage point, in response to the rumors about the Fed or Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan or some guy spilling his coffee in his lap.

One can’t always trace these things with certainty.

 

Worst of all, Gary Varvel (Creators) says, the impending Inflation Reduction Act is full of tax increases, though he doesn’t specify whose taxes are going up.

There are plenty of warnings about the upcoming tax hikes, mostly coming from a single report, which only sorta kinda predicts that anyway. The argument, for anyone with an income of less than $400,000 a year, is about “indirect” increases, by which they mean that, if your boss’s company has to pay more taxes, they may skip your annual raise and raise the price of widgets.

So it’s real, but its impact likely won’t be, other economic experts insist, because other benefits in the act will more than counterbalance those indirect outcomes.

 

Lisa Benson (Counterpoint) points out the real disaster facing us: The act will fund the IRS to do a better job of tracking down tax cheats.

Don’t those Democrats know that princesses and other privileged royalty are expected to cheat on their taxes?

I’m so old I remember when the Party of Law and Order didn’t openly complain about someone enforcing law and order.

 

They may, Mike Luckovich suggests, have a lot more to complain about than having to pay their fair share of taxes, once Merrick Garland goes from the “reelin’ em in” part to the part where he starts gutting and cleaning his catch.

The indictments against the police who killed Breonna Taylor were a wake-up call for the people who accuse him of inaction. It may have taken awhile, but, while justice deferred may be justice denied, it’s a helluva lot better than a hasty action that misfires and lets the villains walk.

Meanwhile, there is speculation that the guy who got seven years for his January 6 actions may be an example of what happens to people who decline to cooperate with the authorities.

In case you thought only tax cheats were being picked on.

Look, I’m tired of waiting for Garland, too, but I used to get tired of waiting for Christmas.

It was usually worth it.