Tag Archives: politics

September 6, 2017 · 3:02 pm

Tumbling the Trumpinator

It has gone beyond the realm of credibility.  How can a pumpkin-headed orangutan with a belly full of racial hatred and Islamophobia still be nominally running this country?  Has he not committed enough irredeemable sins to be sent to Hell, directly to Hell, do not pass GO and do not collect $200!?  I think he stole all the “Get out of jail free” cards before the game ever started.

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I have never called this Twitter twit-wit my president.  I never voted for him.  He did not win the popular vote.  He would not have won the electoral college without Republican cheating at voter suppression and Russian influence through email chicanery.  But the terrible things he has done so far have not gotten him removed from office.  Republicans still treat him as if he were a rational adult.  And Fox News is not only putting lipstick on the pig, they are covering him in red, white, and blue frosting and molding him into the shape of an American Eagle.  Why do we put up with these tactics?

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Perhaps other cartoonists and I are the only ones who see him for what he really is.  He’s an ignorant con man put into a position of power by billionaires so they can foist their evil agenda on us and have him rubber-stamp it with faux legitimacy.

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The betrayal of the DACA Dreamers was fifteen straws beyond the last straw for me.  Who is planning to remove him from office immediately?  I want to help.  I don’t believe in solving problems with guns, but I can throw a mean banana cream pie of satire and sarcasm.  I’m actually Hell at pie-whacking faces.   I can attempt to hurt him with rotten tomatoes of jokery and the silly string  of mockery too.  But even the image of this buffoon in cheap clothing with long red ties is immune to the assaults of mere humor.  He never gets the joke, and it is never on him.  It is on us instead.

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He hurts too many good people by taking away things that they need.  He may have damaged the way sick people access health care to the point that many, including me, will die for lack of funds.  He de-values human life by pardoning racist criminals like Arpaio and praising malevolent dictators like Putin.  He puts human life at risk by taunting another irrational man-baby who also has nukes to play chicken with.

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And no effort to remove him from office for crimes which he obviously committed and shows no signs of anything but guilt about will be made by the party now in power.

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So what will you do to bring back our country and our supposed sanity?  Tell me.  I want to hear a plan.  I stand ready with foam rubber whack bats to take the best shots I am capable of to help.  And I am not the only one.  (Truly, I drew none of the cartoons in this post myself.  Good cartoonists are legion in this day and age.)

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July 13, 2017 · 3:03 pm

The Big Golden Banana-Eater’s Very Sad Day

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I have spent some time on this blog avoiding making fun of Donald Trump.  He has, as Fearless Leader of the Pottsylvania Republic that America has become, done innumerable things that have impacted my life already.  I am a diabetic who can no longer afford insulin.  I can’t breath the city air in the city I am living in.   And my wife still has a green card after twenty-two years of marriage.  He could’ve hurt me more than he has already if not for the fact that the monkey can’t keep secrets for very long, and the harder he tries, the more Pandora’s boxes he opens up.   But the more I leave him alone, even though he’s such an easy subject for practicing humor and satire on, the less he seems willing to leave me alone.  So forgive me for taking joy from his misery.

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Don Dumb-o Jr. managed to convict himself in the press by Tweeting emails that aggressive political journalists had been pursuing for months.  Seriously, I always knew he was something of a bird-brain, but who’d have thought that Dodo birds weren’t extinct after all?  He published the very Russian collusion transcripts that Trump had made all kinds of nasty faces and Obama-hate-Tweets in order to keep under wraps.

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So, while I am happy that the truth is coming out and the old windbag liar can’t stop it from coming out, I have absolutely no faith that the problem will get solved.  The government is still in the strangle-hold grip of the vile and greedy modern GOP (Greedy Old Party).  They are quite likely to continue to excuse and protect the orangutan we elected because the monkey-man will continue to let them get away with everything their greedy old party wants to do in robbing the poor to make the rich richer.  My Republican friends who support Trump are kinda quiet for the moment, but they still support Trump and believe whole-heartedly in every nasty little thing he wants to do to me… with the help of the Russians, apparently.

Oh, well…  He has at least stopped incessantly tweeting bird poop on Twitter for the moment.  So let me enjoy it while I still can.

 

 

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May 14, 2017 · 3:36 pm

Surviving the Reign of the Monkey King

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So the head monkey has fired the giraffe in charge of looking into the Russian banana pilfering that has everyone questioning his fitness to rule.  Rule?  Heck!  I question his continued right to own bananas!

But this post is supposed to be a reflection on surviving, not another angry animal metaphor about things that can’t be cured until the next election, or until the elephants that put the monkey in charge do something about their own addiction to bananas and work up the necessary human emotion and moral outrage to remove him as head of the zoo.

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                                                                        Steve Bannon, the idea-monkey of the Monkey Kingdom

So let me enumerate some of the thoughts that give me peace in the midst of this insane monkey-house cacophony.  (Cacophony is a good word to use around the topic of the monkey king because it has both the words “caca” and “phony” in it.)

  • Bannon is a very scary chimpanzee, but he is apparently on the outs in the court of the monkey king.  He got in a verbal kerfuffle with Orangutan Junior Kushner, and the monkey king has not recently crayoned his signature on the  poison-in-executive-order-form that Bannon cares most about.
  • Orangutan Junior Kushner is now in charge of everything under the sun.  All bananas now grow by his doings, and he can’t possibly run everywhere and poo everywhere to properly fertilize all the banana trees.  And considering the toxic qualities of the monkey king’s banana trees, we probably don’t really want them to grow anyway.
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Orangutan Junior Kushner has taken to wearing Trump-style hair.

  • The Russian banana pilfering has put all other monkey initiatives on hold.  The monkey king was planning to create monkey laws with the elephants that would prevent most other animals from having any hope of health care.  It made its way successfully through the Elephant House and was supposed to move on to the Elephant Senate to be officially stamped with the notion that providing the other animals with mythical “access” to health care wasn’t just a way to make animals pay all their money to insurance piranhas and still not be able to afford any real health care.   Now they are forced instead to talk about other banana-related things.
  •  And on the subject of bananas, the monkeys and the elephants actually have them all already.  So we don’t have to worry about having bananas.  We probably never will.  All they have left for us are the peanuts.  But they like to take and eat our peanuts too.  The good part of this is that peanuts are a healthy food for diabetics.  And, of course, you can’t die of over-eating if you cannot buy food.
The Orange King is very, very HYUGE! but his hands are small.

So, the long and the short of it is this.  It is not hard to see the end of this struggle to survive the monkey king’s rule.  I, for one, will probably not survive.  But cutting the legs out from under the giraffe investigating the Russian banana pilfering was probably the beginning of the end of the monkey king himself.  The lions, wherever they have been hiding, will now come out and eat him.

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March 25, 2017 · 4:24 pm

Apparently, What Winning Looks Like

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Somebody who has an orange spray-tan on his face, a wig made out the remnants of the Scarecrow from Oz after the Wicked Witch was done with her revenge, and tiny, tiny hands once promised that if elected, he would make us sick of winning.  Heck, I was sick before the battle started.  And winning so far this week has meant merely that the Trumpcare/no-care/death-care plan failed spectacularly in the GOP controlled House.  And why did it fail, providing me with a backhanded win?  Because the Freedom Caucus couldn’t agree to a plan that wasn’t cruel enough to the old, the sick already, and the poor.  Seriously, they wanted a healthcare plan that didn’t cover mental health, prescription drugs, hospitalization, or basically everything that I might need an insurance policy to cover.  They want, ideally, to give us health insurance where we must continually pay premiums month by month and then, when we get sick, choose to die at home and get no benefits.  So winning for me means that I can continue to get the crappy insurance coverage I already have under Obamacare to keep me perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy.  And it IS a win compared to what the Evil Republican Empire wants to do to me.

But one thing that makes me even sicker about this kind of winning is that it is simply a temporary stay of execution.  They are going to do it again.  How many times, after all, have they voted to repeal healthcare already?  I have lost count.  Republicans really, really, really don’t want us to keep any of our own money when we can give it to some soulless corporation instead.  And the budget that lurks around the corner is just as big, bad, and brutal as the whole healthcare kerfluffle.  They mean to roast and eat Big Bird like a Thanksgiving Turkey, steal food from school children, fire everybody who works for the government and even thinks about preventing corporations from pouring poisons into our water and air,  and cut funds to the State Department so that diplomacy and prevention of wars is seriously impaired.

So what, as a concerned citizen, am I gonna do about it?  Well, I’m a sick old former school teacher who likes to write humor pieces while I’m busy slowly dying.  So I’m going to make fun of the bad guys.  Seriously, the best I can do is try to ridicule them to death.

So let’s start with the Trumpinator’s penchant for hiring evil leprechauns to torment us.

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And I want to take a moment to talk about the perils of allowing turtles to do politics.

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It is true that “slow and steady wins the race” but, come on!  It also apparently allows you to steal Supreme Court nominations and have no clue what “hypocrisy” means.  He is offended when Democrats refuse to accept and love his party’s proposals, but demonstrated absolutely no ability to say the word… you know the word… the one that means the opposite of “no”… when Democrats were in charge.

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And then there’s the lovely zombie-eyed granny hater that we have allowed to eat the social security system.  His plans for Medicare, Healthcare, and Social Security are all featured now on posters in the Grim Reaper’s public relations office.

So there you have it.  That’s the best celebration of the recent win that Mickey can come up with in his stupid little head.  It’s no wonder we are tired of winning already.

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February 20, 2017 · 12:08 pm

They’re Despicable!!!

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I had promised myself to put the whole political outrage stew in the freezer for a while, and stop picking at the meat and potatoes of it before it completely poisons me.  But President Pumpkinhead is imploding so fast I may miss out before incoming Russian and North Korean and even possibly Australian missiles begin nuking the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area.  I guess I simply have to boil it a little bit more right now.

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If I were going to script it as a psycho-consensual farce and put it on the stage, I couldn’t have written it any funnier.  It seems a couple of evil geniuses have been manipulating the pumpkin-headed guy so they could achieve their own personal ends.  They are selling him invisible clothing again.  And they will get away with it, too, because they are doing it in the context of the Republican Party.  The GOP, of course, is the party that cheats in order to win.  They gerrymander voting districts.  They suppress voters that are more likely to vote for Democrats.  And they maintain a lock-grip on the House where more people nationwide actually voted for Democrats, but that comes through the voting system as a Republican majority victory.  They are, as Sylvester says so juicily, DESPICABLE!!!  (Yes, I know, the triple exclamation point thing again.)

Tweedle-not-so-dumb and his twin brother, Tweedle-evil.

It appears that now that Hatchet-face Flynn, the Dick-Tracy villain who was in charge of National Security, committed treason by promising the Russians that Obama’s sanctions for hacking the American election would be overturned as soon as Trump took over the job as big cheese in chief.  And it not only appears that Trump knew about this (or is that gnu about this?), but even said after Flynn was fired that he would’ve approved of it if he had known… even though he didn’t know… (or gnu).

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Immediately thereafter, Football-head and Bowling-ball-head on the Congressional Oversight Committee (You know, Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz who brought you the Endless Benghazi Hearings Follies and Republican Musical Review) went about the business of completely overlooking any possible wrong doing by the Pumpkinhead Administration.

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A Republican friend of mine once told me that he knew that all the crooks weren’t exclusively in the Democratic Party, but that’s the only place he really wanted to look for them.  It helped him sleep better at night.

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I spent a good share of last evening being lectured over Facebook by a conservative friend about not getting behind the Trumpkin bandwagon and scooping up the horse poop so they could continue their parade of doing Republican good things for the country (where “Republican good things” is a phrase that means destroying public education, taking away my healthcare since I have six pre-existing conditions, and dumping coal pollutants into rivers and oil pollutants into the air).  Apparently my writing stuff about Pumpkinhead Tinyhands that isn’t positive is a protest which constitutes terrorism, and I need to go to some other country like Canada where the commie-ISIS dictator is a libtard idiot just like me.  I don’t  have a right to stay here if I protest the elected government and the so-called humor in my blog and Facebook posts are unacceptably un-patriotic.  Apparently you can only call black presidents Hitler without being hooted out of the country by REAL AMERICANS.

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Apparently I am wrong about this man.  I am told he does not have a bowling ball for a head.

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February 8, 2017 · 3:20 pm

Here Comes DeVos and Her Army of Orcs

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This is not a picture of Betsy DeVos.  This is an orc used as a metaphor, something children will no longer learn how to use in the dark new future of education.

Orcs, as depicted by Tolkien in his epic work The Lord of the Rings, are an unhappy lot, hating everyone, especially themselves and their masters whom they serve only out of fear.  Sound like modern-day Republicans?  Well, that’s probably not a fair comparison.  Shame on you for thinking like that.  Although, I must admit, looking at the Secretary of Education that Donald Trump has foisted upon us with the aid of senate Republicans, there is probably good reason you might think that.

Orcs, according to Tolkien, create no beautiful things.  They live out their lives violently destroying everything and everyone they touch.  They are greedy, corrupt, disloyal, and generally the very definition of ugliness.  And they have been the opponents of good public education for as long as I have been associated with schools and teaching.

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Here is an actual portrait of DeVos.  Sorry to spring something so foul and gut-wrenchingly horrible on you, but I thought you ought to have some idea how hideous this orcishness really is.

Orcs always tell me, “You can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at them.”   What they really mean when they say this is either, “I can afford to put my kids in a good school that will only teach them what I want them to know, and I don’t think any of my money should be taken from me by taxation to pay for the education of poor people’s kids, especially not stupid poor people’s kids.”  Or, more likely, “I am too dumb not to believe rich white people when they say the world will be better for me and mine if I let rich white people keep all the money they make and make all the money they want.”   Either way, in Texas where the orcs have ruled since the Reagan Revolution first won over the rich white orcs that carry their orcish tribal banners all over oil-rich Texas, money has never been an issue for Texas public schools.  There simply is no money for public schools in Texas.  Over the past decade the State has always chosen to cut school funding before dipping into their vaunted billion-dollar rainy day fund whenever the Republican legislatures create a huge budget shortfall.  And whenever there has been a budget surplus, education funds are not restored.  Things like the fight against evil Planned Parenthood clinics take precedence.

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Members of the Texas State Legislature

Now Betsy DeVos, who became our current Secretary of Education despite resistance from all non-orc members of the US Senate, plus two orcs, will now give the orc hordes everything they want for education.  The federal Department of Education will be dismantled from the inside.  Privatized for-profit schools will become the new normal and receive funding disproportionate to the work they actually do.  All the cream belonging to rich folks will be skimmed off the top of the educational milk vat, and the rest will be left to fester and spoil in public school vats, becoming, at best, really really stinky cheese.

And so, let me end by saying, “Thank you, orcs, for doing such a wonderful job of protecting my children and grandchildren from the horrors of education and the ability to think for themselves.  You have protected them from ever learning enough to pull themselves out of the poverty and slavish lives you have put them in.”

 

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February 4, 2017 · 5:49 pm

The Boogendorfer

 

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This is not actually a picture of Boogendorf, this is Toonerville where the clocks are wrong and a giant Mickey Mouse lurks in the foothills beyond.

Today I mean to justify my existence before God and everybody.  Apparently in the modern world you have to be certain things in your basic foundation to justify getting travel visas, citizenship, and a basic right to continue to exist unmolested.  We apparently elected a new leader, the Mad King of Boogendorf, to make sure all Boogendorfers are suitably qualified to live in Boogendorf.  So this is a brief photo essay to justify my case for why Boogendorf should accept me as a citizen and not execute me outright.

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First of all, I am not one hundred per cent crazy.  You can tell from this photo, can’t you?

This kooky dorfleflop can’t be any more than 65% crazy because his pin head is not large enough to harbor more than 65 out of every 100 truly derfy and sanity-stealing notions.  (What is a dorfleflop, you say?  Well, dorf is a German word for town, and dorfleflops flop in a dorf and think they belong like everybody else who has flopped there before.)

But using the Mad King of Boogendorf as a measuring stick (an orange measuring stick with an extra-long tie), that is clearly not crazy enough by half.

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What’s the deal with the clocks always being wrong in Boogendorf?

I have always heard it said, “It takes a village to raise a child”.  And I think that saying I heard is probably true.  I was raised by the village of Rowan, Iowa in the 60’s and 70’s.  I learned to draw there.  And I can draw real cartoon human beings.

Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.

Of course, one must be careful to note that if you could actually draw real cartoon human beings they would be alive after that, and that would make you like God, able to create life from nothing more than pencil, pen, and paper.  And in Boogendorf there is only room for one God.  That, of course, is the Mad King of Boogendorf.  So I guess that is a disqualifying quality too.

And that saying about a child raised by a village is a saying somehow connected to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton was defeated (I have also heard disgraced, demoralized, and denounced) in the last election by getting more votes than the Mad King of Boogendorf.  So I am judged lacking by my upbringing too.

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I am also undeniably guilty of playing with dolls.  I mean, I collect them, I comb their hair, dress them in different clothes, take them apart and repair them, and pose them for pictures.  That can’t be normal.  But is it abnormal enough to make me qualified to be a Boogendorfer from the village of Boogendorf?  Maybe if I plated them in gold or something, or had enough money to go to “golden shower” extremes?  I guess I don’t understand how to be Boogendorfy enough to live in Boogendorf.  The “Boo” in Boogendorf proves that you have to be pathologically afraid of things more, just like other Boogendorfers are.   I am sure the average Boogendorfer is afraid of people who play with dolls.  Especially if those weird people don’t own any guns and don’t like to kill stuff.  That just ain’t natural.  You even need to give guns to little girls to make them safe against those evil anti-Boogendorfers.

So, I guess I am doomed to live a life outside of the walls of Boogendorf (and they are really great walls, too).  I should be grateful that the citizens of Boogendorf have only rejected me and not used their sacred second-amendment rights to execute me.  For now, I am simply not a Boogendorfer.

 

 

 

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February 3, 2017 · 4:39 pm

Facebooking and Birdwalking

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This is my bird-walking illustration.  I know that it is totally the wrong picture for the job, but it is a bird walking, isn’t it.  

It is not a stretch to suggest that most of what you find on Facebook is not real.  Especially when it comes to the endless posting and sharing of topical political memes.  I had thought when Facebook came out with their reaction-emoji thingies, that there was at least one I would never find a use for.  15622475_1183729518385094_5552623989556758950_n

Boy!  Was I ever wrong about that.  Now that the gold-plated pumpkinhead that got himself elected somehow is busy with his markers and crayons making executive orders, it is about the only one that really fits anywhere.

We made a big mistake allowing Trump to play Prexy and be the one in charge of making the rules of the game.  You all knew he was gonna cheat before the game even started, didn’t you?  And it won’t last long.  He is making allies like Australia into offended enemies.  He is banning burn victims, heroic Iraqi translators, doctors, and researchers from coming into the country with their entry visas and green cards and other proof that they have a right to be here.  He is burning up any goodwill and patience and level-headedness  that we have tried to afford him.  He will be impeached, or worse, sooner rather than later.  And then we will have to live with the irreparable damage he has done. 15871838_1523005324380940_7699241610958871006_n

And we probably deserve it.  We have made mistakes before, and if we live long enough, we will make more in the future.  But this was a big one.  And I don’t have to feel happy about it.  No matter what my conservative friends on Facebook tell me… or what names they call me.

So that’s where the bird-walking comes in.  The mind has to wander away down paths of lesser resistance.  We need to go where the sandpiper would go, walking down the beach to look for new and interesting-looking seeds to eat.

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You really should add this to your Bob Ross Bible if you haven’t already.

All of my illustrations in this article, except for the walking bird, which I drew myself, are clipped directly from Facebook.    Facebook is sometimes the soul source of wisdom for Village Idiots, and I should probably make an effort to be one less of the time.  But it is also an excellent source of bird-walking topics that get my mind off the terrible things and onto free-floating tangents that take me to places my mind would really rather be.

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I would’ve liked to have attended Pillsbury’s funeral, but the meme only gave the time and length of the service, not the date.  I fear that by now I have missed it.  But I am sure the service was well done.15747477_1364363353622793_9185361677508015682_n

Nostalgia memes on Facebook are great.  They make me feel all squishy and sad again about the times long gone and how terrifyingly horrible they were compared to how terrible they are now.

Remember John Wayne Gacy?  Or reports on television about the Viet Nam War?  With pictures?  Full color pictures of the My Lai Massacre in living color on NBC, with all the blood in bright red.  Yeah, that stuff on TV kept us outdoors quite a lot.

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But Facebook bird-walking is a dangerous sport.  If you let it, it will eat up your whole life, minute by minute, hour by hour.  And I’m not sure it makes you smarter in any way.  I know some pretty stupid people who are on Facebook quite a lot.

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Bird-walking at its best, though, is to coddiwomple.  And though you don’t know where you are going, you will get there sooner or later, so you might as well look at the scenery and appreciate the irony along the way.  Life should be a leisurely stroll, not a rush to get away from gold-plated pumpinheads with executive orders in their tiny, tiny hands.

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February 1, 2017 · 3:54 pm

Truly Terrible Trump Tricks

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Yep, I have tried thinking about the many uses for barbed wire and dead cats rather than have to think about what Trump has been doing, and it just isn’t working.  After looking up the tensile strength of various common barbed wires from different barbed wire companies, I could not find one appropriate for a cat-a-pult, and it turned out that the whole idea was a joke anyway.  But he just keeps getting worse.

Here is John Green, an author I love and listen to, explaining the Immigration Boobilly Boo-Boo;

The Trumpinator has gotten the idea that he can hammer the world into a shape he likes using mallet-like executive orders.  But no amount of hammering is going to turn the globe into a giant banana.  His executive orders are not put through a review process, and so, are often nonsensical, inappropriate, and even dangerous.

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The fact that you had to take a moment to decide if you needed to ask me if this photo was real or not tells you a lot about what you already know about Trump.  He is petulant.  He is childish.  He throws tantrums at the drop of a hat, or the smirk of an underling, or the comments of a celebrity… I wonder if he throws tantrums about barbed wire and dead cats?

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“Oh, no!  Thinking about Trump made me accidentally strangle Mr. Tinkles.”

And even worse are some of the detestable deplorables that he has working for him.  A man like Steve Bannon with his Breitbart background and his white supremacist crossword puzzles of racism, antisemitism, and nihilism would never have gotten power in the first place if it hadn’t been for Trump.  And now he is at least the second most powerful man on Earth.  Arguably, he’s the first, depending on how much his Wormtongue skills are affecting the baby mind of President Babyhands.

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So, here is my pitiful attempt at mocking the evil Steve, Darklord Bannon;

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I know, the angry eyebrows are simply not enough.  Let me try again;

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Okay, I know it’s not good enough.  I promise you, if I can find a cartoon way to harpoon the great white whale, Moby Steve, I will, and then post it for all to see.  I would like to be able to make a single cartoon so snarky that Bannon’s pet snake would drop over dead at the shockwaves from little old Republican ladies laughing at it and changing their opinion of Trump forever.  Of course, I know, better cartoonists than I have tried and failed.  That doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort.

You have probably discerned by now that I did not vote for Trump.  And I have given him more than enough chance to prove what he will do for this country.  I will never call him President using his proper name.  He is not my president.  And I do not want to live in Trump’s idea of America.  This I will probably achieve sooner than expected because what he is doing to Obamacare will undoubtedly kill me.

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January 25, 2017 · 3:57 pm

The Oxford Obfuscation

queen-elizabeth-iIf you are going to entertain a completely absurd notion like, “Shakespeare wasn’t really written by Shakespeare”, then you have to have some knowledge of the times and the context within which such a profoundly counter-intuitive thing could possibly be true.  And it also helps to understand more precisely what the “writing of Shakespeare” actually means.  Now, I know it is not particularly fair to confuse you, dear reader, right before I try to dazzle you with my complicated and over-thunk lackwit conspiracy theory, but that is, after all, what obfuscation actually means.

The plays, sonnets, and other poetry of William Shakespeare reveal the mind of a genius.  Whoever wrote the works has to be a complicated man living a complicated life.  He has to be a sensitive, empathetic, highly intelligent, observant, and troubled man.  You don’t write the dark and deeply troubled suicidal tragedy of Hamlet without ever having thought of taking your own life.  You cannot portray the madness of King Lear without ever having experienced the turmoil of the mind that threatens to tear your soul apart.  And you don’t write about the complexities of love found in As You Like It or Romeo and Juliet without ever having experienced the massive thunderstorms of the mind that go along with falling in love.  And we are talking true love, not necessarily the domestic love you have for the wife you are stuck with.   You see what I did just there?  I put you into the head of the writer, and started you thinking like you yourself are Shakespeare.  As goofy a mental gymnastic exercise as that is, bear with me and keep thinking it.

At the time of Shakespeare’s ascendancy as the Bard Laureate of English Literature, England was not a safe place to be either a noble or a playwright.  Queen Elizabeth’s mother had her head cut off for bad politics even though she was married to the King of England at the time.  Lady Jane Gray, one of Elizabeth’s predecessors, lost her head when she was no more than a sixteen-year-old girl.  During Elizabeth’s reign, one of her court favorites, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, attempted to seize the queen herself after a riot fomented by a performance of Shakespeare’s play, Richard II, at which eleven of Essex’s noble supporters were said to be present stirring up the emotions of the crowd.  It was a near thing for the writer of the play (about the life of a king whose reign ended in controversy about succession and which led eventually to the War of the Roses) to escape without also being caught up in the rebellion’s failure and round of executions that separated Essex from his head.  Elizabeth banned numbers of plays with religious or political content, bans that never seemed to touch the writer of Shakespeare’s plays, even when they touched on political themes.  You didn’t have to rebel against the Queen to lose your head either.  Elizabeth was trying to reinstate Anglican Protestantism against the critical tides of Catholic Europe.  You could be banished, put to death, or impressed  by force into the English Navy for being suspected of ideas that were too Catholic.  And witchcraft, or consulting with witches, as Macbeth depicts, earned you a nice warm fire in the public square to cleanse your immortal soul.

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Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

So, if one were to be both a playwright and a nobleman, known to and beloved by Queen Elizabeth, might there not be good reason to write under a pseudonym?  And numerous people who write about Edward de Vere mention the fact that he wrote poetry and plays, and the plays were very popular.  Some scraps of poetry by the Earl of Oxford still exist, but whatever happened to the manuscripts of his plays?  It is a conspiracy theory so delicious, that I have to take at least one more bite.  (You understand, I try to stick to a 500-word target for these posts, and even this 600+ is really too long.  So that means there has to be an Earl of Oxford Part II at least.)

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