Humor, not all of it political – The Daily Cartoonist

This was amusing when it ran last week, but not nearly as funny as RFK Jr has made it seem since. Either he’s becoming less guarded in his statements or else his jumbled logic, which doesn’t really qualify as logic, is building to a crescendo.

There’s more measles popping up around the country, which isn’t the result of the last three months but a payoff for several years of anti-vax nonsense, and now he’s insulted everyone on the autism scale and everyone who loves someone on the autism scale.

Maybe Brainworm Bobby is like a goat staked out to attract a tiger, a kind of sacrifice to make the rest of the Trump cabinet seem reasonable and well-grounded. If so, he’s doing a helluva job.

Speaking of cabinet officers, I was conflicted on this Max Espinoza piece, because, on the one hand, it seems sexist, while, on the other, I have kinda noticed that the women in and around Dear Leader are pretty doggone good-looking, and frequently better looking than they are brilliant. Still, it seemed tacky to point it out.

But then I came across a story in the latest Mother Jones headlined In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA, which not only confirmed my observation but expanded on it, noting the combination of Botox injections and plastic surgery that women have used to fit in at Mar A Lago, while observing that the administration hasn’t done much to actually advance women’s rights.

And it fits in with the recent sending of six lovely-but-unqualified-and-untrained ladies into suborbital space, which has been hailed by them and their sugar daddies as “empowerment” and derided by nearly everyone else.

Which raises the question, is it more degrading to comment on the phenomenon, or to pretend not to notice?

Juxtaposition of the Day

I thought it was interesting that two cartoonists from the same syndicate riffed on water pollution on the same day, though I realize there’s no reason to think the cartoons passed through the same editorial hands at all, much less on the same date.

But the real issue of timing is in something that might well prompt the mermaid’s words, since Dear Leader has just opened the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.

It’s a jaw-dropping insult to Mother Nature, but it’s more than that, because not only will trawlers likely damage the coral and other elements of the ocean floor there, but the bycatch inevitable in commercial fishing may involve sea turtles and other vulnerable animals, both in the form of captured-and-discarded non-target prey and in air-breathers entangled and drowned in fishing gear.

Even responsible commercial fishing takes a toll, and it is farcical to assume we have the ability to police fishing practices and ensure that each boat is operating responsibly.

If the mermaids don’t already hate us, this should do the trick.

And on a lighter note, I had to check to see how old Stephan Pastis is, and it turns out he was all of seven months old in 1968 when, in the build-up to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Youth International Party nominated Pigasus for president.

As the Yippies explained, “They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.”

Perhaps baby Stephan wasn’t propped up in front of the TV at that young age, but we older types were certainly watching, and we remember the moment quite well.

We remember pigs. We just can’t remember words. I got a chuckle out of this cartoon but also found it reassuring, because I have started dropping words, which is very scary when you reach a stage in life when several friends and relatives are descending into dementia, one of the drawbacks to living a long and otherwise healthy life.

Like the president, I’m told to remember a set of words at my annual physical and, like the president, I can repeat them back. Nearly everyone gets a passing rate on that test, and there’s nothing remarkable about getting them all right, but it would sure be a drag not to.

The word loss, however, I liken to night-blindness, in which you can’t see something if you look straight at it, but if you look to the side, it will come into view, which has to do with the distribution of visual purple in your eye.

Similarly, when you drop a word, the easiest way to get it back is to stop trying to remember it, which is to say, to not panic over what is apparently a normal part of aging.

There is potential dignity in aging, but, then again, there is also the potential for great foolishness. This cartoon seems absurd, but I knew a woman of a certain age whose husband left her and wound up sponsoring a bride from one of those international match-making sites.

I never heard how things went for him after she got her green card, but I’ve heard enough other stories that I’d be more likely to start buying lottery tickets. The odds seem a lot better.

At the other end of the life cycle is this remnant of a Catholic childhood. There is little religious justification for believing in guardian angels, but, unlike the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, it wasn’t something we were expected to outgrow, either.

There’s a lot in the Bible that is folkloric, which is true of all history from ancient times, but this isn’t the weekend to bring that up, so I’ll just say my guardian angel has kept a low profile since I was about six.

Much safer to talk about eggs, and I not only laughed at this one, but it reminded me of an art class in college that included a life-drawing session. About a week later, I ran into the model downtown, which provided me with the chance to use the classic line, “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

Fortunately, she laughed.

In 2003, Margaret Shulock made it unnecessary for anyone to ever do another Easter Bunny cartoon.