The Week in Review, Annotated by the National Guard

Insurrection? Maybe in a Portland brew pub when they run out of IPAs...

This week was so weird, I can’t even remember what happened.

Oh, yes. I fished a couple of times.

Let’s look at the cartoons and see if any of them jog my memory.

Oh, yes. The usual.

I assume it’s all clear to you how this is all going down. I was kind of in denial for awhile, but now I’m not. The funny thing is, you’d think someone who wanted absolute power might not spend so much time on his private golf courses.

Trump’s spurious claims of urban mayhem (funny, seems to be limited only to blue states, but I digress) are laughable. Homeland Security Barbie Kristi Noem was taken to a Portland rooftop and shown the war-ravaged devastation of food trucks selling stuffed gnocchi caused her to observe that Portland’s leaders were hiding “Antifa”.

Where do you hide those nasty anti-fascists, anyway? In the Powell’s book store Purple Room? They’re wily, those Portland Antifa. Invisible, even. They’re that good.

I liked drawing this. I do golf, if that’s OK, but I’m not obsessed with it. OK, I was for awhile. I play public courses with other fellow Antifa Golfers. I’m not a cigar booze type, so I play cheap tracks because golf is very challenging. Not as hard as crappie fishing, but still. I’m an 18 handicap, which means I’m OK. Not great. I do have moments of greatness, but generally I settle for moments of bogeyness.

Incidentally, have you ever tried to type on a moving, swaying train, as I am attempting to do at this very moment? It’s rather challenging. If there are missing words, please blame Amtrak and physics.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Next?

Here’s a nice little word play I conjured last week.

It was originally “ONE MANIAC. ONE VOUGHT”. Either works, but manbaby is a fun word that may or may not exist. Could be two words. We work on deadline in this shop, so I’m flexible if you are.

This was yet another opportunity to draw rubble, which I have become rather adept at. It’s also the first time I’ve drawn Russell Vought, so we’re just getting warmed up here. He’s also the world’s oldest-looking 49 year old. Must be all the stress from trying to destroy the United States Government. That’s a lot of work, what with the bloody sledgehammer he has to swing all day.

I kind of get hypnotized when I draw rubble. It has to be done right, but it’s also very freeform, too. So it’s what we writer/artists types call a pleasant idyll.

What else did I do?

Hmm. Oh. Yes, this…

This was def my favorite cartoon of the week.

First, I had to go look at a photo of the set of the “new” CBS News, which is now being run by the grumpy jerk Bari Weiss, who has no more business running CBS News than Trump has being a re-elected president. She’s another illustration of “Yes. It is That Bad”. Maybe if they NYT had been nicer to Weiss, we would be in this situation.

JFK once told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that Karl Marx, a freelance journalist before he came up with the political philisophy of the same name, asked his editor at the New York Daily Tribune as a European Correspondent for a five dollar a month raise.

The editor did not give him the five clams, so we got communism instead, as Jack Kennedy observed. But hey. Who know what editor out there now today has wrought with some other flake contractor? You know. Like me.

We need to use the word “wrought” more.

Anyway, I did a nice job on the CBS set, and even worked in my boy Uncle Walter.

I once gave a speech right in front of Walter Cronkite, and he laughed through it (three minutes)—maybe my greatest moment. I was not able to meet him at the Overseas Press Club event, but I almost met him, again, at 1996 GOP Convention. He was chatting with my buddy, who decided not to walk ten feet over to me to introduce us. I should have been more aggressive.

I am still mad at the friend. So I never met him. I also saw him sitting in the CBS booth at a lot of conventions. I miss not only him (and solid CBS journalism), but also because someone could not exactly look like a movie star and be a news anchor. You know, because they had journalism experience and stuff.

I used to idolize CBS News.

Now it’s just another MSM outlet I avoid. Sigh. That’s the way it is, I guess.

What else we got?

This:

I had been chewing on this particular idea for about a week. I finally just decided to go with it, as it was nice drawing.

The crazy stuff 45/47 has said during the shutdown is so nakedly stupid, and yet Trump also never holds his cards. He just tells everyone what he’s going to do, and then people act surprised that he does it.

Oh. What are the “Democrat Agencies”? Asking for a friend on Medicare and Social Security. I was not aware there were Democrat Agencies.

WOW. That was a good train sway.

Anyway.

Maybe it’s a little wordy. That’s a tough balance. It’s more that the words were illustrative rather than critical to the punchline, so sometimes I can do a word cloud once in awhile and get away with it.

People ask me how I track my national work. I see it a lot in Daily Kos, about once a week or so. Then it’s in The Week a lot. I see those. Then my own stuff is all over my feeds, too, and it is a fascinating phenomenon to draw something, post it, and then see it all over the place an hour after I finished it up in Photoshop. Surreal, really. We weren’t able to do that. We got 40 newspapers in our Oregonian library, and you had to wait to see if you were in the Philsdelphia Inquirer or not.

Speaking of my old days, I am going to have dinner with Marty Nolan from the Boston Globe tonight, also with my boy Theo Armour. He won the Pulitzer in 1966, when he was about 25 or so, and is an original Boy on the Bus from the Timothy Crouse book on the McGovern campaign, along with my other dear buddy George Skelton, legendary Los Angeles Times political columnist who’s still banging the columns out at 87.

What else did I do?

Oh, yes.

Had to do this. For the Sunday Chronicle.

Drawing Gavin as a DI was fun, as well as Pvt. Bone Spur. It’s very dialogue-driven, but that’s OK. I like these. They’re fun to write, and I don’t have to kill myself on large art. Sometimes I indulge in some lightly obscure writing, so I had to assume that most people understood the Ride of The Valkyries gag from Apocalypse Now.

I also did this:

A buddy of mine of this local rowing team asked to do this for a t-shirt (I gotta pay the bills). I had a lot of trepidation about doing this, because my dear friend, the late Rex Babin, was also a rower in that club, and did beautiful art for the Head of The Charles rowing event in Boston.

The original rough had them singing, “BUT I LOVE THAT DIRTY WATER!”

My buddy is young, so he didn’t get the song lyric, which I razzed him about endlessly, and Rex would, too. So I removed the lyric. Anyway, I thought about Rex the entire time. Turned out fine.

***********

In other news, my pal cartoonist Clay Jones has had a stroke. Bubba is a sweetheart (mostly!). He’s improving, but it affected his speech and right side, and that’s his drawing hand. The AAEC has set up a GoFundMe for Clay, and I know a lot of your subscribe to Clay as well as yours truly. If you can kick in (he’s a freelancer), God bless you. We’ve raised about $25,000 en route to $100,000. Clay is a great guy, and rehab is going to run a lot.

Here’s the Clay link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/clayjones

That’s it for the moment. Have a great day! —J.