Finishing The Job

It is with anxiety, chagrin and dread that I present this, my first cartoon of the 2024 Presidential “election” slog…

…and despite the massive disappointment and lack of enthusiasm of huge swaths of Democratic voters, Gropin’ Joe announced his re-election campaign kickoff with a promise to “finish the job”… at which point yours truly, like millions of others, is cringing and asking themselves: what job would THAT be — immiserating the poor and the working class? Terrorizing immigrants and bullying our next-door neighbors? Fattening up the war profiteers and Wall Street? Beating down anti-war dissent in public media? Dragging us into World War III?

Lotta big jobs to finish there, Joester; guess you’re going to need four more years to thoroughly screw things up, huh?

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Apropos Of Nothing (Cliff? What Cliff? no.2)

Apropos of entirely nothing, really… just stumped for a gag, smoking and doodling at an ungodly hour the other night, vaguely inspired by this alarmist headline in the Washington Post, though this cartoon was not at all intentionally related to the whole debt ceiling pissing contest on the Hill this week… and while I’m at it — is it a cliff, or the ceiling? Quit jerking us around, Washington Post.

I also fully confess to an equally boneheaded literal interpretation of the whole beat-ass “cliff” metaphor. Hell, I’m old enough to remember the FIRST time around with that “cliff” horseshit.

…and besides, if you really take a good, close, hot steamy gawk at Biden’s real priorities — and the current attitude of the American general public towards more unemployment, inflation, war and austerity — you couldn’t exactly say we were “drifting”.

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A Successful Launch

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship. Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire Space team on an exciting first flight test of Starship!”
— SpaceX statement 04.20.2023

“Where’s the KABOOM?
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!”
— Marvin The Martian

So, I was hitting some sativa bud and banging my head on the table the other day trying to shake loose a decent France uprising cartoon, and THIS weirdness fell out. I’d given up on a France cartoon at the moment and was just doing my daily space geekery, reading about the spectacular SpaceX launch failure and the attendant “hah, I MEANT to do that” spin from SpaceX, when I found my train of thought wandering to the Twitter valuation crash and the Paid Blue Check shitshow and was suddenly, like…

…like, yeah; Musk was really laughing off the Twitter valuation and the hot mess about the paid Blue Check accounts that’s been all over the news lately, and then a day or two later another one of his goddamn Starship tests goes sideways on him and the SpaceX PAO flacks are babbling a bunch of balloon juice about how much they learned today, and it was one of those moments of inspiration and serendipity that screamed “quit twisting your panties trying to think of a France cartoon for a moment and jump on THIS shit, man! Here it is!” Like, yeah — crashing and burning, in metaphor and reality.

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