Weekly Cartoon Roundup

It's been another brutal week enduring the greedy whims of profoundly inadequate men, so let's tiptoe through the toon tulips and see what the hell happened.

This is what comes to mind whenever some mediocre chump stumbles their way into the comments to get big mad over cartoons making fun of Trump and/or Elon. Whether it’s a billionaire’s boot or a pair of Punisher skull trucknuts, the MAGA crowd love keeping ‘em shiny. Even when it is both patently obvious and a verifiable fact these oligarchs don’t care about them or improving their lives. I guess somewhere along the line, these misguided clowns were duped into believing the best way to get what you want is to punch yourself in the dick, as long as it’s sold as somehow “owning the libs”.

If it was DOGE’s aim to make air travel as safe as driving in a Cybertruck Swastikar, mission accomplished. At least this new era of planes regularly falling from the sky serves as a helpful metaphor for this other new era of America we’ve only just entered. But all this avoidable damage and death will have been worth it if it gets white people to blame diversity for all their problems.

Every time I see one of these wraparound-Oakleys-on-wheels I think “there goes an insecure date rapist on his way to do his own research”. But perhaps I should change my thinking and thank Elon for making it easier to spot assholes in the wild, like a Scarlet Letter for finance bros who like Theo Von.

Seeing Trump install himself as chair of the Kennedy Center brings to mind the Nazis’ efforts to control arts and culture in Germany, so I figured I’d be proactive and start updating, or rather improving upon, works of art that have been so far rudely insufficient in their idolatry of Klan Chowder. This one, American Gothic: Herr Plugs Edition, hopes to begin the process of remedying that oversight by replacing that farmer couple (who probably didn’t even own any crypto) with our new oligarch overlords.

Another submission to the new MAGA Department of Moral Arts and Preferred Culture, improving upon some dusty old scribbles that didn’t even have a single red hat or reference to our beloved Burger King. You’re welcome, Edvard.

It’s neither weird nor out of character for this White House to share images of a crowned Narcisyphilis with the words “Long Live The King”, but it is disappointingly inaccurate. So, I did them a solid and truthed it up for posterity. And while I always suspected we’d eventually slide into fascism, I can’t say I expected the fascists to be sporting Racist No. 5 bronzer and a muskrat pelt toupee.

President Kremlin Debt calling Zelensky a “dictator” is some real top tier projection but I suppose one will do anything to keep the people happy who could out you as a Russian asset who likes to pee on Muscovite strippers.

CPAC is basically like a raisin-heavy potato salad luncheon with the worst people you've ever met so it comes as no surprise that Mars Karen showed up acting like Leatherface, if Leatherface’s choice of murder weapon was second-hand embarrassment. If only all that Ketamine led to a loss of balance and a little on-stage pratfall but oh well.

Look, it would take an awful lot to make the U.S. truly great for all its citizens - and those around the world who are subject to its global hegemony - but giving this pile of hospital laundry the ol’ four-knuckle salute would be a welcome start. Especially after finally shaking off his white hood and just going full fucking Nazi.

History doesn’t rhyme but it does something something. And that “something something” is “do the exact goddamned thing if you asshats don’t learn from your own collective past”. If we’re lucky, Gitmo and the massive for-profit prisons they’re building to house thousands of migrants will someday be liberated, and their architects will wear the same endless shame as those who built Dachau and Buchenwald.

Actual footage of the Department Of Grifting Everyone “uncovering fraud”, which is really just what they call getting undressed.

Ending this week’s roundup with an older one that I think serves as a handy translator for any time Mayonnaise Sculpture opens those calamari lips to give a speech. This week, it was at CPAC, but honestly once you cut through the dementia-addled slurs and incoherent bing-bongs, it’s all the same Mein Kampfing, just without any big words getting in the way.

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Album of the Week

This week’s album selection is Caetano Veloso’s 1972 masterpiece “Transa”, a rarity in his decades-long catalog for having a tracklist in which roughly half the songs are sung in English. Veloso had already established himself as a genre-definer by ushering in the Tropicalia sound with his self-titled album released 4 years earlier, and for writing songs that would be covered and popularized by fellow Brazilian artists like Gal Costa and Os Mutantes. But with “Transa”, Veloso transcended the sound that he had become known for and created something much more intimate in its approach. There is an effortless quality to the performances here, and a fairly stripped-down instrumentation compared to some of his other work.

I don’t pretend to know what many of the lyrics mean - even those sung in English - but there is such a mastery of simple melody, that being able to understand every word is immaterial. And Veloso’s voice is so smooth and emotive here that he could read me my own obituary and I’d probably love it.

Anyways, here is album opener “You Don’t Love Me”, sliding in like a breeze on a warm Brazilian night.

Until next week,

jesse