Category Archives: Military
Orwellian Train Wreck
It turns out ObamaCare really is a train wreck.
Republicans tried to delay it and were denied. Then they tried to defund it and the result was a government shutdown.
Even though it was far from their goal, had the Republicans succeeded, they would have saved the president’s signature program a lot of embarrassment.
Orwellian White House
Instead, the White House called the Tea Party’s efforts to stop the train wreck “terrorism“.
The same administration, four years ago, labeled the killing of 13 troops at Fort Hood in the name of Islam, “workplace violence“.
The President’s Lawn
The president thinks the National Mall is his lawn. He used park service storm troopers to try to keep veterans and everyone else – except illegal immigrants – away from the mall and memorials. Maybe the illegal immigrants were represented by illegal immigrant lawyers.
Lawn Job
Over the weekend veteran groups uprooted park service barricades and dumped them on the White House lawn.
D-Day for Government Shutdown
Fortunately, there was no government shutdown on D-Day, 69 years ago (or, in terms of the federal debt, 16.5 trillion dollars ago).
Unfortunately, the government was shut down when the Honor Flight veterans of WWII made a landing at their namesake monument in DC.
Assault on Government Shutdown
Not surprisingly, the vets easily overwhelmed the barricades and 7 rangers (called up from furlough) at the poorly defended monument and claimed it for themselves.
Now back to Normandy, where the beaches are closed.
Update: Veterans are be being chased away from the Vietnam Memorial.
Wounded Warrior Cartoons
I spent last week drawing cartoons for wounded warriors.
First stop was the VA hospital in Cincinnati on Sunday. The trip was organized by Polly Keener, the president of the Great Lakes chapter of the National Cartoonists Society.
The only picture I have is this one of New Yorker cartoonist Michael Shaw. Michael made a witty presentation explaining that he draws 10 cartoons a week and considers it a good year if New Yorker publishes 12! That’s cutthroat cartooning.
Our visit, however, was decidedly non-cutthroat cartooning. We drew for vets with all kinds of injuries and health problems, as well as a few perfectly fine staff members. The most interesting vet was an 85 year old guy who lied to join the navy at age 16. He served in the pacific during WWII. Then he joined the army and served at Inchon in the Korean war.
Wounded Warrior Tour
L-R Top: Steve Moor In the Bleachers, Eddie Pittman Phineas and Ferb, Sam Viviano Mad Magazine, Bill Hinds Tank McNamara, Buzz Beamer, Cleats, Paul Fell editorial cartoonist. Bottom: Rob Smith, Jr. editorial cartoonist, Jeff Bacon BroadSide/GreenSide, Your faithful correspondent
On Monday I headed out on a USO sponsored tour of forward operating bases – in Florida and Georgia. I’ve made other USO trips in the past to Germany and the Persian Gulf. My cartoon buddies from the Sunshine State theater are pictured above.
Jeff Bacon, a retired navy captain turned cartoonist, works with USO to put the trips together. We visited MacDill Air Force Base, The Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay, Georgia, and the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville.
We didn’t get to fly any drones and the closest we got to a sub was lunch. But we did draw for vets with everything from head and spinal trauma, to paranoid schizophrenia. We also drew for PlayStation jockeys at the base shopping mall.
It was a rewarding trip but I fell way behind on my regular workload. Something about health care and debt ceilings. Got caught up over the week-end. Now you can see everything you need to know about last week’s news in the posts above.
Exceptional Exceptionalism
Putin wrote an op-ed in the NYT last week mocking Obama and the idea of American Exceptionalism. He scored bonus points because everyone knows Obama himself is not so wild about the idea. He thinks America is exceptional in the same way Britain and Greece are exceptional. Which is to say, not very. But that didn’t stop him last week from asking Americans to support an attack on Syrian president Assad – with something more than a pinprick, yet unbelievably small – because we are exceptional.
The abuse continued this week when a Russian minister claimed the Navy Ship Yard shooting was an example of American Exceptionalism.
Exceptional and Weird
Maureen Dowd had a few thoughts of her own about the president concerning the partisan speech he delivered while the shooting was still going on:
“The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore… Top Democrats who used to consider Obama one cool cat now muse that he’s “one weird cat,” as one big shot put it.”
When the going gets tough the weird get going.
