The Plan Backfires

The Plan Backfires

I’ve been so busy, the last month or so, working on something for Know Your City, that I missed doing any editorial cartoons during the entirety of the recent government shutdown. I wanted to at least produce a comment on that shutdown’s conclusion, so I set aside the other project for a couple of days to work on the above.

As symbolized here, the conspiracy by House Republicans to force the President either to make further concessions on the Affordable Care Act, or risk the kind of global economic catastrophe that could result from the US government going into default, seems to have mostly blown up in their big, dumb faces. Crisis averted!

At least, for the moment. Voters have famously short attention spans, and the next election where they could conceivably punish the Republicans for their flagrantly irresponsible behavior is more than a full year away. Combine this with the fact that many House seats are practically election-proof due to rampant cheating gerrymandering, and it’s entirely possible the GOP could see modest gains in the next election, regardless of the beating their approval ratings suffered because of the shutdown. A worst-case scenario is that the only direction in which many Republican seats could change at all would be for their current occupants to be replaced by ideologues who are even dumber, crazier, or more stubborn!

Visually, I’m quite pleased with this cartoon. I managed to keep House Speaker John Boehner at least halfway recognizable, despite many of his distinguishing features being scorched off! In terms of symbolic accuracy, it does arguably fudge the damage done to the US economy by the shutdown, estimated at around $3 billion, though that pales in comparison to the possible consequences of a default.

I don’t know how much time I’ll be able to dedicate to editorial cartoons, for at least a few more weeks. My pace on the Know Your City project has been sluggish–plagued by equipment failure. However, I’m hoping to finish it ASAP, so I can return to a somewhat regular update schedule here.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 21st, 2013 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Cartoons & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “The Plan Backfires”

Obama’s expression sells this one. If it was anything other than the tired, slightly angry “You dumb shits” I don’t think it would have punched nearly as well.

Yup. I knew getting his face just right would be very important!

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