Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The Dudgeon Masters

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Mike Peterson Published: November 11, 2012 1 minute 1 comment

I really want to get back into funny comics and frivolous stuff like that, but Rudy Park really was the strip that rose to the top today.

Which was a little easier since the King Features site decided not to serve up any cartoons today. You can get some of them by going to rhymeswithorange.com and checking out the bar at the bottom of the site. (This is actually a plug for Hilary Price's annual open studio which is today. Information is also there.)

Anyway, this was a pretty good cartoon to have written six weeks or so ago, because you knew that the tinfoil brigade was going to rise up in dudgeon — and not just low dudgeon or even ground-level dudgeon but high dudgeon — no matter who won.

I haven't actually seen too many 'fixed election" claims, though there's one going around about the absentee ballots from military bases having been ignored.

Which was based on a satiric posting on an Onion-like humor blog aimed at the military, Duffel Blog.

It was a joke, people.

Those of us who have been in the writing/reporting business for more than, oh, a week, have learned that there is no joke so outrageous that somebody won't take it seriously, and in these days of screaming, gaping, flaming paranoia, it's no surprise that somebody not only fell for it but proceeded to go batshit and spread it on the same daisy-chain route of investigative mirror-gazing outlined in today's Rudy Park.

I've also read on Facebook that General Petraus and Hilary Clinton resigned within 24 hours of each other because of Benghazi, a theory which seems to rest on two solid pillars:

1. Ignoring the well-established fact that Hilary Clinton long ago announced her intention to serve one term and that, in fact, her announcement was not that she was resigning but that she was putting it off a little longer in order to assure a smoother transition, and

2. Some notion they seem to have that, having resigned, Petraeus will not have to testify about the incident, which is based on their idea that, when he leaves the job, he loses his security clearance, a process they seem to believe involves those little flashlight thingies that Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones carry in their jacket pockets.

There are some other things floating around that are less paranoid and simply more selective in their analysis, but no less delusional.

Yes, the stock market went down on the election news, but there are always people who bet on one side or another and then bail.

This time around, we also appear to have had a few CEOs who were either hanging on hoping Romney would win and change the rules, or are simply throwing hissy fits, but, for whatever reason, have announced layoffs, which fuels the idea that the election has actually wrecked the economy.

That's at least within the realm of notions that can be argued over, or, at least, that can be argued over with a certain percentage of those proposing them.

The core group of true-believers, of course, are unreachable.

The looney you shall always have among you, and, just as the Internet allows left-handed polo players, victims of extremely rare diseases and people who like to play chess in Esperanto by correspondence to find each other, it enables people who would normally be isolated by their delusional obsessions and lamentable lack of social skills to unite.

I laughed when Jeff Danziger published this one seven years ago, but I'm not so sure it's all that funny.

A small miracle of timing:

I don't know the lead time for PC and Pixel, but this is a nice piece of synchonicity that I cannot believe was intentional:

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.