Honestly, I'm still hearing loons online claiming they need assault rifles to defend America from... ourselves! It's just insane, isn't it? But I don't know if I can continue down that thread now.
Sure, there are plenty more political cartoons about this subject, but my heart isn't in it. It's just too depressing. I said what I needed to say about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting - twice - but it's just too painful today.
So let's look for something more cheerful, like the complete environmental destruction of our only planet:
Yeah, a carbon tax would be simple, effective, and solve more than one problem at the same time, since it would add revenue to combat the federal deficit while also helping to fight global warming.
So, of course, it's completely off the table in Washington, D.C. If Democrats are too timid to fight the NRA, there's no way in hell they'll take on the oil and gas industry.
Well, we can still laugh at the crazies, if that helps:
But I can't say that helps much, not when climate change deniers are as brainless as frogs:
Actually, I don't mean to slander frogs, since amphibians are smarter than Republicans and, contrary to the myth, wouldn't roast themselves like we're doing.
OK, so maybe I can just laugh at the Mayan apocalypse?
Ugh, no. While it's always fun to laugh at Fox 'News' - and especially their 'war on Christmas' - that brings us back to guns again, and I just can't handle more of that today. Sorry, I just... can't.
So how about Congress and the 'fiscal cliff'?
Well, that's not too inviting, though I'd say it's a pretty good indication of what we have to look forward to. The fiscal cliff doesn't bother me too much, since Congress can fix at least some of that in January, but another debt ceiling fiasco - or even the threat of one - would probably slam the economic recovery to a very painful halt.
Still, you have to laugh at Republican intransigence, don't you? They still seem to be living in their own little fantasy world:
They're so crazy, and so unwilling to compromise, they can't even come to an agreement among themselves. Forget about coming together with Democrats, since that's about two steps past where their dogma has taken them.
If you've been out of the loop, Speaker John Boehner had this master plan to have House Republicans bypass negotiations with Barack Obama entirely, but since it still involved tax increases on the wealthy - but only on those people making more than one million dollars a year - he couldn't get his fellow Republicans to back it.
Keep in mind that taxes are already going up at the end of this year. If Congress does nothing, then taxes will go up for everyone. But Republicans are so determined to defend the 1% (actually, far less than 1% of Americans make more than one million dollars a year; it's more like one-fifth of one percent), they're willing to see taxes raised across the board unless the very wealthiest of the wealthy also get their taxes cut.
So it looks like we're all going over the fiscal cliff because Boehner can't get the House to agree to anything.
That might be funny, but the results probably won't be, especially since people this crazy are likely to be crazy enough to politicize the debt ceiling, too. (And make no mistake, the debt ceiling has nothing to do with how much the government spends. It just tells the world that we're not deadbeats, that we'll honor the debt we've already incurred.)
So I think I'm giving up on finding a cheerful political cartoon today. Maybe I'll just settle for wishful thinking:
Well, we can hope, can't we?
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