Q Toon: Post-Election Blues

It turns out that I didn't have to redraw a thing for this week's cartoon. This year's elections held absolutely no surprises, coming out pretty much exactly as those omnipresent polls told us they would — polls being those ever so newsworthy measurements of the truthiness of political campaigns, shadowy attack ads, and two years of unrelenting, well-coordinated attacks from conservative power brokers and conservative media.

Here in my home state, Senator Russ Feingold cast votes that Tea Partisans should have approved of -- against TARP and bank bailouts, for example — but he's a liberal with a "D" next to his name, so the Tea Party (and, significantly, the K Street Chamber of Commerce) came down hard on him and elected a pig-in-a-poke businessman from Oshkosh. Feingold also barely squeaked by in 1998 and 2004, years when there was not a strong Republican tide, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that time caught up with him.

And Scott Walker now gets to do to Wisconsin as governor what he has done for Milwaukee County as County Executive: bring it to the brink of bankruptcy and push it over the edge on his way out. And it won't take either him or the Republican legislature long to distract their supporters from their dismal economic record by attacking gays and lesbians (not to mention immigrants, Spanish-speakers, union workers, the University system, and whatever other minority right-wing radio chooses to demonize).