Q Toon: Cancel Culture

The odd couple of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max make their third appearance this week, telling a vote canvasser that they had both cast their ballots early. (I had to script their dialogue so that it would work in case the deadline for early voting had passed in the locales where they might be published. Originally, I had the canvasser herself promoting early voting.)

My better half and I have already voted, which has done nothing to stop the instant messages, phone calls, and hysterically desperate emails hounding us to vote, volunteer, and THIS IS THE FIFTEENTH TIME WE'VE WRITTEN YOU TO SEND US MONEY!

(No it isn't. I delete 100+ such requests every freaking day.)

In the final panel of this week's cartoon, Leo and Max reference the decision imposed by the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to spike editorials by their respective editorial boards endorsing Kamala Harris for President. Thus granting tacit equivalence to the candidacies of center-leftist Harris and fascist, racist, extremist grifter Donald Berzelius Trump, the decisions by Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have resulted in a deluge of subscriber cancelations in protest.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter claims that her father’s diktat comes in to protest the Biden administration’s supplying weaponry to Israel in spite of its on-going wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. Fair enough.

But the chances of a Harris administration reining in Mr. Netanyahu, while slim, are much greater than a second Trump administration doing so. The first Trump administration’s only action regarding the Palestinian problem was sending his son-in-law to sit down with Netanyahu and draw up the Palestinians’ terms of surrender.

For his part, Bezos had the Post publish his excuse for killing its endorsement editorial. As I understand it, he's just returning the Post a simpler, more innocent time before color television when it didn't make such endorsements. And pay no attention to the corporate interests behind the curtain.

He did not explain why this sudden policy change came a mere eleven days before Election Day — as opposed to eleven months ago — or even eleven weeks ago when the Post editorial board was writing editorials essentially calling upon President Biden to drop out of the race for the good of the nation.

(I apologize to those of you among the 200,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions this week for those three links to articles you cannot read. I still value its news department's reporting too much to cancel mine, not to mention the wit and wisdom of such as Ann Telnaes, Eugene Robinson, Alexandra Petri, and Dana Milbank. They can't all have their own substacks, can they?)

Anyway, to nobody's surprise, Trump is now telling his devoted minions, “The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers, they’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying — because they only endorse Democrats — they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it.”

So, Bezos, ya wanna try writing another op-ed about how when they came for democracy, you said nothing, because you weren't a Democrat?