The Double Tap pre-orders are all in the mail! Like Christ on his cross, I can finally croak the words “It is accomplished,” and die. Also like Christ, I intend to raise myself from the dead to become a powerhouse marketing tool for anyone with a white, white smile!

Do you know how hard I work to take money out of your wallets??

This is not mere blasphemy, either. Believe me, there were times in the past week when, after scrawling dozens of backing board sketches,  I too had to turn my face to the heavens and ask “Father, why have you forsaken me?” When that didn’t work, I called my Dad in Ashburn, NC and asked him over the phone (he told me it was because I hadn’t followed him into the family business as a raincoat and umbrella wholesaler). But all is well with the world now! You folks who ordered the Double Tap (Blockhead’s War #5 and #6 with some cool goodies) will today be with me in paradise. And for those of you who didn’t order?

You are dead to me.

And for those of you who were already dead to me? You are even deader. Like… the carbon of your bones has disintegrated into low-energy gluons or sumthin’.

As for those of you who are gloriously alive in Christ Jason, don’t forget to send me pictures of yourself enjoying your Double Taps! You know, reading the comics in fancy corporate coffee houses or at funerals. Stuff for the Facebook.

…

On to politics! The one thing I hate about being the most beloved cartoonist on the Intercommunications Webwork is that it distracts me from my real passion, which is borderline political cranksterism. The shit that has been happening in this country for the past decade-plus has actually got me reading more political literature than comic books. But after all this time, my efforts are bearing fruit.

For instance, I think I have conservatives figured out at last. After all these years, after really struggling to dissect their thought processes by reading their own words and watching their own YouTube playlists, it has finally penetrated: conservatives are against whatever Democrats are for! That’s the sum total of their political theology. And if Democrats are for what conservatives are for, then by shit they are against that, too!

Take health care reform. Pretty soon we may see the Supreme Court overthrow a century-long effort to make health insurance available to every American. The Affordable Care Act, flawed and ponderous as it is, and birthed during a time of political extremism, nevertheless follows a blueprint cooked up by none other than the free market Republican Party. “No Public Option” has always been the Republican Option. Instead, the government folded itself origami-style to arrive at a solution that leaves our hated private insurance empire in the driver’s seat but forces every American to finally own up to the cost of medicine and what is required to make it truly affordable: a little skin in the game.

And how did the Republicans respond when their own solution– a solution so unavoidable that they can’t even help running its number one champion for president– was put into law?

They went batshit crazy! They named the president every brand of evil they could think of–Nazi, terrorist, muslim, death panelist, alien– they began drinking cobra venom milkshakes with ever meal, they made a pop star out of Glenn Beck, the most flamboyantly wicked fraud that mass media has ever known. And then, just to show how lobotomized the conservative movement truly is, the oldest, bitterest Republicans in the country waged a Summer of Hate and elected a new House with the agenda of slashing Federal spending on anything the billionaires want them to. Everything but Medicare, a socialist healthcare scheme so beloved by the elderly that any Vietnam Vet amongst them would sooner burn a flag than loose a penny of it.

Now the Republicans talk of “repeal and replace”, which is not just a cannard but a flat out excercise in doublethink. Repeal… how? When will there will ever be enough Republicans at once in Congress to subvert the fillibuster bazooka? Replace… with what? Affordable Care is Mitt Romney’s own bastard child!

And then there is the matter of priorities. Obama was blamed for putting health care ahead of jobs when he came into office. Can Romney possibly afford to step into that cowpie, too? By November the European debt crisis will likely have America on the path to a depression that even a World War won’t solve. And if that were to happen, believe me, Mitt Romney would be the last person you’d want playing doctor to health insurance reform.

“How can that be?” you ask. “Mitt once rescued the Olympics!” Feh. Putting aside Mitt Romney’s gifts for resuscitating an international corporate glory campaign, just look at the man’s own stance on health care reform. From his website, the very first line says it all:

“Health care is more than just one-sixth of the American economy. It is an essential source of well-being for individuals and families.”

Wow! Health care is more than just a marketplace for maximizing Pfizer’s quarterly earnings? Mitt, you just may have the common touch that our stodgy government boardrooms have been needing!

This is what a capitalist sees– and Romney is the dictionary definition of a capitalist– when he looks at an issue like health care. Not medicine for curing sick persons, but a line item on a spread sheet. Treating every issue as a dollars and cents calculation is his entire platform, one he voices at every opportunity: when a need arises, he will first ask if it is “worth borrowing money from China to pay for it”.

But if the need is great enough… that’s exactly how he will pay for it! By asking China! No Republican president  has the temerity to ask Americans to pay for anything! Least of all the plutocrats who, if you will only pay attention, both parties now concede are fully in control of the democratic process.

And I mean that, too: listen to what both sides of the political aisle are saying. You think that bi-partisan scalp-hunting is the order of the day? There’s another narrative taking place, and in this the left and right seem to be in total harmony: the Money is running Washington, and not in the “funny ha-ha” way we have gotten used to. When John McCain, no wilting flower, says that the Supreme Court cocked it up big with Citizens United… look, McCain is no Occupier, so why the fuck is he talking like one? And Obama himself… he called out John Roberts publicly at the State of the Union a couple years ago, but then turned around and formed a Super PAC of his own, because…

Because he’s a liberal, people, and that’s what liberals are. The conservatives at least know what they stand for, and that is being against liberals. Liberals don’t stand for anything. And that is how politics for the general welfare has been hollowed out.