Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 08, 2014

Get your priorities straight!

Tweets are for twits.

and the mccain/graham siamese thing thinks we left iraq too hastily

To pick up on a couple of comments from yesterday; the copyright strip between the first two panels, which shows 2014, is the clincher that this is not a repeat. The fact that it looks like one, because GT has used this theme before, is presumably deliberate: by wondering if this is current, we are all Jen…

And it appears GuardSGT was banned, presumably for trolling. His sockpuppet which sprang up a few weeks later, (TEAparty, was it?) got banned after a couple of months, once we all started replying to it as GuardSGT. My limited experience of the Powers that Be here on GoComics is that they don’t actually tell you what they are doing or reply substantively to complaints, but if enough people raise a valid complaint they do take the appropriate action.

Don’t be upset, Mel. Your sister just supports the soldiers and not the war.

It sounds like you’re saying they’ve been in the Dark Ages since…the Dark Ages.

Really a shame, IMHO; that region (from Afghanistan to Egypt) was the center of the world for culture and science until…not long before the Dark Ages. (Look up in a dictionary, if you can find one, all the scientific words beginning with “al”.)

This administration and Congress barely support either. I’m surprised that they don’t make the troops pay for their food, shelters, and ammunition. If they can ignore four guys yelling for help and dying in Benghazi, this bunch of polecats are capable of anything.

Yes? Afghanistan was a cultural centre and trade crossroads for millennia. Herat and Kandahar, Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif were cultural centres the likes of which Europe hasn’t seen since the fall of Rome. Even as late as the 1970s, before American meddling there to prop up jihadists, Afghanistan was a liberal and progressive country. As for Iraq, are you aware of the Eastern Caliphate? Or perhaps you’re of the school of thought that we brown people “deserve” to be invaded and “civilised”?

Where is her lesbian sidekick?

Garry and this forty plus year old strip is BACK ON TRACK!

Afghanistan also managed, during a time of general British supremacy in the 19th and early 20th century, to comprehensively rout one British invasion, get a score draw on the next, and even win on points with their own invasion of British India. @jeffiekins; while I agree, I think you’ll find that is actually during the later part of what we used to call the Dark Ages. The al- prefix is Arabic; Afghanistan was Islamised from 7th C onwards.

Why do you think they never leave the country? Setting aside their lifelong disdain for the rest of the world, that is. Remember the story that, aside from going to China to hit on women when his father was ambassador there, bush never left the US?

I know she’s just a cartoon character, but I have to say this: Mel doesn’t need anyone to feel sorry for her – she’s does that for herself quite capably.

(I wonder if making her somewhat unsympathetic is really GT’s intent?)

While I respect the dedication of those who serve in our military, I deeply regret the need to do so imposed by our politicians on behalf of those who benefit from separation, death, and destruction.

Actually, it is the lefties who “support” the troops. The lefties don’t just pay lip service. We want the troops to be able to have what they need when they get home. We have representatives who vote accordingly. “Support” means a lot more than just wearing a bumper sticker on your car. It doesn’t mean paying loads of $ on weapons that even our military say that we don’t need.That is what is called having your priorities straight.

the afganistan,iraq,et-al, have been in the dark ages since well before a white foot stood on north American soil.

That was the actual Dark ages. All of Europe was in the Dark ages well before a white foot stood on north American soil.

Everything going on over there is essentially two groups of Muslims who are trying to kill each other off, have been doing it since before America was even a country, and will continue to do so until one side or the other succeeds.It will make no difference to us which side succeeds, because we are infidels so they both feel obligated to kill us off too. The best course for us is to let them kill each other off and weaken themselves enough that we can easily take the winner when they have time to decide to come after us.Meanwhile, It has nothing to do with us, and we should drone anyone who bothers countries outside of their little war zone and otherwise leave them the hell alone.

It should be interesting to see what happens to Z and Z next and what happens in real life Colorado as well as the rest of the country in regard to drug laws, the parallel story that we are hearing about lately on Doonesbury. If marijuana is truly a gateway drug, maybe laws will loosen up regarding cocaine soon as well? I just saw on the news that the Tea Party darling Trey Radel is returning to Congress after being busted for cocaine in November. Trey Radel had called for drug testing of food stamp recipients. For his cocaine conviction, Radel paid a $250 fine and headed to rehab. Big whoop. If he had been a food stamp recipient, I am sure he would have had a much worse sentence. Right wingers often like to cite Marion Barry’s use of cocaine as DC mayor. The slight problem with this comparison: Marion Barry served 6 months in federal prison for cocaine possession.

I posted this late last night so it may not have been seen, although I always go back to check late comments, and consider it worth repeating:.Well, I see Trey Radel, the republican cocaine congressman is going back to Congress. Good thing he’s not a poor black kid, he’d rot in jail and never vote again. He’s going back to “do what I was elected to do.” Raise money and vote to take food and healthcare from down-and-out Americans.

@ClarkKent: On Cheney, I am amazed that no one ever mentioned much about him having all this trouble with his heart. Why? Because it keeps trying to turn back to stone.

Other stuff aside, Good barb today, GT. Well done.

“I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”


- G.W. Bush, 3/13/02

We are all one generation away from the Dark Ages.Even so there was an ongoing war in Assghanistan when we entered and few of the bombs hurting the “nation” were ours..As an intellectual exercise, consider all the Middle Eastern nations we have never bombed and name the ones not currently in a close approximation to the Dark Ages.Further, if you could think of any, name the ones not dependent on outsiders to keep the lights on.

In Viet Nam, we declared victory and withdrew. Let’s redefine victory and get the heck out of Afghanistan.

One problem with the claim we involved ourselves with A and Ir only for the oil and mineral wealth is that we never got any of same..in fact, the mineral wealth of A was not known until we invaded and will likely end up in the capable hands of China..IF it is developed at all, it will be with the efforts of outsiders.. The historical value of places along trade routes only matters when goods go through them. Part of the reason Columbus got funding to find alternate routes was that these places were so expensive and unreliable..Cultural problems contribute greatly.

That wouldn’t happen to be Jen from Liberty Meadows, would it… by the way, she’s also a blonde.

WE don’t bomb nations back to the dark ages. They were already there when we arrived!

Hawthorne,Dope is not harmless. It has been clinically proven to cause lung cancer, just not certain how much. Long term use has been shown to affect brain function, permanently lowering IQ by about 6-7 points. That may not sound like much, but that’s about half a standard deviation. An average person would go half way to below average. Any time I bring this up, the dopers will strong voice their denials. It sounds just like tobacco smokers did 40 and 50 years ago with their wishful thinking.

Borntalkingback said, about 12 hours ago

It is a source of endless fascination to me how Americans can bomb nations back to the Dark Ages and then blame them for living there. “If these people want to live in the Dark Ages we should let them.” Doublethink, anyone?

The real wonder is how Americans can think that they could fashion a working, 21st century democracy in a land, I will not call it a nation, which has two official languages, five more regional languages, forty minor languages and over 200 dialects! (Google Languages of Afghanistan.) Afghanistan as a single entity by colonial European powers long ago, but cannot be said to be a nation.

As for fashioning working twenty-first century democracies, recent events seem to show that it cannot be done even in countries like Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon. Even Turkey begins to look iffy in that respect.

bawana is correct. Some of these countries have been in the dark ages for a long, long time.

It is when they become bases for attack on the USA by such people a Osama bin Laden that they make themselves a target for retaliation – then futile attempts at nation building.

It should be interesting to see if the Christie scandal of traffic-gate is picked up by GT. Christie seems to be going down by this one.

The cost of making war in material, money and weapons, transportation on the sea, in the air and inside war machines, troops, training and hospital beds and many poor wounded, kids who may not remember their dads, is too much to pay.

Well, Japan and Germany and Britain and Poland got bombed pretty good, and they seem to have recovered.