It’s the end of the world as they know it…
but they feel fine!

Those of you who’ve followed my work for any length of time will remember my complaints about the early start of the Presidential “election” cycle (John Edwards announced on Christmas Week, 2006) in the form of the four-part “Jackass Slate for 2008″.

So, here it is, at least a year before the “official” start of the 2012 Presidential campaign season, and here I am already doing a ‘12 Election cartoon. I don’t know what else I can say for myself, other than that when the muse visits me, she absolutely refuses to quit pestering me until I’ve committed a creation to paper. It really was a “perfect storm” of events, recently: we had the epic FAIL of the Obama Administration in the areas of healthcare, the economy, and the war in Afghanistan; the Democrats stumbling in the recent elections in Virginia and elsewhere; the GOP hopefuls for ‘12 already jockeying for position; Obama’s approval rating finally dropping to a level representative of normal objective reality; the ominous spectre of a sound butt-paddling for the Democrats in the 2010 off-year elections — and a movie just out about the end of the world in 2012, which was pretty much the icing on the conceptual cake.

Now, I’m not into clairvoyance or prophecy or any of that woo-woo, but the events of the past year — most notably the healthcare “reform” debacle — had gotten me to thinking that at least in one respect, the Mayans may have been on to something…

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Almost as if on cue, USA Today, in its classic “everything’s OK, don’t worry, be happy, nothing to see here” fashion, ran a big-ass front-page story this week trumpeting in its headline that the economy was “surging”. Now, if you know anything at all about USA Today — or, as some of us wags call it, USA Hooray — when you see them using words like “surging” in a headline on an economic news story, you can be sure it’s 99 & 44/100% pure bullshit.

But, anyway, assuming you believe USA Today, the economy’s surging again! And, if you checked out the actual breakdown yourself at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’d see that a pretty good chunk of them are rock-bottom-wage “service” jobs, not including the handful of “freelance” categories you see here — including a newly-emerging job category showing a huge upswing at the end of the month, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coasts of Mississippi and Alabama.

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About this time, the implosion of the Dot-Com Bubble was really starting to ripple through the economy, causing an uptick in unemployment and a “recession-ette” — nothing like the massive Fail we’re experiencing now, of course, but still quite a jolt at the time.

In the midst of all this was the run-up to Iraq War v2.0 — batshit-crazy Neocons throwing absurd lies and fabrications at the wall in hopes something will stick, craven Democrats fighting each other to be first in line to support Bush’s lunacy, and an increase in aggressive military recruiting tactics — i.e. stalking high-school kids coming out of class or at the shopping mall, threatening kids with imprisonment in Guantanamo when they attempted to back out of enlistment.

In this piece, I’m sort of wondering aloud about whether or not the Neocon Mob were actually banking on the increase in unemployment to supply them with the volunteer cannon fodder they needed to properly stomp on Iraq and steal its resources and destroy its culture. Need a job, kid? No prob, dude; the Army is still hiring!

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