A Very Good Riddance, and Now, "Hey, Joe"

Final insults, anti-Trump cartoons, plus Ray Charles and Randy Newman

Well, the big day is finally here, and as you read this the Awful Orange Ogre is already airborne and out of here. We’ll celebrate here today by bidding him a not so fond farewell with some of the most brilliant, or funny, or properly scathing cartoons published over the past couple of days—and join Ray Charles in urging him to “Hit the Road, Jack” forever. But let’s kick it off with one of my favorite Randy Newman tunes, so apt for today, inspired by the hopes of Depression-era citizens when FDR took office: “It’s cold and the wind is blowing/ we need something to keep us going/ Mr. President, have pity on the working man.” If you like this, please subscribe, it’s still free!

Nixon in his final hours announced: "My mother was a saint." Trump this morning should have admitted: "My MAGA was a taint." At Andrews send-off by a small crowd he was still-blaring “Fortunate Son”—clueless till the end. Then he referred to “as bad as the pandemic was.” And soon, thanks to the vaccine, “you’ll see the numbers skyrocket down.” Still with the racist “China virus.” Vows to return to D.C. — we hope in an orange jump suit. Then flies off to Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Trump became ex-presidential today.

Before getting to the fun (anti-Trump) stuff, I was surprised to learn this week that most of us, myself included, seem to have forgotten the severe terror threat that Obama faced, privately, when he was inaugurated twelve years ago. Peter Baker of The New York Times walked us through it one year after the fact. Full story here.

After a weekend of round-the-clock analysis, the nation’s intelligence agencies were concerned that the threat was real, the men told him. A group of Somali extremists was reported to be coming across the border from Canada to detonate explosives as the new president took the oath of office. With more than a million onlookers viewing the ceremony from the National Mall and hundreds of millions more watching on television around the world, what could be a more devastating target?….

The threat seemed to weigh on Obama. He canceled a practice session to go over his inaugural address with aides at Blair House. David Axelrod, his senior adviser, later interpreted that as a sign that Obama was thinking about the suspected plot. “He seemed more subdued than he had been,” Axelrod told me not long ago. Obama had not yet taken office, and he was already being confronted with the threat that consumed his predecessor’s presidency. No matter how much he thought about terrorism as a senator or as a presidential candidate, it was another thing to face it as the person responsible for the nation’s security — and quite another thing again to know the threat was aimed directly at himself, his wife and their two daughters…. In the end, what for 72 hours looked like a credible threat turned out to be a false alarm.

Yesterday you may have seen a clip of a military band practicing “Hit the Road, Jack,” in front of the White House. Later, Stephen Colbert urged, in his Biden voice, “There’s a road, Jack—hit it!” Sweet, but nothing tops the original, with Brother Ray at his peak.

And don’t miss nurse Lori Marie Key singing “Amazing Grace” at the moving Covid-19 victims ceremony yesterday.

Note: First time I got close to the U.S. Capitol…Dropping a large card with the name of an American soldier killed in Vietnam in a casket near the steps, the night before massive November 1969 peace march, with vet leader John Kerry nearby.

You may have seen that The New York Times posted a kind of amazing semi-complete list of thousands of Trump Twitter insults, 2015-2021, in alphabetical order, no less. Now: think of the poor people who had to compile this! You probably didn’t dive into it but, as your humble servant, I did, and here’s just a smattering:

Steve Bannon: “Sloppy Steve” “Cried when he got fired” “has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone.”

Barack Obama: “disastrous approval numbers”

Angela Merkel: “Ruining Germany”

Hamilton: “Highly overrated.”

Samuel L. Jackson: “Don’t like golf swing. Not athletic.”

Stephen Colbert: “fighting over table scraps” “will be wacky in the unemployment line”

Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” song: “Didn’t love it.”

Nordstrom: “Ivanka has been treated so unfairly!”

Robert DeNiro: “Has received too many shots to head from real boxers in movies”

Carl Bernstein: “a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool”

Rand Paul: “Didn’t get the right gene.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “dumb as rock AOC” “a Wack Job”

Bette Midler: “washed up psycho”

Maureen Dowd: “A neurotic dope!”

Meryl Streep: “Hillary flunky who lost big.”

And now, the cartooning…

Hey, that’s no way to say good-bye?

Mike Luckovich

From the New York Daily News.

John Sack

The Daily Telegraph (UK)

San Diego Union-Tribune

Morton Morland

Vasco Gargalo, Portugal

Barry Blitt

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels, the current The Beginning or the End, and The Campaign of the Century, which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he won more than a dozen awards as editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony andnow has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.