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Sheep: How does cutting back on food safety inspection help make America great again? Does our baby food need more bacteria? Goat: Kids need to be exposed to more germs. It's good for them. And the government spends too much money! Sheep: How do budget cuts at the FAA, already understaffed, improve things? How does defunding NOAA help us prepare for natural disasters? Goat: You assume all these people actually do what they say they're doing. All they really do is suckle at the government teat. Sheep: What about the drastic cuts to cancer research? who wins there? Goat: More room for wealthy republicans to get in on that teat suckling.

NEW COMIC TWO OR THREE TIMES A WEEK, OR WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

I'm a huge P.J. O'Rourke fan, which is the kind of thing that was possible having lived in the bygone days when one could credibly believe that all elected officials were grifters of one kind of another and government was by and large a dirty word. Sadly, that attitude allowed the rabid right wing to take over our republic and we may not survive. Still, I'm fond of quoting P.J. O'Rourke: "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."

What P.J. (RIP) did not note, however, was that Republicans "prove" government doesn't work by doing their utmost to make certain it cannot possibly work, forcing the more progressive wing of the Democrats to accept things like means testing and tax credits in place of direct, simple programs that could actually help people. Then when Republicans get the chance, they dismantle these half-hearted programs while saying, not entirely incorrectly, that they don't work.

We've reached that portion of the program now, where the Republicans, having narrowly won a majority control of the entire federal government, are smashing everything they possibly can while they still can. Compare and contrast with Obama's first term, when the Democrats had full control of the entire federal government, and they spent their two years timidly tinking with healthcare and not much else, finally getting landmark legislation which sort of kind of helps some small number of people, at a fairly high cost, with a large margin of difficulty, sometimes. Big win! So much win.

Anyway, the GOP is now pursuing such popular agenda items as cutting food safety inspection, particularly on bacteria found in powdered infant formula, which a few years ago led to drastic shortages in formula across the country, because company mergers have left the United States with too few infant formula factories, because "efficiency"; reducing the budget of the FAA, where air traffic controllers were already strained; cutting huge swaths of NOAA, leaving us vulnerable to extreme weather events; cutting cancer research; and cutting Medicaid. This last one is especially popular among Republican voters who don't even know what it is or that they actually receive it.

Robert Anton Wilson (also RIP) once said, "Don't vote. It only encourages them." I miss P.J. O'Rourke and RAW but what I really miss is the time when I could comfortably ignore politics.