It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fighting Trail.
As always, there's something bleakly amusing when Muir trots out the tropes of Nazi proganda while not realizing he's doing it.
Oh, and having his 'deep blue leviathan' be black while attacking a blue ship?
Chef's kiss. No notes.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Strange Case of Mary Page.
It's almost a perfect representation of the strip these days--cheap sexism, ranting about "communism", and a lousy attempt at a gag. Really, just some racism, and this would have been the Platonic DbD of this era.
The transformational storyline of the Late Period wouldn't have happened without a Dubya program that I'm going to have to discuss, the embedded journalist program. Throughout the Iraq War, journalists were 'embedded' in various combat units for lengths of time. While supposedly this was about superior access to allow for more in-depth reporting, critics argued it destroyed any pretense of objectivity, encouraging the journalists to identify with the units they were embedded with. Obviously, results varied--the classic Generation Kill, after all, was produced by just such an embedded reporter. And then...
Muir's selection as an 'embedded reporter' came very late in the day for the program, and was undeniably politically motivated. His qualifications were negligible--he was, after all, a syndicated cartoonist whose strip was appearing in a mere four papers. But he did have some connections to the GOP's pet bloggers--we'll discuss this when we wrap up this era--and that's likely most of what got him in. And of course, Muir was motivated. To his mind, the people, manipulated by the lying press, had betrayed the righteous government that had done so much good, and brought the treacherous Democrats back into power. People needed to see the truth, to be brought back into the right way of thinking. And so Muir was off to Iraq.
For five days.
As should be obvious, this wasn't enough time for any sort of in depth "reporting", but it was enough time for a man who was quite interested in producing propaganda to get the material for it, especially if he was simply going to reinforce his priors. (Which, as we will see, is precisely what he did.) And so, Muir came back to produce his story. There were many ways he could have written it.
But it was Muir, so we naturally got his self-insert being recalled to active duty, because he was so badass. It was the sort of choice that a more reasonable person might have realized was a mistake, tone-deaf, insensitive, hell, down right pathetic, but, well, this is Muir. He didn't realize how this might look to someone less... sympathetic. Hell, he was going to give Captain Mitty even more of the life he wished he had.
Zed was going to get married before shipping off, with a family on the way. As I said, the transformational storyline of the Late Period, and oh boy, do we have a lot to talk about in the next installment...
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Purple Mask.
I consider this the unofficial confirmation that Muir ended that previous storyline early.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Goddess.
There's a part of me that suspects that Muir started to realize on some level that he was revealing how little he actually knew about the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, on top of which he had no way to wrap the storyline up, so...
The escape hatch.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Fates and Flora Fourflush.
The fascinating thing is this demonstrates not only Muir's delusional, racist, sexist misunderstanding of the present, but his equally delusional, racist, sexist misunderstanding of the past.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Kathlyn.
Ahh, yes. The Constitution that exists in Muir's head that puts counties above the federal government, lets them overthrow the government whenever they lose, and also is supposed to establish a white ethnostate.
Again, this is all as pathetic as it is reprehensible.
