We Are Deep Into Feverish Free Association Now.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Invisible Hand.

We're just getting smashed over the head with movies Muir liked in his twenties at this point.

This Is Undoubtedly Proof Of The Conspiracy Against Him!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Hidden Dangers.

A less paranoid man might realize that this is because he's chosen a fundraising model that closely resembles many forms of financial fraud and adjust his methods accordingly, possibly by seeking out a respected organization to handle this for him.

But obviously, Muir knows better than that.

Like The Bourbons, Muir Forgets Nothing, Forgives Nothing, And Learns Nothing.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Smashing Barriers.

It's bitterly amusing to watch Muir give yet another display of multiple level FAIL and think it's showing how clever he is. We see, in one strip, the Muir who is stuck in a bad simulacrum of his own childhood, the man who can admire the sight of things while not getting the sense of them, the pliable old reactionary spouting the same garbage decades after the world moved on, and the man stuck in a hell that he has both made himself and had reinforced by the movement he supported. All in one terribly drawn, terribly written strip.

And he doesn't see it, of course. Thinks he's done a great job, and is showing what a sensible man he is.

Sam Overshares Even In The Parody Sequences.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Man of Might.

...

This is Muir's idea of quirky family dynamics.

And effective fund-raising.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 17: Captain Mitty Gets A Wife.

Zed and Sam's relationship had been in sort of a holding pattern since around 2005, when he started treating them as an actual couple, and frankly had been approaching it earlier, as the period of de facto coupleship prior to that wasn't too different. Just now, it was clear that they were dating and sleeping with each other, where previously, you sort of thought they were, but weren't sure. Muir seems to have toyed with shaking the dynamic up when he introduced a young intern named Suzi with a thing for Zed, but this rudimentary storyline died after two strips, and Suzi only ranked a horrible offscreen death years later that was mentioned in passing to allow Muir to indulge even more of his now overwhelming misogyny, racism and Islamophobia. Skye's arrival just added her being, well, awful while keeping the overall relationship the same. So, Muir finally did something that shook things up--he had Sam wind up pregnant just as Zed got called back into service.

Now, Sam previously had shown little interest in or proclivity for motherhood--indeed, she'd even been fairly dismissive of it--but that was the Early Period, where Muir just wanted her and Zed to be a couple of snarky urban professionals. Now that they were ever more Muir's vision of an ideal American couple, well, she and Zed just took it as given that they'd have kids now, which meant marriage. Interestingly, neither of them seemed particularly worried about the fact that Sam was a woman in her forties going through her first pregnancy.

Put a pin in this, there's bullshit coming.

The pair hurried off to Vegas, tied the knot--they had an Elvis wedding--and just like that, there'd been a profound change in the status quo. And Muir having quietly just retconned Sam's entire attitude towards parenthood was, well, going to retcon a lot more in the future. Oh, were changes coming. Indeed, without realizing he'd done it, Muir had just quietly set a charge under what had been the core premise of the strip so far, but that was lurking in the background. 

Soon, Zed would be heading overseas with Jan somehow getting to play journalist because... look, her dad is ultrarich magic, all right? For Sam though, this meant lots of "jokes" playing up her being Zed's loyal, pregnant wife waiting for him to get back as he risked his life.

This isn't particularly subtle propaganda. But then it hardly has been at this point.

A Confirmation Muir Has Never Read 'Oliver Twist'.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Woman in the Web.

So, this is the next week and a half, eh? Muir whining and begging for more money while insisting, no, no, that's not what he's doing.

...

Oh, boy, that's going to be tiresome.

Has He Mentioned He Hates Muslims?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Iron Test.

...

Sometimes, the sheer breadth and depth of Muir's hypocrisy gets to you.

Like A Kind Of Third Rate Patriotic Burlesque Show...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Fight for Millions.

Ahh, we're really entering the sleaziest part of the Begging Bowl period...

It's become something of a tradition at this point.

The 'Need More Money' Refrains Get Extra-Whiny This Year.

 It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Vengeance and the Woman.

Once again...

Every.

Frickin'.

Year.

Well, That Is An Image Out Of Nightmares.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Secret Kingdom.

Here we get another example of Muir thinking a display of his ignorance is a display of knowledge, and a display of his pathologies is a display of artistic vision.

He Is A Whiny Man... He Remains A Whiny Man.

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 propaganda 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.

And Alfred Bester And Julius Schwartz Join Those Muir Has Made Roll In Their Graves.

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 Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 16: Captain Mitty Gets The Call.

 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...

He's Tried Nothin', And He's All Outta Ideas!

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.

Wrote Himself Into A Corner, So He Boldly Wrote Himself Out Of It.

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.

Three, Count 'Em, Three Different Sorts Of Racism, All Conflated.

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.

The Self-Fluffing Of The Ego.

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.

He Thinks This Shows How Insightful He Is.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Blazing the Overland Trail.

Has he mentioned he thinks letting non-whites live here is treason? Because he thinks that.

"We Need To Tell The Founding Fathers To Be MORE Racist!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Wilderness.

Did I call it, or did I call it?

This whiny, pathetic, hateful little screed is Muir imagining himself to be so, SO patriotic.

Because he hates this country, and he hates everything that's decent. But he has to pretend to himself that he doesn't.

Urrr... Whut? HWHUT?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Adventures of Captain Africa.

At the time of this writing, in strip Muir has mistakenly placed the signing of the Declaration twenty-six years after the Boston Massacre. It was, in fact, six years and four months, the Massacre occurring March 5th, 1770. (I put this down because Muir isn't above re-editing boo-boos like this out afterwards, so I'm attempting to immortalize the error.) And that clumsy mistake typifies this whole storyline, such as it is. Muir is, as he has in fact been doing from almost the beginning of the strip, trying to appropriate the Founding Fathers for his own politics. But Muir doesn't understand them, barely engages with them. He doesn't really want to learn things because he wants myth, which is why you get things like the clumsy misdating, Muir not getting the facts right because he didn't even learn them to begin with. 

But Muir's bad at myth too. As we see with this entire storyline. And his inability to notice that Crispus Attucks puts the lie to the 'White Men' bullshit he's been pushing with ever-increasing force over the last decade. Hell, I'm fully expecting him to explain that this shows how extra right he is soon. He keeps to his pattern.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 15: A New, MORE Inferior Sort Of Leftist.

 By 2006, both the political situation and Muir's strip had changed.  As noted before, Muir had painted the opposition to the Iraq War as a bunch of shiftless, cowardly hippies during the War's buildup--after the quick fall of Saddam's government, he went to ignoring them outright, clearly feeling that the matter was over and he had won. However, the opposition to the War didn't stop and instead broadened, especially as toppling Saddam did not in fact lead to a speedy peace, but instead to a violent insurgency and lengthy occupation. Now, as noted last time, Muir's response to what was actually happening in Iraq was a mixture of studiously ignoring it, and actively gaslighting about it, all while whining about how the press/Democrats/people were misleading the public and being unpatriotic and stuff. But that still left him a more visible, militant Left to deal with than the sort of genteel establishment liberalism represented by Jan. Muir could see the need for another Left character.

And of course, there were other issues with Jan--while she was still allowed moments of her previous feckless idiocy to show what Muir imagined was the liberal viewpoint, her relationship with Damon moved her firmly into one of the good ones, a person Muir imagined was only kept from seeing the transcendent truth by sentimentality, habit, and of course, the evil Leftist conspiracy to lead good young women like her astray. While she hadn't moved completely to her Fox Liberal role yet of showing the audience just how wretched the Democrats were by having this liberal staring agog at their perfidy, she was already making moves in that direction. And of course, both these moves had another source that we'll talk about in the future when we talk about a... certain aspects of the strip, and how it stood at this time. (Let's put a pin in that one, all right?)

Now, the fact was Muir didn't mind this, because he'd clearly had a lot of fun with his vision of the anti-war Left during the buildup, people he enjoyed punching even more than the Democrats. That undifferentiated blob of stupid hippies started showing up again, and then in 2006, a couple were shown praising themselves for booing Hillary Clinton, allowing Muir to bash both her and them simultaneously. A couple strips later, and "Sky" explains that she's going to go visit her in Florida, one of the few clear references to the setting at this point.

And boom. Like that, Sam suddenly had a younger sibling. (That Sam had never mentioned such a sibling previously or the fact that, initially, Sam and her sister had in the vicinity of twenty years between them were just part of the shoddy construction.) Skye--she gained the 'e' on her third appearance--was that mass of dirty hippie peaceniks concentrated into one character. Written to be as obnoxious as possible, she was lazy, perennially unemployed, viciously self-righteous, in essence, every form of sheer awfulness that Muir imagined when he imagined a leftist. She willfully sponges off her sister, a complete parasite. Indeed, Skye isn't going to have any sort of discernible job for years, just floating around and being "left". She's rude, childish, and egotistical. Of course, so is the rest of Muir's cast, but Muir doesn't realize that, he thinks they're quirky and lovable. Another thing that will be come clear very quickly is that Skye's bluntness means she frequently puts her arguments rather forcibly, making the supposedly right-thinking cast look even worse. But again, Muir doesn't notice that. He simply assumes he's built a loser, and that the audience will respond as expected.

And so, his new straw leftist in hand, Muir waits for the Democrats' inevitable defeat in 2006 so he can chuckle about them thinking all this criticism of the glorious war was a good idea.

The Democrats win control of Congress. Muir is irritated, but still convinced that it's all just a temporary disturbance. And that will produce... well, a lot. Oh, such a lot.

They Did Not, In Fact, Know Their History.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Riding with Buffalo Bill.

As Muir pulls out one of his most tired running gags in this baffling attempt at a storyline, I should mention this underlines the vast ignorance under his pose of learned patriot. Franklin, obviously wasn't in Boston during the Massacre--aside from this being well after he'd largely moved to Philadelphia, it was when he was the Colonial Postmaster, and in fact, living in England.

But then, Muir is stuck in the Kiddies' Own version of history.

Still Not Answering The 'Real Time Travel' Or 'Simulated Time Travel' Question...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Gunfighters of the Northwest.

Muir remains all in on the whole 'remind the audience of better works' thing...

Well, I Can Believe They're Homeschooled...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Great Adventures of Captain Kidd.

It's kind of amazing how clumsy this is in every particular. A stupid gag that involves warping characters to happen, occurring in a bizarre and ludicrous situation that makes no sense and has no narrative weight.