Well, At Least He's No Longer Trying To Pretend He Isn't Neo-Confederate Scum.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Roaring West.

It's kind of fascinating how amazingly wrong all of this, from Muir demonstrating that he doesn't understand how odds actually work, to his following it up by demonstrating that he doesn't how laws work, to declaring that if the crazy theory doesn't happen, clearly it was being pushed by the insidious conspiracy to demoralize people and keep them from doing WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE, to the weird CSA apologia and Lincoln bashing, and the babbling of that version of the Constitution that exists in Muir's head where he and his get to do whatever they want, and any attempt to make them stop is tyranny.

Just a parfait of crazyfail, really, and I'm wondering where Muir goes when the latest thing that is obviously going to happen doesn't happen.

"It's Impossible For Us To Lose Because Of Things We Did! Impossible!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Call of the Savage.

While I do think this most recent version of 'No, wait, this is a conspiracy!' is going to stick around, growing ever vaguer and more contradictory as, well, every previous iteration has, I also suspect his latest conviction that 'yeah, yeah, Trump has something planned, everything's going down like he drew it up' will at least partially fizzle out. Trump is just too out of juice, and Muir is too pissed at him for failing to keep going back to the same playbook. Oh, he'll keep regurgitating these witless arguments of how the other side winning can't be real, how laws that don't work the way he imagine can change it like pressing an instawin button, and that his various fantasies about stopping this through violence he'd never do himself are patriotic. That's standard Muir. But Trump is reaching the end of his days as a useful figurehead.

It Begins...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Tailspin Tommy.

As we both chuckle and wince over all that, I have to ask just who is this unnamed advisor supposed to be and will they be an unperson in a week or two?

"You BABIES!" He Cries, As He Blubbers And Stomps His Feet.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Red Rider.

So, they gonna roll out the secession again? Their beloved state has dared not vote the way they insist it always must.

Won't lie, the fact that this comes right after two days of blustery false confidence leavened with empty threats is deeply amusing.

He Thinks He's Being Subtle And Witty, Folks.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Vanishing Shadow.

Ahh, Muir spouting his weird third-hand Bircher nonsense to anchor his usual brittle tough guy talk. It's vaguely fascinating, the layers of nonsense Muir has bought from his fellow online kooks, which he genuinely thinks of as a sign of his cleverness, and the fact that he uses it to garnish a cowardly, blustery threat that is clearly written in a way that gives plausible deniability. 

This Continues To Be One Weird Interval.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Jungle Mystery.

See, that's how you get to be an American, in Zed's mind. Waving a gun around and shooting at Blacks.

In His Mind, The Founding Fathers Are Crude Assholes, Just Like Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Indians Are Coming!

...As I said yesterday, when you strip out the newer, purer strain of antisemitism Muir's been injecting into the strip, this is very much his usual tactic when he's afraid bad things are coming for he and his. Whining that the GOP is all traitors to whatever the best and proper form of Right Wing is at the moment.

POSTSCRIPT--Muir's expanded on this from where I first saw it, and yet the fascinating thing is how empty all this pseudo-scholarship is, a man shouting bigoted nonsense he has heard third or fourth hand and thinking this proves what an insightful scholar of the human condition he is.

Just A Few, Simple Reasonable Demands.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Tarzan the Tiger.

One is torn between disgust at the naked misogyny, racism and Islamophobia of all this, and amusement at the pathetically unearned confidence that backs it all. Muir seems to think he and his are so utterly vital to the world, and have such incredible leverage, even as it all comes tumbling down.

They're Getting Some Of The Evil They Wanted, So They'll Forgive The Evil They Didn't Want.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Final Reckoning.

You can always count on Muir to remind you that his politics are just vile and wretched, and that he will gleefully assume that bigotry has to be making good things happen, it has to, because otherwise, he'd have to admit he's spent his life making the world and the country he claims to love worse.

As Usual, Muir Turns Against Oppression When He Thinks It Might Be Turned On Him, Personally.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Wolves of the North.

The fascinating thing about Muir's "uniparty" bullshit is that you get scenarios like this. When the people he supports do something that annoys him, he just rewrites reality so it isn't actually his side doing things--things that he supported in their initial phases, mind you--no, no it's that evil conspiracy that runs thing in the shadows doing it. Muir may be a fascist, but he's largely ruled by the impulses that created the Italian Regency of Carnaro, the unrecognized interwar microstate where the militias that had taken over wound up doing things like having mock battles with live grenades, because, hey why not, they're full of vital energy after all. He loves oppression in the abstract and when he thinks it's happening to his enemies, but eventually, he runs headlong into the fact that his dreamed of dictatorship is going to have build a general state capacity for oppression that could be used against him. And whenever that happens, he grows irate, because he is fundamentally a child demanding his vague and contradictory wishes be granted instantaneously and with no negative consequences for himself.

These moments are always true 'stopped clock' scenarios, Muir reaching the right conclusion for once, but based on premises that are completely self-indulgent and hypocritical. And now that I've said all that, let's enjoy Day 2 of Muir on the war path against the Administration, even if he's clearly loading his attitude with qualifiers.

"And Then HE WOULD CRY!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Steel Trail.

And here is Muir at his most pathetic, ignoring the blatant efforts to subvert the Constitution the man he's presently following, shrieking that reforms to correct institutions that he and his have thoroughly corrupted and turned into threats are betraying the government and writing a sad little cartoon where the target subjected to this imbecilic harangue just quivers and gives up, for who can resist this transcendent truth?

Again, simply pathetic.

War And Sexism! It's What Made The Country Great!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Social Buccaneer.

He treats this as such a stirring lesson and statement of values, instead of yet another display of his crudity, his racism, and of course, his tendency to try and use static panels as an artistic crutch.

Muir Once Again Declares Nobody Is Racist Enough For Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Under the Crescent.

And we move from pretending that Trump is mostly great to pretending that everybody is plotting against Muir again.

Always fun to see Muir spiraling.

A Desperate Attempt To Will Success Into Existence...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Graft.

This manages to be as pathetic as it is vile, an illustration of just how much Muir has warped himself. He's told himself that being a cowardly bigot is being a brave patriot so long that he doesn't know what bravery and patriotism actually are anymore, and so as he applauds awfulness while he can, as the failures inevitably happen, he winds up muttering pathetic rationalizations to avoid the simple fact that he's awful person putting his trust in worse people, trying to extract joy from misery and failure.

Even Muir Is A Little Astonished How Antisemitic He's Getting.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Broken Coin.

Obviously, at least part of the reason Sam is the one muttering this swill is to give Muir cover. "Oh, no, no, it's not me, Sam, you know, she's feisty, she's a redhead, her ladyparts, they get in a twist sometimes..."

Even Muir Has To Admit The Hoped For Purge Probably Isn't Coming.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Trey O' Hearts.

There's something so quietly pathetic in the inner lives of people who essentially pay so Muir can draw them--badly--visiting his redneck Legion of Doom, sucking up to the cast, getting to fire imaginary hi-tech guns, and fantasize about essentially being SS guards at a concentration camp.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 19: Don't Mess With Naomi. Or Bother Having A Coherent Storyline.

 Naomi first appears as a past military comrade of Zed's, an Israeli military contractor who simply pops up to reaffirm Zed's badass credentials. and join in the general abuse of Jan during this storyline. But then, after a week, Muir decides to use her for some cheap sentimental drama and ALSO decides that she's been hired by Jan's dad to keep an eye on her daughter. (So either the military are just letting an unaffiliated mercenary stroll around because, hey, she's cool, she's from an ally, or they're letting a contractor take a side job from a private citizen, neither of which are great.) While this is yet another display of Muir's growing fascination of using Don Portago as an Instant Plot Coupon Dispenser, the more interesting thing is Naomi herself. Somehow, even though she truthfully doesn't seem too distinguishable from the various other soldiers Muir bespecks this storyline with, she tickles Muir's fancy and just keeps showing up throughout. 

Because, that's the other thing about this story--it's long. While the original plan appears to have had this go on for a month--Muir has Zed toss that time out early on--things just dragged on so that Jan and Zed wound up spending most of 2007 in Iraq. And Muir was no more skilled at crafting storylines then as he is now--the entire sojourn is repetitive, formless, and dull. Jan gets taught the same jingoistic, racist messages over and over, all while the real Iraq burned, and Muir struggles to ignore it alongside the rest of reality.

And through it all, Naomi just... hangs around. It's clear that she'd tickled Muir's fancy somehow, likely by his own twisted counterfeit philosemitism which saw Israelis as admirable because they were so good at dealing with those evil Muslims. She likewise gave a window in what was going to be Zed's ever-expanding badass past, which Muir must have found convenient. Still, a casual reader from this era would probably be shocked to learn this incidental character was going to become a major supporting character and at times a member of the main cast. Indeed, Naomi was a good indicator of the future of DbD, a future that was more bizarre, more insane and more unpleasant than its present.

And that present was quite unpleasant indeed.

They Must Protect Their Imaginary Wives From This Incredible Imaginary Threat.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Queen of the Jungle.

As we take in this pathetic racist swill, a reminder that the population of the US is nearly 350 million, making Muir's impressive sounding number look... well, small.

Especially when you realize that our mighty Murican is quaking in his boots about women and children.

Apparently, Muir Just Wanted To Draw Some Planes.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Jungle Goddess.

As we look at this lazy little cartoon, let's all savor the fact that these days you don't even have to wait a comic or two for Muir's declaration of how very much Nazis the Democrats are to be ironically undercut by him using Nazi-style rhetoric. 

These days, it usually follows in a panel or two.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 18: Captain Mitty Does His Duty, And The Feckless Liberal Learns A Lesson.

Zed's Iraq tour was the first true Captain Mitty storyline, but it must be pointed out that he is largely out of focus for it--an important background detail of the storyline, one who allows the entire thing to happen, but not the main character. No, that is Jan, filling the old propaganda role of the skeptical liberal journalist who comes to realize just how vital this war is, how evil our opponents are, and how dedicated our troops are. 

I noted last time that this was accomplished with a  handwave--Jan's father just fixes it, because he can, that's what he does--but I really should zoom in on how forced all this is. While a weak explanation is made of Jan doing this to support Zed, there's very little explanation of how this does this, precisely, and again, once they're over there, Jan largely winds up doing her own thing and having troops tell her that everything she knows is wrong. It's quite clear from a textual standpoint that Jan is in Iraq because she's the sort of character you need over there, and Muir's explanations of the hows and whys are flimsy. For that matter, Jan's storyline is fairly bland. She meets interchangeable troops who are all happy to be there, and annoyed at the perfidious liberals insisting that they aren't. She sees it demonstrated that the native Iraqis are being treated well by them, and in no danger from them. She discovers that local insurgents are vile scum not worthy of her regard. And she discovers the United States press are nakedly biased and laughably incompetent. In essence, everything that Muir had been stating was the case prior to the storyline is confirmed to be exactly correct during it.

Saying this was a tone-deaf and deluded take doesn't cover it. After all, even Muir seems to regard his Iraq War boosterism with a certain level of embarrassment these days, even if it's with the usual qualifiers and avoidance of any real introspection that you'd expect from him. But remember, Muir was writing this in 2007, the year where the occupation truly unraveled.  Muir wrote of a deluded press misleading the American public about what was a massive success just as that press began to produce stories that showed that things were going worse than all but the most skeptical of critics had imagined.

And so, by itself, the main storyline was just a dull, mendacious propaganda piece that was flimsily constructed and monumentally ill-timed. Even Jan's move rightwards was simply Muir doing what he'd been doing prior. No, the importance here lies largely in two areas. One obviously is Zed's continuing move towards becoming the Captain Mitty he is today, which we do see throughout the tale. But more importantly, Muir was about to add a new character, one who would stick and be a significant part of the Transition Era and the early portions of the Compound Era. The exceptionally odd figure who is... Naomi.