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.

Muir--Carrying Water For International Far-Rightists He Barely Comprehends.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Scarlet Arrow.

As usual, Muir's take on international politics is a mix of blindly repeating things he hears from other Right-wingers online and whatever bizarre distortions his mind then levies on tales that were distorted to begin with.

So, Muir Apparently Thinks The Yucatan Is Right Next Door To Peru...

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

Always amusing to watch Muir try to dress himself up in education and culture that he doesn't actually comprehend. Well, that or tiresome.

Reality Remains The Champion.

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

And apparently, Muir finally reached the limit of being able to ignore rising gas prices and beef prices, and is throwing a snit. 

Of course, as usual, he still demonstrates a profound ignorance of economic realities even when he bows to the world that actually is--Muir seems to think that importing Argentinian beef would raise the price here instead of lowering it. 

Because he's a dull nativist who assumes that international trade has to be a bad thing.

The Imaginary Victories Are Getting Damn Hard To Parse.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fighting Ranger.

...

The most amusing part is that Muir thinks this comes off as such a big win, but Mamdani has been listening to Trump spew anti-Muslim bullshit this entire time like a deranged racist grandpa at Thanksgiving. Or he would have if there was any actual continuity in this entire sequence of strips, but again, Trump and Schumer are having problems staying consistent in their personalities and goals throughout. And I don't mean between strips. I don't even mean between panels. I mean between lines.

"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.

Remember, If The Leopards Are Eating OTHER People's Faces, It's Fine.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Ghost City.

Muir's ability to pivot on AI in a way that's both witless AND cruel remains a sight to behold. The unlikely, imagined image of scientists losing their livelihoods to the machines makes him chuckle, for they are infected by the woke and have people who are not white guys doing things. But when he remembers the things are scanning his work, he gets so offended.

The Eternal Bleak Whine Of A Shuttered Mind.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Eagle's Talons.

We've literally listen to this man babble pseudoscience, toss out a popular but in fact spurious quote that is, on closer look, little more than vague hatred, and now he spouts the cheap and pathetic lies of "Affirmative Action/DEI ate muh lunch!"

So, yeah, classic Hivemind member, all swollen ego and dismal intelligence.

A Reminder That Cicero Was A Politician.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Beasts of Paradise.

I know I keep saying this, but I find Muir's efforts to dress up his awfulness with the pretensions of high culture and historical knowledge so tedious. Because in the end, his knowledge is just like the philosophy he's using them to try to support--shallow and false.

Once Again, For Muir, The Only Real Problem Is Insufficient Racism.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Around the World in Eighteen Days.

...

I have said it before, and I will say it again--there is no true loyalty in the movement. There was none when it was worshiping Dubya, there was none when it was worshiping any number of Tea Party figures, and there is none when it is worshiping Trump. The idol exists to be exalted, yes, but also to exalt the cult by proxy. When they begin to doubt, they flirt with tearing it down. Muir has had these flirtations before. He's always turned back because Trump has always provided some cruelty, some pretext and some promise of Muir's vaguely imagined racist tomorrow. But the day's fast approaching when Il Puce will simply be an old, done man.

And as that happens, the flirtation will likely move to a true dismissal, and Muir will find a new one.

And it will be worse. That's another thing I'm sure of.

"And What About Giants And Dwarfs?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

It's been kind of fascinating, over the years, watching Muir shift from the classic Rand fan who was personally skeptical of religion to the bizarre hybrid area he exists in now, where he's absolutely still excited about dinosaurs, but also has come to accept that obviously, Goddidit.

Everything Really Is Gender.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Winners of the West.

Muir is tossing this out, a distorted version of the old PC bugaboos, because he heard for years that Trumpism and the MAGAts would lead to failure and humiliation.

And it has, so he's retreating to the sandbox where he can pretend games like this come across as tough, instead of peevish and pathetic.

The Puddle Boasting Of Its Depth.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The White Horseman.

As we stare at this muddled, meaningless attempt at profundity, I'd say it's amazing that Muir wants to go there on the Epstein files, but let's be honest, he's clearly retreated into another one of his incoherent alternate universes on the subject.

Twisting Science And Politics Simultaneously.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Terror Trail.

This is a brand of Muir strip that I've seen before. He pulls this sort of smug both-siding when he sees defeat looming in the distance. Partially to create a reality where, no, no, a loss isn't coming up, the Dems are naturally inferior, they're scum, they can't win, and partially to tell himself that, nah, he's not gonna be the loser, it's the dirty GOP who just won't commit, if they were just more tuff, they'd win. And so he pretends he's not one of the guys attached to the loss, he's part of the vital resurgent new political movement that will soon claim its natural place!

It's more pleasant than admitting he's an old reactionary nitwit who's watching the program he backed collapse into disaster.

Yet again.

And So We Know Misogyny Is Right, For The Imaginary Female Robot Says This Is So.

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

The thing that really strikes you is how pathetic all this is, grumbling, whiny, brainless misogyny trying to pretend it is something tough, and thoughtful and deep.

Knew It Was Coming.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Diamond Queen.

I'm half expecting another one of Muir's "Ha! Made you think I was a Nazi" bits in the near future, where he thinks he's being clever instead of trying to have it both ways. But whether it happens or not, the fact remains that the Nazi apologia I've been seeing as inevitable given the twist of his politics has happened, and it's just as awful and just as brain-dead as I thought it would be.

I mean, he's still tossing out the "Hitler was a socialist" canard, people.

Do Not Tell These People About Bidets.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Lion's Claws.

It's interesting to try and parse what Muir views as "respecting another's culture", because this strip is so blatantly hypocritical you're left holding air. In the end of course the old equation--Muir demands everything from others, while insisting that nothing be required of him, and if this isn't followed, then he considers himself horribly oppressed.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 21: Icarus Descends, Or The Brief Period Of Syndication Ends In Failure.

Now, I mentioned that Muir took most of October off. While the exact reason for that isn't clear, it probably had something to do with DbD being pulled from syndication in that very month, and him working to shift to its new, purely online existence. 2007 had earlier seen Muir take a break in February as a result of his trip to Iraq, during which he reprinted older comics. The October break saw no such practice. It was (and is) simply a void in that year's calendar.

So what lead to this sudden fall? Well, obviously, nobody's come forward and given a full account, and I suspect that whoever told Muir it was happening gave him a line of guff, but I don't think it's a coincidence that this came after a strip depicting Hillary Clinton in blackface acquired a great deal of notoriety. (Muir was doing another variation of his "Democrats are the real racists" spiel, incidentally, as well as his usual bashing of Hillary.) That said, I think Muir's ability to produce stupid controversy was the final straw, not the sole cause. The fact was that DbD was an unfunny, badly drawn mess and wasn't catching on--the sympathetic newspaper owners who'd given it a chance were likely finding it an embarrassment even before Muir made it a notorious one. In truth, Muir had been fortunate to get syndicated at all, the recipient of the sort of favoritism he was constantly insisting minorities and women got. As I've noted, the search for a Right-Wing Doonesbury has gifted a lot of hacks chances they didn't deserve. Muir was just one of them.

I'd argue the end of syndication and its psychic effects of Muir almost certainly played a role in the shuttering of Mystery Business(tm). (Though as I plan on noting there were others.) And it also definitely fueled Muir's persecution complex, though this remained in its nascent state in the immediate future. But for broader effect--the strip's brief flirtation with mainstream relevance ended, and honestly, to much of the world, DbD barely left a ripple. It would move to an online space that would simply get crazier and crazier as the years passed.

Ironically, the most lasting effects that syndication wrought on the strip were the earliest, from the changes in Jan and Sam's ethnicity, and perhaps the most visually striking, the move to full Sunday strips. For the first three years and two months of its existence, while DbD had Sunday strips, they were standard single-rowed ones. Early in 2006, one year into syndication, the strip began to have full Sundays, though many of the initial batch are lost--for the first six months, the full Sundays ran for one day on the site only and then were replaced by the opening panels only. (Muir mentioned a plan to bring the full comics back to the site, but never did it.) This was almost assuredly about making sure the strip remained in the comic section on Sundays, instead of getting shuffled to the editorial page. But of course, Muir kept up with it afterwards.

Indeed, it's safe to say the brush with syndication would help annihilate the foundations of the strip as it had been. But then, Mystery Business(tm) had been on shaky ground for awhile, as we're going to see.

He Thinks His Arrogant, Unthinking Bigotry Shows How Clever And Righteous He Is.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Brass Bullet.

As Muir insists that people who do in fact exist don't exist, I feel I must mention that at various points in his life Vlad III Tepes was the sworn vassal of the Ottoman Sultan...

That Is, In Fact, Not What The Quran Says.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Voice on the Wire.

As we watch Muir repeat the Right-wing urban legend that pork functions as some sort of Muslim kryptonite, let's recall that I'm pretty sure it was Sam who drove the feral hogs in there originally.

But then, as we keep seeing, time and space are bendable in DbD and causality can be warped at will.