Mr. Hedley is and has always been utterly clueless. Showing him doing something typically stupid and irresponsible isn't meant to be an encouragement to others to do the same -- quite the opposite, I should think.

Re the 9-13-20 Sunday strip: Driving while texting is illegal in California and many other locations. Distracted driving is a known risk both to the driver and to others on the road. Your depiction of Roland Hedley, Jr. driving while holding a smartphone or similar device in his right hand is beyond irresponsible.

Re Today's Classic strip: Seeing Sam at age three reminds me of her 20 years later -- expertly and confidently navigating gender-and-identity relations on-campus. She represents such a stark contrast with the "young men" in the DoonesWorld (one - Jeff - must be pushing forty).

Re Boopsie as a sequestered OJ trial alternate: Interesting set of "cultural clues" for B.D.-as-investigator. These "clues" may shed more light on GBT-as-New-Englander than anything else: "a pickup just floated by" -- "Okay, so you're still in California" ; "There's a McDonald's, and an Arby's and a Hertz..." --  "Hell, you could be in Mexico" (except the bus ride wasn't that roundabout). FWIW, pickups are commonplace everywhere in the American West, not to mention the "fly-over states." Alaska, too, except that we are a "fly-by state."

The colour addition to today's drawing of the President is well earned. Thank you for the 40-plus years of insight into the American Psyche. I started reading around the Just a French Major from the Bronx days, and thanks to the Flashbacks page I can relive all of those times over and over.

The final panel is today's strip sums up the Trump presidency in simple, beautiful, and, unfortunately, brutal honesty. 

"Well, everyone knows why." You could have stopped right there.

Damn. I did not see Roland's B.D. tweet until this evening, and it broke my heart. I think of a family member who would have  turned 41 today, if he had not lost his life in military service to this country in 2005. I think of our own life as a former military family, fortunately without any trauma, and of my father and my six uncles and a cousin who all served during WW II. And there aren't enough burning suns to express how I feel about that genuine loser in the White House.

Although I am Canadian and at a distance from North America right now, I try to read the strip online every day, and chafe a bit if, due to interruptions in internet and/or electricity, I am not able to access it. I loved the lengthy SNARF! comment. It is true for me as well that "Doonesbury has been my alternate family," which puts the truth in front of us. The writer ends on an optimistic note about himself and his country, and I just want to say YES! You will come back, you will find yourselves, you always do. And then the rest of us will breathe a very, very, very large sigh of relief.

I don't see the actions of the Red Rascal as speaking for Doonesbury. Jeff is generally seen as stumbling around without much thought and occasionally falling into a situation. I don't see him as a spokesperson.

My favorite part of Sunday's comic was where the character felt better on the right side of history. You know, with the rioters and looters. The people who have destroyed many lives by burning down their businesses, including black businesses...

Re yesterday's strip: An interesting approach to showing the authorities as tools (possibly unwilling) used to suppress honest dissent. But in real life, they have usually had their conscience-ectomy during training.

Great. So now Doonesbury endorses violence against police. So much for a return to reason and civility. Helping Trump or what?

Amazing! In today's 40-years-ago Flashback strip, Mark is finishing a radio interview with B.D., whose statement about Reagan makes the Gipper sound like a precursor to the Blancmange in Chief (Trump): "I say it's time to look for simplistic answers. I say it's time to look for some quick cures....I say let's give wishful thinking a chance!" :-)

You can tell today's strip is Jeff fiction, because if it were real, the protesters wouldn't have expected any better from the Red Rascal, who started out as a CIA agent-in-training and then continued as a freelance supporter of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

I just realized that Donald J. Trump is a Doonesbury follower. During the 2016 campaign when he said to minority voters, "Vote for me, what do you have to lose?" he was stealing Duke's line. Honey tried to warn Uncle Duke away from using that slogan; too bad she wasn't advising DJT.

Today's Say What? Trump quote ("But so I think...") brings to mind this long-ago Doonesbury strip.

About two and a half years ago, I began a move to another state (which would occupy every minute of my time and most of my available funds, not to mention my energy) to where I now live, after 35 years in Dallas. Until then I'd read Doonesbury daily online, ever since it was first available. I would peruse the archives and enjoy the great documentary of the history of the USA and world since the mid-1970s. Doonesbury was my comic strip, more than any other, including my first favorite, Pogo.

But these two and a half years, with no internet service out here in the boonies, I was lucky to get cell-tower access to data on a good night (and almost never during the day). So I had stopped reading Doonesbury.* Then, tonight, things seemed a little more relaxed. We’re finally settled in after a remodeling which occupied most of those 2.5 years, and I needed to know how things are going in Trudeau-land. I began reading the Sunday Doonesburys, going backward in time. The cell connection still isn’t very good, and it sometimes took 10 minutes to load one comic, but I persevered, and after several hours I had seen all the new Sunday comics going back to August of 2019. A whole year’s worth!

In early September of 2019 Boopsie is having dinner with her family, and her daughter says something about her attitude being a little “woo-woo.” Suddenly we see the "SNARF!" and who appears but Hunk-Ra! The comic caused such spontaneous laughter I was afraid I had awakened the household, though it’s just my wife and our cats and dogs. Presently I noticed wistful bits of tears wetting the corners of my eyes. In that moment I realized that I had missed this so much! Doonesbury has been my alternate family, my virtual homeland, where the truth is always right there in front of us, even though at least some of the characters don’t see it. Unlike the real world, where the creator doesn’t give a damn what public servants say or do, in Doonesbury there is always prescient irony — that sense of knowing, even before it happens — where even if some president is attempting to pull a hoax on the public, we know he’ll be laughed at. He cannot get away with it, because that wouldn’t be funny. No, in Doonesbury there is always poetic justice, the calm of knowing that these excesses will be dealt with, that people will see through them and the people will be victorious. (And malevolence will be skewered with laughter!)

I need that right now. I need that like I’ve never needed it in my life. I just want the madness to be over, and for things to go back to the way the world was before climate change, COVID-19, and D.J. Trymp conspired to take away the joy of being an American. I guess you could reduce those three things to just D.J. Trymp, because with other presidents we would at least be attempting solutions to the pandemics of this world. It seems that Trymp is the pandemic we most need to be rid of, so that we stand a chance at beating the others. Anyway, in a moment of almost forgotten laughter, I reconnected with my past, and in doing so I regained that American sense where we know things are going to work out, because Americans eventually do the right things.

Thank you, GBT, for a lifetime of this alternative world -- at least a lifetime since the 1970s -- of connecting us with what’s going on, giving us hope, finding our moral compass, and identifying some of our most intimate and personal feelings. And may Boopsie never again send Hunk into remission for so long! 

* Stop reading Doonesbury? Never. But the local papers are still filled with Gasoline Alley, Alley Oop, and Blondie & Dagwood Bumstead. Without high-speed internet, we stand very little chance of finding Doonesbury here, where newspapers are still sleeping in the 1950s.

Rick could be thinking: Hmm, that basement has been awfully quiet. "Joanie, have you seen Jeff today?" 

Fifty years of masterful political commentary via comics has led to this moment, when a hero arises who can find hope (and humor) at the bottom of Pandora's box. Today's Sunday strip lays out a scene of despair familiar to us all -- and defuses it with Jeff as the Red Rascal. GT still portrays the real threat of the POTUS response to protests, but at the same time shows us how fanciful and impotent that response truly is. Thank you GT and Red Rascal for saving us once again, by reducing the sense of hopelessness just a little.