WaPo doesn't understand comics 3: This is an editorial cartoon? [UPDATED]

With all due respect to Ellis Rosen, whom I don't know at all, why is this on the editorial page of the Washington Post. Is this a political cartoon? If so what does it mean?

I'm absolutely serious about asking what does it mean. One might have expected to find a cartoon like this in the New Yorker 35 or 40 years ago, but one expected nonsensical comics from them.

The Post made an extremely large mistake by not appointing Ann Telnaes to replace Tom Toles (or Herblock even IMHO), and they continue to compound it by running works like this. 

For their home cartoonist, we should have someone that lives here. Michael de Adder is a perfectly competent cartoonist, but he's a Canadian who stayed in Canada and works on a contract. He's not a WaPo employee. To add to the disrespect they show him, the editor runs his cartoons smaller than this one is, and his color cartoons with extensive cross-hatching are run in black and white, so they are extremely muddy and sometimes unreadable. We deserve our own local cartoonist, and one who is treated with respect, in the great tradition of Herblock.

 

5/16/23: formerly local editorial cartoonist Al Goodwyn wrote in to say that a version of the cartoon had a title of "Monumentally Exhausted" -  here it is in the online version, which I don't understand any better.  Hmmm, the link calls it "Washington Chaos" which isn't any better as a title.

Finally, just to be clear, I know and like Michael de Adder, and I like his work when it's printed in color and larger than 4x4." He's still not a Washingtonian, even a transplanted one like Block, Toles, Telnaes (and me). Also, I'm sure Ellis Rosen is a fine cartoonist - as I said, I don't know him. I just didn't think the Post's editorial page was the place for this cartoon. As a filler on another page, which newspapers used to do, I would have glanced at it, perhaps smiled, and moved on. Adding to this blog on a computer, and not writing it on my phone like I did last night, I can see that he actually IS a New Yorker cartoonist. Good for him. I subscribe to that print magazine too, but I'm way behind on reading it.