Bad Things
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents two contrasting scenarios. The top panel is labeled "When people you dislike do a bad thing" and shows a man watching TV, calmly stating: "They did a bad thing!" The bottom panel is labeled "When people you like do a bad thing" and shows the same man watching TV, but now anxiously rationalizing: "Dammit guys! If we keep doing the thing we're doing, it'll just make everybody think the thing we're doing is the kind of thing we do!"
The comic highlights the stark double standard in how people react to wrongdoing depending on whether the perpetrators are in their in-group or out-group. When the "other side" does something wrong, the reaction is simple and direct: they are bad. When "our side" does the same thing, the concern is not about the moral wrongness of the action itself but about the strategic and reputational damage -- how it will make "us" look.
The Humor
The humor lies in the tortured, circular logic of the second panel's dialogue. The man cannot bring himself to simply say "we did a bad thing" -- instead he frames the concern entirely around perception and optics. The sentence "it'll just make everybody think the thing we're doing is the kind of thing we do" is both logically tautological (the thing you are doing IS the kind of thing you do, by definition) and a perfect encapsulation of how tribal loyalty warps moral reasoning. The comic is a pointed observation about political partisanship and the human tendency toward motivated reasoning.