I’d love to hear what George Carlin would say about all the cartoonists who’re going to draw him doing stand-up at the Pearly Gates.
Warning: Rated R for language. Don’t listen to this at work.
I’d love to hear what George Carlin would say about all the cartoonists who’re going to draw him doing stand-up at the Pearly Gates.
Warning: Rated R for language. Don’t listen to this at work.
For everyone who asks “Why is Lemont planning to marry Roxanne?”:
You know you haven’t got much to say about your opposition when you resort to condemning their logistics. First Fox News ran a “days since Barack Obama promised to appear on our show” clock. Now the Republican Party’s homepage is running their own countup clocks which count the days since Obama’s (a) visited Iraq, and (b) was invited to ten town hall meetings by John McCain.
Is the GOP sure it wants to play this game? The Democrats could easily respond with clocks of their own. Such as (dates are rough estimations):
1. “Days since John McCain flip-flopped on off-shore drilling: 2 days”
2. “Days since John McCain officially approved of torture: 730 days”
3. “Days since John McCain used 100 heavily-armed soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, 2 Apache gunships and a flak jacket to prove he could walk around an Iraqi marketplace without protection: 565 days”
4. “Days since the Iraqi marketplace he walked through was back under the control of insurgents: 330 days”
5. “Days since President Bush promised to fire whoever committed treason by outing an undercover CIA operative: 1,460 days”
6. “Days since President Bush vowed to capture Osama Bin Laden: 2,355 days”
7. “Days since President Bush vowed to rebuild New Orleans: 895 days”
8. “Days since President Carter called energy independence a national security matter, vowed to free us from Middle East oil, and was consequently mocked by Reagan and the next two generations of Republicans: 13,870 days”
9. “Days since President Truman tried to give Americans universal healthcare, but was rebuffed by Republicans in Congress: 21,900 days”
Etc…
Of course, none of that’s as important as Barack Obama’s travel itinerary or the burning question of whether he’ll stick to the five debates he’s offered McCain, or accept McCain’s invitation to ten.
Anyone surprised by this must have been born after about 2005. Before August 28, 2005, just about the only place you could find actual criticism of the White House was on late night cable and (ahem) the comics page.
Over 1900 years ago, the prominent Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus pinpointed what he saw as the exact moment the great Republic fell. In his eyes, it was the moment when Caesar, undecided until the last second, finally made up his mind and crossed the Rubicon river. Ever since, “crossing the Rubicon” has been shorthand for points of no return, either when the returning is physically impossible, or when there’s just no point in trying because the goal isn’t any greater than the least effort required to reach it. The phrase is used for everything from the moment the first bomb drops in a war, to the moment you open the shrink wrap on your new iPod.
Hillary Clinton’s just crossed the Rubicon.
“Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama. ‘My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,’ she said, dismissing calls to drop out.” –MSNBC
Today, cable news and the Internet is filled with speculation that Clinton, who’s now invoked this RFK assassination rationale twice, is subtly encouraging – or at best privately hoping for – the assassination of Senator Obama (who has been likened to RFK for months now). Her campaign’s explanation, that she was merely mentioning that RFK was assassinated to point out another instance where the nomination contest went into June, has yet to gain traction. And there are a couple reasons for that.
1. Barack Obama recently won the majority of pledged delegates, he’s won about twice as many primaries, he’s within spitting distance of the 2025 delegates needed to win, Florida and Michigan aren’t going to be counted in any way that would hand Clinton the nomination, and her argument that she’s won the popular vote is being widely ridiculed because it presupposes that none of the caucus states matter, and not a single person would have voted for Obama in Michigan were his name on the ballot. The bad blood between the two campaigns, largely caused by Clinton’s gutter politics (or “hardball politics,” as her supporters have been excusing it), is far from assured a spot on the ticket as V.P. So the only way her now-quixotic quest for the nomination could succeed is if something cataclysmic happens to the Obama campaign. Something like an assassination.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be nearly enough to deny a candidate the benefit of the doubt. The Media, and even the usual suspects on the Internet, would be inclined to believe no malice was meant. However…
(2) The Clinton campaign hasn’t exactly been reluctant to engage in code-speak in the past. After Obama’s wins in Iowa and then South Carolina, when it appeared Obama was appealing to whites, blacks, rich, and poor, and increasingly, young and old, the Clintons began a calculated attempt to marginalize him along racial lines. They used code words. “Spade.” “Rolling the dice.” “Shuck and jive.” They dismissed his South Carolina win by saying Jesse Jackson won South Carolina too (implying he won because he was black, and it was a majority black state, while completelly ignoring Obama’s previous win in Iowa, an overwhelmingly caucasian state). As her delegate losses mounted, Clinton became gradually but steadily more explicit in her race-baiting codewords, just recently claiming that non-college educated working class white people aren’t going to vote for Obama, and rightfully so, since he’s an elitist. It was a nice, uplifting euphemistic argument meant to communicate to two different audiences. To superdelegates, it was clearly meant to stoke fears that racist white people wouldn’t vote for the black guy in the Fall. To racist white people who were either too stupid or who lacked the opportunity to attend college, she was trying to say “he doesn’t understand you. He’s not like you. That’s ok, because I understand you, since I’m just like you.”
I don’t know what’s in Clinton’s heart. I really don’t think she’s calling for Obama’s assassination. But I have to admit, the thought crossed my mind and lingered there for a few seconds before I managed to dismiss it. For a couple seconds, I didn’t know whether she’d simply made a horrendously bad analogy, TWICE, or whether this was a part of her distinct pattern of race-baiting, hatred-stoking gutter politics. I didn’t know, for just a couple seconds, whether she was hoping someone would help her, by proxy, assassinate her way into the White House. No commentator, journalist, blogger, or forum participant I’ve seen today (and I’ve read thousands of posts) seemed to know for sure, either, at least initially. It took Chris Matthews, a pundit who consistently dismisses conspiracy theories, several minutes before he decided he’d give her the benefit of the doubt.
But the fact there’s been any doubt at all is exactly the point. A day ago – hell, 12 hours ago, I would never have entertained even for two seconds the idea that Hillary Clinton would want Barack Obama to be killed. I had never heard even the most rabid Hillary-bashers on the Internet entertain that notion, either. But today, we’ve all seemed capable, for however fleeting a moment, of entertaining that exact notion.
And when we’re at that point – when so many people are able to think it’s a possibility that she’d stoop to something like that – there’s really no going back. Because for such a notion to be this widespread this quickly, a profound lack of trust in Mrs. Clinton must also be widespread. Perhaps so widespread that it, too, has crossed some sort of Rubicon in our political landscape.
Some believe time is cyclical. That time is a wheel, that a thing that’s happened before is a speck on that wheel, and that someday when the wheel turns completely, what’s happened before will happen again. If that’s true, I wouldn’t be surprised if Suetonius, upon Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, remarks “Caesar has pulled a Hillary.”
Geraldine Ferraro, who thinks being black in America is an unfair advantage and who thinks she’s discriminated against because she’s white (rather than being dismissed for sounding like a crackpot), now says she probably won’t vote for Obama because he’s “terribly sexist.” I don’t remember “beating Hillary Clinton fair and square” being the definition of “sexist.”
As previously mentioned, GW Bush claimed to have experienced an epiphany after a horrible bombing in Iraq. No more would the families of dead and mutilated soldiers have to suffer alone — no, the President too would suffer along with them. By giving up golf.
Well, as Keith Olbermann pointed out in his latest special comment (toward the end), the president who lied a nation into war, who lied about the Valerie Plame incident, who lied about… well, it would probably be quicker to just list what he didn’t lie about. Anyway, he wasn’t even telling the truth about the golf thing. The AP photographed him playing golf two months after he said he’d made his fateful decision to give up playing his game.
Grieving families left behind by soldiers needlessly killed in Iraq can rest easy, knowing that they aren’t suffering alone. George W. Bush, in solidarity with the soldiers who risk everything to carry out his dimwitted orders, has also made the ultimate sacrifice: He’s given up golf.
According to the Associated Press, “Bush said he made his decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.” Bush says he believed continuing to golf would have sent the wrong message, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
…Oh, that’s what he meant. In other news, the President has yet to give up his other favorite sports: fishing, moving brush from one place to another on his ranch, and sending young men and women to die in an unjust and unnecessary war.
Some veterans aren’t too impressed with Bush’s sacrifice — which begs the question: Why do veterans hate America?
I’ve been drawing wedding invitation cartoons for my friends for years, caricaturing them in Candorville style, and the invites have always been a big hit. So I figured, why not offer this to anyone who wants it, whether friend, stranger, or bitter arch-enemy? If you want your own wedding invitation Candorvillized, visit the new Candorville Custom Wedding Cartoons page!
Here’s the pitch:
That wedding invitation with the elegant couple and the heart and the dove on it sure is nice. But will anyone be talking about it? Will anyone (other than your mother) hold onto it for years, or maybe even frame it?Get custom artwork for your wedding invitations, t-shirts, or simply to frame. Just e-mail us some photos of the happy couple, and we’ll turn them into caricatures standing atop a wedding cake. Getting married in Vegas? We’ll add in some Elvis backup singers. Getting married at the zoo? We’ll even throw in some animals (the animals in this example are the ones not on top of the cake).
We’ll e-mail you print-ready artwork you can give your favorite printer (we recommend Vistaprint.com). Or, if you’re in a hurry, we can handle the printing for you and have your finished invitations shipped directly to you (see details on the wedding cartoons page).
ATTENTION SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA READERS! AS I mentioned, the San Francisco Chronicle is substituting Candorville for Doonesbury while Garry Trudeau takes a vacation. They’re seriously considering keeping Candorville even after Doonesbury returns, but they need to hear from their readers. So far they’ve had a couple hundred responses, and readers favor Candorville by about 60% to 40%. But they want to hear from more of you, so if you want to see Candorville in the Chronicle permanently, you’ve got to write to them right now and tell them so.From the Chronicle:
For more than a century now, ever since a couple of newspaper barons tussled over a strip called the Yellow Kid in the1890s, the folks who put daily newspapers together have known that comic strips are no laughing matter. You can muckabout with a lot of things, but you’re asking for trouble with readers the minute you start mucking about with the comics.
The reason is that people take comic strips personally. That isn’t to say they don’t care about what’s on the front page,or what candidate for public office a paper endorses. But many readers develop a stronger relationship with the comics,and the stuff we call “furniture” – puzzles, Dear Abby, Miss Manners, the chess column, etc. – for the simple reason thatmany of these features appear every day and folks look forward to them as part of their morning ritual.A few weeks ago, when Garry Trudeau, the genius behind the long-running comic strip Doonesbury, decided to take a three-month break, we decided to give another strip, Candorville, a trial run until Doonesbury returns in June. While we liked Candorville, it was more important to hear from readers…We received more than 200 responses, including a few phone messages.
On Candorville, it isn’t surprising that opinions ran the gamut. The reason is simple: Virtually every comics page in the United States is a buffet table of offerings. Some strips are old-fashioned, simply drawn, others are edgier, perhaps even political, and still others are ironically dry. It isn’t surprising, for example, that one reader who wrote to suggest the return of Beetle Bailey also mentioned that she liked Blondie, Dennis the Menace and Peanuts. Other readers who tended toward the edgier strips, like Doonesburyand Candorville, also seemed to like Bliss, Brevity and the Fusco Brothers. As for Candorville, some readers knew the strip from other Bay Area papers and were hopeful that it would find apermanent home in The Chronicle. Others knew the strip and hoped it would never find a permanent home in The Chronicle.While some newcomers to the strip either liked or disliked it immediately, others weren’t opposed to it but wanted to see how it developed in the weeks ahead.
In general, counting those who wanted to give the strip a chance, the votes were about 60 percent for and 40 percentagainst. Of course, as we’ve learned from the endless presidential primary season, polls are not always accurate. In this case, if we received 200 letters and e-mails, you have to assume that these are people who care deeply enough about aparticular comic strip or the page in general to write in, as opposed to just answering a poll question with a yes or no. The sample, as they say in the poll-taking business, is not large enough to be significant…
Allow this bonehead to reassure everyone: We are told by Trudeau’s syndicate that he plans to return with new strips in June and we’re as anxious as you are to get them back into the paper. What you may be seeing in other papers are reruns, just as we rerun Peanuts as Classic Peanuts. In the meantime, there’s Candorville, drawn by Darrin Bell. A few readers said or implied that one of the reasons they like it is because its lead characters are African American. That was one of the reasons we were first attracted to it,to be sure. We want to find strips that reflect the diversity of the Bay Area, but that’s easier said than done. For one thing, there are a lot of strips of every kind out there and you’d be surprised how few of them are very good, or funny,or even well-drawn. Several times a year, we’re visited by very nice people representing the comics syndicates and theyall tell us how certain they are that some new strip will do well in our market. And several times a year, I look at them and wonder if they have any idea of what our market is. Or, in a few cases, what planet that market is on. We’re going to continue to scout the horizon for new strips and, in fact, we’ve got a few in the bullpen already. Diversity will count heavily in our selection. So will quality. But if we find something new, it’s probable that the onlyway to bring it to you every morning is by eliminating something else. That’s where the tough choices come in, but we won’t make them without your participation.
Do you like [Candorville]? Let us know. E-mail us at [email protected], or send me a letter at The San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco CA 94103.
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