Login with Patreon
WHAT YOU'LL GET:
  • 20 YEAR ARCHIVE!
  • Themed collections!
  • PATRON Chat room!
  • ALL BLOG ENTRIES!
Login with Patreon
SEE MORE
DARRIN BELL
PROJECTS
HERE

“B” is for “Moron”

Ashley Todd and her scarlet letter

Never before have I been so pissed about my website being down. Yesterday, when I made my usual rounds of the Net’s preeminent hate sites, I came across a huge (HUGE) headline on the Drudge Report. Apparently a McCain volunteer had been viciously “mutilated.” She was a 20 year-old white girl, brutally attacked by a huge, dark skinned (of course) black man. He mugged her, and when he saw her McCain bumper sticker he flew into a rage, held her down, punched her, kicked her over and over again, and then carved a “B” (for “Barack”) into her face, to “teach her a lesson.”

 I’d heard this story before. We all have. Countless times. Only sometimes it’s a young white mother whose kids were stolen by a large black man (only later come to find out she was a little bit off in the details: her kids were actually sitting at the bottom of a lake where she’d put them days earlier).

I try to suspend my cynicism when I hear about things like this, because these sorts of attacks do occasionally happen. Thugs and monsters come in all colors, creeds, and shoe sizes. But then I got to the part of the article where it said she hadn’t gone to the hospital. And the part where her friend drove her around for a while until they found the place where the attack supposedly occurred. And the part where her photograph showed the “B” carved BACKWARD in her cheek, as if whoever had done it had been looking in a mirror.

But my website was down, so I couldn’t point out any of this. So I went to sleep, feeling 100% sure the hoax would be uncovered by morning. And sure enough it was. She made it up. This 20 year-old College Republican member from Texas, Ashley Todd, made the whole thing up. Reality wasn’t helping out in the whole “Obama and his supporters are scary, dangerous traitors” routine, so she had to do something. And who can blame her? She was raised in an era where her favorite party made a practice of fabricating their own facts when the real ones weren’t advantageous for them.

But at least she could’ve carved the “B” foreward. I hope that “B” she’s going to be carrying around for the rest of her life is a scarlet letter that’ll remind her, from now on, not to be such a moron.

On the bright side, when she’s out of jail, she’s got quite a career ahead of her in the Republican Party.

Thanks for clearing that up

This has been going around the internets for a day or two. Anyone know who wrote it?:

Just to clear things up – I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight….. If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re “exotic, different.”

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers: a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

Name your kids Willow, Trig, and Track: you’re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.

Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating: you’re well grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

If your total resume is: local weather girl (sports caster), 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a good moral Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible. If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America’s.

If your husband is nicknamed “First Dude”, with at least one DUI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now…..

Can pedophiles even vote? (or “John McCain’s latest ad”)

John McCain is crazy like a fox. A real maverick. He’s like a fighter pilot, zig zagging all around to stay one step ahead, behind, or on top of his opponent. While Barack Obama’s skipping through small-town America trying to shore up his vote among the white working class, McCain (maverick that he is) is going after a heretofore untapped segment of the electorate: pedophiles.

I know, it surprised me too. But what other conclusion can one reach after seeing his latest ad castigating Obama for advocating legislation that would teach young children how to protect themselves against sexual predators?

Time out, there’s a hurricane in my eyes.

I remember when we were kids, and we were losing a game of four square, the sun would conveniently be in our eyes. That’s why we lost. It wasn’t because we sucked. Anyone notice how Hurricane Gustav has conveniently prevented George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the two least popular men in the Republican Party (if not the country), from speaking at the Republican Convention today? If they were anyone else, I might suspect they were exploiting a disaster for political purposes. But since these people have never done anything like that before, I’m sure they only have the interests of the citizens of New Orleans at heart. Thank God. **UPDATE– Since the hurricane failed to deliver the blow the Media had hoped for (CNN’s now calling themselves the “election center” again, after being the “hurricane center” just yesterday), Bush is going to have to speak today (Tuesday). This reminds me of the times in the Eighties when I was supposed to do homework but got sidetracked by Robotech and He-Man. Then, of course, I had to ride my bike around the block a few times before dinner. And after dinner, there was always Three’s Company or the Cosby Show. Then, probably because of the bike riding, I was tired. Who could blame me? In the midst of self-hate and panic the next morning, I would sometimes see rainclouds gathering beyond the avocado tree in our backyard. I would pray for a hurricane or a twister to cause massive carnage and destruction so I wouldn’t have to face an angry teacher. But since this was Los Angeles, I never had that kind of luck. I always had to own up to my mistakes. But I always had a two hour school bus-ride to either do my homework or (almost as often) to think up a good excuse. Maybe when he speaks at the convention (well, not really AT the convention, he’ll be putting in a brief cameo on video from the White House) Bush will offer one hell of an excuse tonight for the last eight years. One we haven’t already heard a thousand times, I mean.

What I learned about Michelle Obama from Larry King

Thank God for the Larry King show on CNN. Tonight he had four guests assess the first night of the Democratic National Convention. Michael Reagan, partisan right wing radio talk show host, Ben Stein, partisan right wing radio talk show host, and Lars Larson, partisan right wing radio talk show host. For balance, he gave us Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn. I’d just finished watching Michelle Obama’s speech on my DVR, and I apparently got the wrong idea. When she spoke at length about how her father’s hard work and her mother’s hard work helped her and her brother succeed in life, I thought she was saying America rewards hard work. See what made me think that was when she said, among other similar aphorisms, “The only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.” Apparently I was reading too much into that stuff, because when I flipped to Larry King afterward, I saw Lars Larson explaining what she really meant. According to Lars, what Michelle Obama really meant to convey with that story about hard work leading to success was the notion that “America’s not a place where you can get ahead if you try hard, and of course all of that is President Bush’s fault.” Now, for a second that confused me. More than that, it angered me, the thought that I knew what I saw and here comes a guy who tells me it was actually the opposite of what I saw. But such anger is irrational. After all, this guy was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and his tie was neatly fastened around his doughy neck. More importantly, he was on television whereas I was sitting in anonymity on my couch in a comfortable (i.e. torn) t-shirt and boxers, wearing only one sock. Who would you trust? Besides, there’s something intoxicating about the mind-numbing confusion that comes from Lars Larson telling me what I saw was the opposite of what I knew I’d seen. It was as though I could feel my brain cells throwing up their synapses in exasperation and just giving up. It felt just like popping bubble wrap with my feet. Only in my head, and with Lars’s feet. Luckily, Larry King didn’t kill the buzz by asking Lars to, y’know, substantiate his analysis by citing a passage from her speech or anything. Rather, King said he would play a clip from Obama’s speech and then “accidentally” played a McCain attack ad instead. They all got a nice chuckle out of that mishap, a gleeful chuckle loud enough for me to hear over the sound of my own head banging against the wall. I would’ve stuck around to see what Larry’s other 3 right wing guests had to say about that, but I sort of zoned out during the commercial and turned the channel to Matlock.

McCain campaign predicts 15 kerbillion-point convention bump for Obama

The McCain campaign today circulated a memo predicting a huge post-convention bump in the polls for Barack Obama. “He should get anywhere from an eleventy-thousand to 15-kerbillion point bump” according to Sarah Simms, strategic advisor to the McCain campaign. “Anything less than that would clearly  indicate Obama’s abject failure to connect with the American people. Reporters and commentators on all broadcast networks are expected to accept the McCain campaign’s prediction at face value, and have already scheduled 4 weeks of “Obama didn’t perform as well as expected” coverage between mid-September and early November. When reminded by a reporter that “eleventy” isn’t an actual number, Simms replied “John McCain knows a thing or two about numbers; he had plenty of time to count the days he was locked up in a Vietnamese hell hole with only rats and bark to eat.” 

Join the community

Join the community to converse with other Candorville, Rudy Park, THE TALK, and Darrin Bell Political Cartoons readers in a positive environment, to get access to thousands of archived editorial cartoons and comic strips, and to read behind-the-scenes reports and mini essays on important and not-so-important topics.