Dadmocracy

“After poking fun at George W. Bush for eight years — often drawing him with big ears and a severe overbite, or as a gung-ho Joe College type, or simply as a clueless doofus — political cartoonists are finding Barack Obama a more elusive target.

Bush’s emotive facial expressions, easy-to-caricature physical features and, most of, all his deeply unpopular political decisions were fodder for liberal-leaning cartoonists. But the cool and detached Obama enters the White House at a time of considerable economic anxiety, bolstered by wishes of goodwill even from some political opponents.

‘I had all my villains in place for eight years and they’ve been taken away,’ lamented Pulitzer Prize winner Pat Oliphant, one of the most widely syndicated cartoonists. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever had this experience before, of a president I maybe like. This is an antagonistic art. We’re supposed to concentrate on finding things wrong. There’s no point in drawing a cartoon that’s favorable.’”

What a load of sycophantic BS. I accept your challenge, Mr. Mark. Oh, yes, I accept…

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I’m settling in to a new work schedule, so I apologize for the sporadic updates lately. Dadmocracy should now be updating regularly every Monday. Garfield, you have one less reason to hate Mondays now! Buck up, grumpy!

“When the going gets tough, the tough go campaigning. So, almost as if he were still running for office rather than actually running an office, the president arranges a photo-op or a town-hall meeting, where, for the moment, the hopeychangey shtick still plays. ‘I have an urgent need,’ a freeborn citizen of the republic (I use the term loosely) beseeched the president in Fort Myers this week. ‘We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.’

As Michelle Malkin commented of the urgent needer: ‘If she had [had] more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too.’ Obama took her name — Henrietta Hughes — and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he won’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be…

Someday soon this inaugural Obamateur Hour (as one of my correspondents, John Gross, calls it) will end and the ‘events’ phase will begin. Back last spring, some gloomy reflections of mine on multiculturalism prompted a reader to advise me to lighten up: ‘We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.’ A mere nine months later, the first part of that equation no longer seems quite so obvious…

America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality, or it can buckle its mandatory seatbelt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . .

Let’s not go there.”

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Glenn can seem pretty buffoonish to anyone who isn’t used to him; I’ve been listening to his radio show for the last 3-4 years and he predicted our current economic crisis well before anyone else saw it coming. He lost a lot of ratings for harping on it for the last couple of years, but he knew what needed to be said. His credibility with me is as high as it gets.

Yup, I found another stupid news article about how cartoonists are drawing on eggshells when it comes to President Obama. I found their quote from Ted Rall (who inspires cartoonists everywhere by showing that even the most simple-minded buffoon who can manage to grip a pen without shoving it up his nose can become an award-winning journalist) interesting:

Rall, who is liberal, said it’s harder to take shots at Obama because he’s smart, charming and handsome, “so when you attack the personality, people suspect there’s only one reason: It’s gotta be his race. My conservative cartoonist friends find it very frustrating.”

I don’t think Rall’s released his obsequious grip from the President’s pant leg long enough to notice that some of us don’t need to stoop to racism to criticize the policies of a President who has managed to break almost all of his campaign promises within his first month in office. I, for one, have swept all the eggshells off my floor and plan to stomp around quite a bit for the next four years, regardless of any corrupt politician’s skin color.

“In the aftermath of Proposition 8, it’s open season on Mormons, and the producers of HBO’s series Big Love are in the best position to give the Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) a big slap.The series focuses on members of one of several splinter groups that have left the Mormon Church over the issue of polygamy…

Big Love is not doing anything new. Anti-Mormon groups have been describing, depicting, or showing ersatz versions of the temple ceremonies for many years. Anyone who wants to know what goes on in the temples can find out with very little effort. So why are we Mormons upset about Big Love’s foray into anti-Mormon “exposé”?

It’s offensive when believers in one religion hold up the sacred rites of another religion to public ridicule. So we’re hurt — but we’re not surprised.

Mormons have always been the exception to America’s policy of religious tolerance. Throughout our history in America, Mormons have been oppressed by government, killed or driven out by mobs, slandered, and libeled — always by fellow Americans who professed to believe in religious tolerance…

So the church’s official advice to its members is: Ignore it…

Most Mormons are seeing the Big Love temple episode in the context of the recent outpouring of hatred and bile from those who most vehemently opposed Proposition 8. Mormons have been targeted for business boycotts; some have lost their jobs because they contributed to the campaign to defend marriage.

The result is that few of us have any desire to act as the worst of our opponents have acted. After someone has boycotted a friend’s business, it makes it a bit harder for you to want to call for a boycott.

By and large, while we’d prefer that everybody handle differences of opinion peacefully, we’d rather be persecuted than be the persecutors. The few times in our history when we have departed from that principle, the results have shamed us for generations. Tolerance works better.”