Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 01, 2010

Hrm. Rerun time again?

Bob, Gary has never claimed - or even tried - to be “fair and balanced”, but I agree with your frustration that he hasn’t taken advantage of the numerous opportunites that have come along lately. The material provided by our present administration is priceless!

But he’s getting a little old. As the “About Doonesbury” caption to the right explains, he’s been “tracking eight presidential administrations” (even though he’s not tracking this one, obviously). Perhaps its just as well for Gary that he has semi-retired and given up his role as a relevent political satirist to make way for Glen Beck .

Glen Beck is relevant? Give me the Vicks, I need to cry!

“BobMcK”, “Nemesys”, I get the strong feeling that you two actually find “Mallard Fillmore” to be funny. And “Nemesys”, anyone who actually thinks Glen Beck to be “relevant” reveals himself or herself to be too divorced from reality to talk to.

glenn beck is CRAZY, folks.

Nemesys, maybe he’s just waiting for Obama to start a couple of wars he doesn’t know how to finish.

Glenn Beck himself is a joke so satirizing him here would be redundant.. There are a number of conservatives whom I disagree with but Glenn Beck is just nuts.

Beck is loopy, emotional, irreverent, quirky, goofy, and slightly insane… but yes, he is relevant. So is Jon Stuart, Leno, O’Reilly, Letterman, etc. (Colbert not so much these days). Even if you don’t agree with some of these guys, at least they keep up on current events.

Not Gary. Reruns aside, he’s voted “present” but not commented on Obamacare, Climategate, the Nobel Prize, the Olympics loss, the NYC jet photo scare, the Afghan war, Pelosi diss’ing the CIA, Reid’s racist comments, Biden’s clueless remarks, Dodd’s unethical activities, White House crashers, Stimulus bill pork projects, the hiring of lobbiests and tax evaders, etc, etc, etc. Somehow he does find time to chronical the “Palin doll” and Fox News, but other than that, it’s like 2009 never happened for Gary.

I do like the Alex story line, but you just didn’t see those kinds of nice distracting stories when Bush was around.

Yuseff, Obama did have the chance to end one, but he chose not to… probably for the exact same reasons Bush didn’t. I will say that I mostly agree with Obama’s foriegn policy thus far, even as it validates Bush’s decisions. But why no comment from Gary on it?

You can’t watch Beck without having an open mind, which is why many folks on the left like Al have trouble understanding him (Independents love him, though). He’s a nutball, no doubt. But even if he’s 90% whacked out, that 10% left over is interesting. Why doesn’t Gary go after him, I wonder?

too easy a target?

Nemesys - I don’t read the strip every day, but I recall GT recntly making fun of Obama’s winning the Nobel (yes, he did - weren’t you paying attention?), his losing the support of the far left and his image (perpetuated mostly by his critics on the right) as a savior. Yes, Obamacare is a big story, but it’s a story without an ending so far, and one that, alas, the public really doesn’t seem very interested in. As to the rest of your list of supposed omissions - seriously, are you arguing that any one of those items, even all of them in the aggregate, constitute as big a story as, say, the invasion of Iraq, the outing of a CIA agent, the Katrina response, the VP shooting a hunting companion in the face or any of the other stories GT sunk his teeth into during the Bush years? Does your self-proclaimed open mind acknowledge the possibility that you see your list as important stories only because you’re grasping at reasons to justify your hatred of the Obama administration?

Beck is just a “Cheaper” Imitation of Rush Limburger (and smellier). It’s like watching Cheezy Burlesque disguised as News!

And now they have Sarah! Can’t wait to see how that plays out. Loved how Glenn wrote in his diary about his meeting with her for an interview!

Dan, it’s true Gary mentioned the Nobel prize for a couple strips, but his commentary was against those who criticized Obama for it, not against the prize winning itself (I’m thinking that you forgot the tag lines). Early on, Gary did flirt with the “savior” thing, you’re correct, but he dropped it very quickly and it hasn’t been seen since (did he get some criticism for it from his friends?) Gary almost came up with a symbol for our POTUS (the teleprompter?), but it never happened (I think Obama is the only POTUS that Gary never assigned one to).

Sure, there were good stories to saterize in the Bush years, and in the Clinton years. I laughed at all of them, and Gary never let up on either of them. But you cannot be serious -or credible - if you’re saying that Gary has been as saterical against the fumbles of this administration vs. that of others. There’s simply no comparrison, no matter which side of the isle one is on. Or can you not see that as a reflection of your stoic hatred of previous administrations?

Nemesys - I agree that GT has not gone after Obama as much as he did against Bush. But my whole point is that he has had less reason to do so. I commented about your list to underscore the fact that Obama simply hasn’t committed errors of the magnitude that Bush did. Including the Olympic loss, the NYC photo scare (oh yes, that was a BIG story, wasn’t it?) and the WH party crashers in your list shows how far you have to stretch to compile a list.

Yes, I thought that the Bush years were a catastrophe for America (“hate” is your word, not mine), but I think I can justify that position based on his actions, and I’ll be happy to list them if you want me to. Then we can compare lists.

When the criticism about Bush started to mount, we heard a lot from the right about how unpatriotic it was to speak against the president during a time of national crisis. We don’t hear that argument nowadays, do we? Is it because this is no longer a critical time in America? What do you think, Nem?

And that last paragraph came off sounding more flip than I meant it to be. Apologies. But my point about the patriotism flip-flop still holds.

Dan, I don’t agree with your premise that there was so more to comment about Bush than Obama, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree on whose administration has been more “catostrophic”. Remember, it took Bush 8 years to build up his laundry list, and Gary was on his case right out of the gate. Obama has almost as much to comment on in only one year, and Gary has been relatively silent all that time.

Don’t get me wrong… it’s perfectly OK for Gary to stay mostly on one side of the fence… most satrists do. But let’s just not pretend that he’s sitting on it and expect him to be even handed. Trudeau has a perfect right to play favorites, and in answering Bob’s question, I simply opine that he certainly does.

Nemesys - And again, I ask you to specify what Obama has done so far (or more accurately, given the lock-step opposition from the right, what he has been able to do so far) that even puts him in the same league as Bush.

joefish25 said, “too easy a target?”

Naw. He just doesn’t want to get it back from Beck and thus enter the public discussion arena. Some commentators love to be criticized, because it gives them visibility and ammo, but not Gary. As his Wikipedia article indicates, he likes to keep a very low media profile, so he stays away from Beck, Rush, etc. It must kill him, since there’s a lot of good material there for him.

Dan, I already listed 12 things in the first year alone (not all by Obama, of course).. To that, I could add the remark on Cambridge police acting stupidly, closed door meetings, no CNN cameras, the Supreme Court nomination debate, the Mass elections, not closing Gitmo, terrorist trials in NY City, the Underwear Bombing attempt… all great fodder for comment. Why no comment? You wave around Bush issues as a red herring distraction, but you still don’t answer that basic question. Obama’s long list of broken campaign promises alone would keep Gary fixated on any other president, Republican or Democrat.

Besides, you know well that most of what Trudeau commented about Bush had nothing to do with the major issues you cite… it was personal digs about his character and intelligence (Gary had to publish a formal retraction about that one, you may recall). Why nothing similar about the wonderful host of people in power now?

Nemesys, you mentioned Bush as a comparison to GT’s treatment of Obama. You mentioned him a second time when you touched on Obama’s foreign policy. I think citing the specifics of the Bush’s actions and comparing them with Obama’s is the only way to explain why Obama has received less criticism from GT, not a red herring. How else do I answer your underlying complaint?

As to your latest list, I started responding item-by-item ( and am still prepared to do so) but that quickly became tedious and redundant. I’ll just say that virtually everything you list either has little or nothing to do with Obama’s conduct as president or constitutes a pretty small story. I think that answers your question about why no comment. If you can cite a GT story line about equally second-tier stories during the Bush days, please do.

Broken campaign promises? The St. Petersburg Times - no liberal rag - maintains a list of campagn promises made, kept, broken, etc. Out of over 500 Obama promises, they list 15 as having been broken. Peruse the list. Which one do you think is a big story?

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/

As to GT criticizing Bush’s character, I think it’s pretty hard to comment on conduct with explicitly or implicitly commenting on character. I’m sure any number of current Obama critics would agree with me on that. And GT relied (unwisely) on a made-up news story for his comment about Bush’s intelligence, and correctly retracted his comment when that story was shown to be false. “…had to retract…”? Do you have some reason to believe that GT was persuaded to retract by anything other than his own sense of right and wrong? If not, why that choice of words?

I think the Nobel committee deserves an IgNobel prize for advancing the cause of representative democracy.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/Most-Nobel-jurors-opposed-Obama-Report/articleshow/5130024.cms

You guys sound like two of my sons. They aren’t “friends” on facebook anymore, hardly spoke to each other at my husband’s funeral, and have made any possibility of a family reunion a total zero. Politics, politicians, and political pundits, and I’ll include TV in general, have destroyed harmony among the citizens of this country. And now even the comic strips are political fodder for rants.

It’s to the point now that Trudeau is about as pointless as this administation is…or Bush’s for that matter…

Mythreesons - you’re absolutely right. It’s a comic strip. Sometimes when I get started I just don’t know when to stop. I’ll try to remember that going forward.

Having said that, hey jrmerm….

BTW, the readers/commenters add the tags. Still a great commentary on the State of the Open Ward.

This week is a rerun of the week of February 16, 2009