Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 01, 2010

I’m waiting for Jeff to show up.

God, Bill, I hope not. Jeff currently gets too much facetime. I’d like to see more Mikim, so to speak. How are they doing in the “empty nest”? Also, I’d like to see G.B. Trudeau address more of the political races AND the oil spill. Perhaps B.P. could hire Earl’s p.r./lobbying firm.

Speak ill of the Left? From Trudeau? You kidding? He’s too busy bad-mouthing those of us in the military.

Orion

If you think of BP as being part of the Left, you need a new compass. As for bad-mouthing folks in the military, Trudeau has been very sympathetic to those currently serving and those who were wounded in action and are in rehab. Cognitive dissonance is getting worse all the time.

Orion, are you equating the CIA with the military?

Seriously?

Although, GT doesn’t seem to have much respect for those with multiple Politically Appointed Stars on their shoulders.

SHEIK This is the first time I disagreed with you. I love your comments and your wit. BUT if you don’t think Gt has been to the left the last forty years, I think you had better redefine what center is. I have enjoyed GT since I was a teenager and believed all that peace, love, and dope bullcrap. As I aged and the realities of life sunk in, I realized that Christian as a government project might seem. I was allowing bread and circuses to steal my freedom. A person makes his own life, not taxpayer money.

Yeah, and how’s that’s “small” government working for us? Loose rules for real estate mortgages, banking, investment markets and oil exploration sure shows that less is more…mess, greed, disasters. Works good for a few though. Thanks for the laughs, GT.

news item: poppy fields are being sprayed by unmarked planes. Supposedly this is killing the fields. Of course, this is hearsay from the farmers. No one has video I bet. If it is true. It has to be CIA. First good thing they have been able to do in decades.

FriscoLou, In case you missed it yesterday, You are correct.

FriscoLou, Thanks for the memory jog. I don’t know if that particular plane was involved in the drug runs, but it was part of the same operation of supplying the CONTRAS.

Fertilizer get’s sprayed from the air, too, pot.

Orion: What strip have you been reading the last month? Sure wasn’t this one.

Those government programs aren’t Christian, lew. I know you tossed the word in as bait, but the problem is the churches AREN’T doing them, are forbidden by law to have much to do with them. the ones they do run do help people get jobs or provide only a bit of assistance to get them on their feet because they have real world contacts to find them work. Salvation Army is the perfect example.

The government programs are to buy votes. I’m sure you don’t take Social Security or any retirement for doing nothing any more, so I know it couldn’t apply to you. Someone who worked for the Census Bureau for example would actually be helping determine where the government funds went for those programs. How’s your part time job going?

What is most interesting is that so many “capitalists” here flag spammers. Hate them. Can’t stand them. Yet they are merely folks trying to make a buck with actual work and trying to get by in a dog-eat-dog capitalist economy (foreign or not). Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to say you love the pure capitalist system and then flag people using it to it’s best advantage?

I’ll bet you won’t see any comments about civilians being killed in drone attacks, either.

If you consider Al Franken, John Kerry, and Howard Dean to be centric, then yeah, I suppose you could say that GT is, too. But if you don’t, Trudea’s political contribution record says very clearly why I won’t hold my breath waiting for equal time for the right and the left:

http://www.newsmeat.com/

Sorry, it won’t let me post the entire url, but if you click “celebriy search” and then enter “Trudeau”, it makes interesting reading.

As I’ve said previously, every popular message board I’ve seen eventually gets taken over by the Crazies. This one is turning out not to be any different.

And for those of you who actually take exception to the above observation, please go to the following webpage:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114369/quotes

The page is from the Internet Movies Database (IMDB.com) website which contains quotes from the movie “Seven” (a.k.a.: “Se7en”). Please read the quote that begins, “I’ve been trying to figure something in my head, …”. It’s fairly much the question I would like to personally ask a few of the posters on this board.

Good quote, but methinks that the first one on that page applies to you :-)

You might well be right, but be assured Nemesys, I did have you in mind, and it’s not just for comments today.

@Lewreader: Sheik said, “If you think of BP as being part of the Left, you need a new compass.” Not sure why you equated that with GT – hopefully a misread on your part.

@horace_manoor: “Peace flotilla” – is that what they’re calling it now?

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t like that Israel stopped them in international waters or that it erupted into a gunfight, but I’m pretty sure there was shooting from both sides. Nothing says “peace” like shooting at Israeli commandos, eh?

nemesys - okay, who are YOUR “centrist” heros?

Who says GT has to be bipartisan? He writes a comic strip. Love it or leave it as they said in the sixties. People are allowed to say their opinion in the United States, whether or not you agree. I don’t like certain people’s views so I don’t bother with them. However, I don’t complain about their right to say what they will even though I don’t agree with them.

Dan, I had never really considered that before, but I suppose I’d have to say Bill Clinton. He suspended his idealism, putting it aside to work with an adversarial Congress for the better good of the nation’s interests. I wouldn’t call him my “hero”, but he did act heroicly, and I admire that despite our basic idealogical differences.

GW Bush was also somewhat of a centrist, but not a successful one, as he compromised his basic principles out of political weakness, not unilateral heroistic principles. Clinton knew that if the country won, he won too, so he bit the bullet and moved to the right. Bush’s compromises the other way had the effect of compromising the nation.

@Alabama

If you object to the kind of self-absorption that troubles “David Mills,” does that mean you prefer the witless insouciance of posters like “stebon,” whose name if inverted (“no bets”) signals that he has no stake in the game?

GT may be whimsical, but he’s never indifferent. As for horace’s “attack on that peace flotilla,” no doubt GT WILL satirize it–once somebody (other than Faux news) proves that the flotilla’s real intent was to threaten Israel and its IDF commandos.

Of course GT doesn’t need to be bipartisan… but he used to be much more open minded about his satire than he is now. Remember “the waffle”? Being able to poke fun at both sides of the isle speaks to credibility, but if that’s no longer GT’s goal, well, knock yourself out.

I really don’t think bipartisanship was ever GT’s goal, isn’t currently his goal and never will be his goal. He doesn’t have to be bipartisan. Someone who insists on bipartisanship is usually insisting on it because they disagree with what is being said. That is fine but don’t expect the other person to change his mind in the name of “bipartisanship.” The right is allowed to have their ideas floated around and they are criticized too.

For the benefit of those who questioned whether the graduation arc last week was a rerun, is this proof enough for you?

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?ucfulldate=20090605

Note the date on the strip, June 05, 2009. Do you need to see Zipper’s birth certificate too?

Misng:

That link did not work for me, but if you just type a full date with slashes after “www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/” in the form indicated 2009/06/05/ you do get the gocomics Doonesbury for that date, comments included.

For me your link goes to Slate’s version for today, and the comic date is 6-1.

I use Firefox.

Don’t worry this proof will not convince the die hard doubters.

nemesys - we agree about Clinton, not that he was a particular hero of mine either. But I’m hard pressed to think of anything that W did that represented a shift to the left. What did you have in mind?

For all the “Neocon” rhetoric, Bush was a weaving centrist, no less than was Clinton. He extended most of Clinton’s policies without a bump. He never met a spending bill he didn’t like, and he thought that would make those on both sides of the isle happy with him as a result (it didn’t). His support of immigration amnesty was misguided (imnsho), and he overhyped the need for bailouts with the same level of enthusiasm as he hyped WMD’s in Iraq.

Clinton pro-acted… Bush reacted, but they both ended up in pretty much the same place. Neither was particularly politically ideological in the manner of Reagan or Obama.

@Nemesys

This comment on politics has nothing to do with GT’s strip, but I was struck by your illogical pairing of Reagan and Obama as ideologists and your ranking them below the presumably more “pragmatic” Clinton and Bush.

An ideologist is someone who never reexamines their ideas or modifies them to fit an emergency. That is, s/he cares more about ideas than results.

It’s true that each of these four presidents has clung to a unique idea (in the case of the Republican presidents) or to a complex of ideas (the ostensibly more “intellectual” Democrats). But you can’t really judge their pragmatism without looking at the ideas the presidents in question refused to negotiate.

I believe we get a better measure of their ideological rigidness by specifying what their larger designs were and by asking whether their compromises enabled them to achieve those designs.

Using this measure, I’d score the four presidents as follows:

Obama + 4 (stimulus; reform in education, health insurance, and financial regulation)

Reagan + 2 (starving the government by replacing taxes with borrowing; rebuilding our arsenal to hasten the collapse of the Evil Empire)

G.W. Bush + 1 (realizing that the attack by militant Islamists required us to respond with an all-out, 21st-century “Crusade”)

Clinton + 0 (his “pragmatic” compromises meant giving up on health insurance reform, cutting welfare while balancing the budget using taxes reinstated by his predecessor, prolonging the Bosnian conflict by announcing that our troops wouldn’t intervene, and allowing the banks as well as al-Qaeda to flourish with impunity).

“An ideologist is someone who never reexamines his ideas or modifies them to fit an emergency. That is, s/he cares more about ideas than results.”

A tip of the hat, palin drome. Great definition

It’s always hilarious to listen to debates of left and right when rightist in America carry poster depicting a left wing Obama as Hitler. Since Hitler was a right wing extremist. Hard to call O a “Stalin” and make the “communist” label stick as an insult when the right borrowed so much money from Red China.

The underlying error is this false expectation that anyone is going to live up to an ideal of perfectly right or left. Worse, the idea that every person in the country is qualified to judge if the leader lives up to the ideal as he, the leader, understands it.

Lew, you read others’ comments as poorly as you read mine. Sheik Yerbouti didn’t say that G.B. Trudeau wasn’t to the left. Everyone who reads DOONESBURY can see that Trudeau’s political inclinations are progressive. Unlike most politically oriented strips, however, Trudeau has great sympathies toward his characters of all political persuasions. His original alter ego, Mike Doonesbury, became a Republican some sixteen years ago and only recently returned, reluctantly, to the Democratic fold, sent there by the awfulness of the Bush-Dick presidency.

Mike Doonesbury was hardly alone in this. No matter how poorly the public thinks of Congress’s Republicans, Congress’s Democrats, & President Obama, it thinks even more poorly of Bush-Dick. B.P.’s oil spill is just one more part of the Bush-Dick legacy. We knew that he made a mess of America. This oil spill is just a tangible analogue: barrels of blood he has spilled in Afghanistan & Iraq, barrels of oil he has spilled onto our Gulf shore.

Yerbouti was defending Trudeau against Orion’s idiotic statement that Trudeau was against the military. Trudeau has enormous sympathy & respect for our men & women in uniform, and they respect him.

It’s so interesting, watching the reactionaries hallucinate in tandem.