Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 27, 2010

Just because something is reported by Faux News doesn’t make it so. How’s that Tea Party candidate that practices witchcraft doing?

Bubbling over…

Wonder when GT will finally unveil The Chosen One’s icon. Some suggestions (because I know you all care so much):

A 24k gold waffle (as in the new and improved Bubba Clinton)? A Moses-esque stone tablet? A protractor (for his social engineering)? A dollar sign with infinity ($∞)? A counting-down clock? A standard bearing the symbols of all his devout groupies (never mind–that’s impossible to fit in a comic)

Is there any way to draw a vacation?

Could his Nobel be the icon? I don’t know if there’s an easy way to draw a recognizable symbol for that. It is pretty ridiculous that the icon still hasn’t come after 20 months in office. In the past, Trudeau got that down pretty quick.

Sheik, She is following in the footsteps of the Tea Bags before her. A good ‘ol boy likes his women Fauxy, but doesn’t want one that makes him look dumb. That makes for a limited pool of choices. This one is showing Saraesque qualities.

Mike is too smart to watch Fox News.

JRC123:

· A large set of ears?

· A prayer rug?

· A burglar mask?

· A sack of OPM?

Maybe if they hide under the covers it will just go away. Oh, the Prez has a lot of openings for campaign speeches, Any takers?

Surely there are plans for negotiating with the reps. Remember Scott Brown? How he waffled? Not every R has voted NO all the time. Don’t think the new congress will be any different.

JRC123: A Burning Bush

Mike is too smart NOT to watch Fox News, at least now and then.

Chris Rock does a great routine on prideful ignorance.

OK, Yurbootie”, so a 42-year old woman who dated a guy in high school that played around at being a witch is now a “practicing witch”. How stupid can one person be?

I vote for wilddave’s burning bush, with its logo reading “I AM THAT I AM”

That should satisfy the birthers, those with a phobia for socialism, the Moslem-haters, and maybe even those who rally behind Christine O’Donnell’s call for sexual purity.

I expect we’re about to get a lot of Bush-burning.

palin, I haven’t heard much from the birthers lately, but finally the “truthers” have some solid validation thanks to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent UN statements. 35% of Democrats now have at least one thing in common with Mr. Ahmadinejad, and perhaps more than one.

JRC, the perfect icon for BHO is nothing at all, and so GT got it right.

beenthere, I know a few Wiccans, and they’re not at all happy that the witch thing has been incorrectly portrayed by both O’Donnell and the media. What she described is more like a teenage Buffy party than a witch’s ritual. The “practicing witch” schtick is by the ignorant and for the ignorant., but I think she should take advantage of it. Would you rather vote for Samantha or for Derwood?

I thought we WANTED leaders to keep their cool under pressure?

Nothing the President does will satisfy the cons. Sore losers.

Does O’Donnell wiggle her nose or pull on her ear to win the election?

Justice, I think the nose thing works for her. It was Carol Burnett who pulled on her ear.

Clark Kent is right: when it comes to being dazzled by truth and reality, Bush resembled Ahmadinejad far more closely than either president resembles Obama, whose ability to see things as they are frustrates our media devoted to transient “information.” In The Republic, Socrates clearly describes this “information.” He labels it OPINION and contrasts it with KNOWLEDGE.

He likens those who trust opinion to persons in a cave. They stare at the silhouettes projected onto a wall in front of them. Occasionally one of them turns around and wonders at the objects being manipulated before a fire to produce the silhouettes. But if he investigates further, he might be led beyond the fire and up out of the cave into the sunlight of knowledge.

Socrates asks, “Wouldn’t he kill the person who showed him this daylight reality and rush back into his cave?” Or he’d be like a deer stuck in the headlights, or a fanatic told that his prophecies are based on lies.

So far, Obama can’t even get voters to look at the firelight behind their favorite opinions. For example, many believe the deficit was caused by spending (notably Obama’s stimulus). They don’t KNOW about all the money the Bush Republicans borrowed for eight years so that the wealthiest taxpayers woudn’t have to pay their share (about one-half) of government expenses. Voters don’t KNOW that the services they take for granted (social security, medicare, national defense) cost real money that has to come from somewhere.

In the end, a cartoon strip cannot escape the shadows of opinion. Trudeau KNOWS he can’t capture the real Obama in Doonesbury. That’s why he shows us Mike studying the Obama about whom the media offer only opinions. Nemesys speaks more wisely than he knows with his quip that “nothing” symbolizes Obama.

@JRC123- re: “Is there any way to draw a vacation?” Smears are great as long as you ignore facts.

Days spent on vacation during first year in office (factcheck.org):

W. Bush: 69 Reagan: 42 H.W. Bush: 40 Obama: 26 Clinton: 21 Carter: 19

That’s not counting trips to Camp David which is more like a scenic office space. But if you want to add in Camp David days:

W. Bush: 78 Obama: 27

I’m not an Obama basher, but how about an Easter Island head with the Nobel Prize around the neck. He already sort of resembles one. Plus the motiff of an emotionless stone faced god passively but sternly looking on as society implodes around him is somewhat fitting.

Obama NEEDS a Republican sweep. He can’t blame bipartisanship for his inactivity forever, you know.

Faux, the “Tepid party”, and the right, want Chicken Little back, complete with Foghorn Leghorn Bonehead. Run around screaming and yelling, in your bunker, starting wars others will fight and pay for. It should be remembered that in the old west, it wasn’t he who drew fastest, but he who hit the target, who survived.

The ranters from the “minority” are there because their policies hit a lot of innocent bystanders, fatally, and now they expect to get their guns back. Don’t let it happen.

@ palin - And yet in the end, Garry shows us his own view of Obama that matches the opinions provided by the media (even Fox media, but Roland’s opinion on the topic are found all over the political media spectrum). This particular strip, while mild compared to others, is perhaps the greatest “zinger” that GT has ever portrayed of our current president. Garry’s own opinions are thus infused into the media smokescreen, putting GT in the (not uncommon) position of meta-analyzing himself.

As to many not knowing about Bush’s spending, I’ll grant that this is probably true for the majority of the independents who decide elections and have jumped ship from where they voted in 2008, but not true for conservatives. Ironically, Fox News, Rush, Hanity, etc. were preaching this exact overspending message long before Obama got into office. As has been articulated many times, Bush’s greatest failings have been when he has behaved as if he was a liberal Democrat, and conservatives will freely admit it…. his lack of support towards the end was in response to what the conservatives felt was Bush’s lack of support for their principles. What confuses the conservatives (and Hillary Clinton) now, of course, is the economic strategy of adding gasoline to a spending spree fire already burning out of control.

The funniest thing is that everyone is assuming it’s only DEMOCRATS that are going to be voted out of office. There are an awful lot of people who are sick of pretty much everyone currently in Congress, and want to get rid of them, regardless of the party they belong to. It also doesn’t help that some of the Republican candidates are pretty strange. Here in Colorado, we’ve got a senatorial candidate who’s so far to the right that he makes George Bush look like a liberal. We also have a three-way race for governor between the popular Democratic mayor of Denver, a Republican candidate with all sorts of legal and ethical issues, and a former far-right Republican who decided to join a third party because he thinks he’s better than the Republican candidate. (The latter is one of the more fun nutjobs we have in the state, Tom Tancredo). Basically, the Republicans have handed the governor’s mansion to the Democrats in this one.

Good call, Gypsy.

How about his Icon be the starship Enterprise? He’s alway being compared to Spock.

Perfect time for another vacation.

Nemesys,

What Fox and Rush et alii fail to grasp is the fact that Bush’s administration failed to budget (i.e., collect TAXES) for even its NONDISCRETIONARY expenditures (social security, Medicare, defense, interest payments on the debt, and the Iraq War). Instead of taxing, they BORROWED, resulting in our by now uncontrollable deficit.

The Democrats’ policy of “tax-and-spend,” deplorable as it sounds, in fact looks like reason itself compared with the Republican policy of borrowing to pay for tax relief. (See my summary of Greenspan’s interview that I’ve also tagged “borrowing,” as above.)

Tigger,, That is what I told President Dewey when he went to bed the night of the election.

Social Security? You mean Roosevelt’s ponzi scheme is finally out of new suckers? But But But, when Congress “borrowed” from the plan, to pay for the day to day expenses, didn’t they promise to pay it back? Aside from FICA extorted from taxpayers (Who could have invested in the market at a historic 8%), have they broke into tax dollars yet? I’m glad big brother won’t let me make the mistakes investing in my future that he has.

Anyway you geniuses, seems to me that Social Security, like the Post office pay their own way. How the hell does that concern your income tax? Both have been tapped as cash cows too many times.

Blame it on the rich. Discriminating against minorities who make it is the American way. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians. Hate them and take their money. After all, have you ever had a poor employer? The dirty rats working longer and harder than us, risking everything and then expecting to keep50% of their legal earnings

@Lewreader

You’ve made this too complicated for yourself. The government’s budget—-or any budget—-will be sound only so long as income (i.e. tax revenues) covers outlays. Before Reagan’s administration, presidents usually raised taxes to pay for rising expenditures.

But then Reagan got the idea of choking off revenues (i.e. taxes) in order to strangle new spending by his Democratic Congress. (This was called “starving the beast.”) The trouble with that policy was that revenues were frozen while expenditures continued to grow—-mainly because of population growth and increasing medical costs. So Reagan BORROWED in order to balance his budget.

Reagan’s two successors, Bush I and Clinton, were responsible enough to stop borrowing and to raise taxes to cover government’s essential outlays (which Clinton tried to pare down by cutting welfare and defense). By 2000, Clinton had managed, NOT to close the DEFICIT started by Reagan, but to PROJECT a balanced budget on the basis of expected revenues (i.e. income taxes at the pre-Reagan levels) to cover moderate or normal growth in expenditures.

Enter Bush II. Predicting a budget surplus, he creates three new costly expenditures: (1) Medicare D or drugs for seniors (2) the war in Iraq (3) return of projected tax revenues to taxpayers—-especially the wealthiest (who had been supporting %40 to 50% of the costs of government over the prosperous half-century since WW II).

I doubt that discrimination against racial groups has anything to do with the uncontrollable deficit created since 2001. But it’s quite obvious that our government cannot recover without the wealthy resuming their fair share of responsibility for our government’s unavoidable costs. I’m sure that in spite of your cathartic ranting you can figure out what some of those costs are. (You might start with interest on new debt incurred over the decade just ending. That alone amounts to one-sixth of the budget.)

PALIN I agree with most you say. I also say that most of our outlay can not be cut. I do wonder though, that in a country created against centralized government, why we have allowed this one to grow so. Somehow I read “general welfare” as general welfare. Others read it to say the federal government should involve itself in problems within a state.

We are fortunate to be able to change our minds. Wish we didn’t have the same choices.

Lew, I’m with you in favoring anti-federalism in principle. I especially deplore that Federalist monster the national bank run by the oligarchs from Wall Street. Finding himself saddled with a paralyzing deficit, Obama has only made things worse by deferring to those crazy economists (Summers etc.) and he’s going to have to retract all their policies if he wants to salvage his presidency.

Beyond the financial sphere, however, it’s not easy to circumscribe the Federal powers. Central govt. is indispensable for the military and our courts. It’s also necessary to regulate interstate commerce, protect the environment, and oversee welfare (and soon Obamacare) to ensure that these are fairly distributed. And what about education? We all know that good schools are locally controlled. But who will fix the schools in impoverished parts of the nation?

Add to these responsibilities emergency aid, disaster relief, and the expensive bureaucracies needed to enforce regulation of industries, collect taxes, and maintain the welfare (and soon immigration) rolls, and you can begin to see why our govt. is hiring even during a depression.

I think you and I are asking the government to take care only of those who need more help than we do. Of course, we too are eventually going to need more help—-or our children will.

The Republicans have held the presidency 20 of 28 years before Obama, held the Senate most of that time, and the house majority from ‘95 to ‘07. In every campaign, they promise to cut spending, but they never do to any significant degree. This time will be no different.

i admit - i voted for the lesser of two weevils however a floating birth certificate ? (ducks)

Hey Barack…job is definitely more than anyone bargained for but stay the course..get out of all wars, brag about health care, persist in tax cuts for middle class only, and finally create some jogs and get a clue about teachers…we are not to blame..check out the administrators and you will see what i mean.

@benbrilling

Ref. Bush comparison: Ok, fair enough, but a more relevant comparison:

Number of days TCO spent at exotic/upscale locations in 2009 on the public dime: 26 Number of days I spent at exotic/upscale locations in 2009: 5 – On the public dime: 0 Number of days you spent at exotic/upscale locations in 2009: _ – On the public dime: 0

It’s amazing how well he spends other people’s money…

Christine O’Donnell was never anywhere near an actual practicing witch or an actual satanist.