Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 09, 2011

Appears that Bmzklfrpz is in trouble also..

And that’s a good thing!

In re yesterday’s discussion:

Referring to the passages in Hamlet (II.ii) that are in the folio but not in the second quarto, Harold Jenkins writes:

“Why these passages were dropped in printing one can only guess… The new Queen [James’s Queen Anne] herself was of the country that Hamlet called a prison. But in view of the Second Quarto passage about the drunkenness of Danes (I.iv.8-22) censorship is not an obvious explanation. And with the possibilities of confusion in the copy, one cannot after all be quite sure that the omissions were designed.” (Hamlet, Arden ed., p. 45)

It really does not matter much, Drome, but please get your facts right. Now, please stop griping that Garry Trudeau will not write Doonesbury to please you, and create a strip that does. Thanks.

In re today’s strip:

Although I have tired of Duke and wish that he would go the way of his model, Hunter S. Thompson, I am glad to see Garry Trudeau’s restrained glee over the panic of tyrants. What a shame that Bush-Dick was permitted an easy retirement rather than the trial *he* deserves.

(I also know that Duke & Earl serve an important function in Doonesbury’s stories.)

“Bmzklfrpz” is the Americanized spelling of his name…(dealing with outsiders and all that)

BrianCrook, I feel the same as you do about Duke. There’s nothing to like about him and I’m glad GT has never tried to soften his corrupt nature

Can’t Bmzklfrpz just say his name backwards and avoid all this trouble? Or can he barely say his name forwards?

Bmzklfrpz, in trouble? Why would anybody have problems with him….?

Maybe they’d like to buy a vowel…..

BRIAN Sorry I missed you. Just wondering why you always mention “Bush-Dick”” (Most would match first names or last)? I Haven’t mentioned your idols Kemnnedy/Johmson killing 58,000 servicemen and creating the welfare state in a week. If we could both drop the past and glory in the Future of the new Congress, America would be happier. Have a productive day.

How do you pronounce Bmzklfrpz? Bim-zickle-firptz?

Sandfan. makes me think of mix-yez-spit-lick and this isn’t the 5th dimension!

This will be good for business for Duke and Son (who seem to have hired some of their employees back - I guess the Stimulus must have worked!), but only in the short term. Soon, these countries will settle down peacefully under Sharia law, where the only thing to break the peace will be the occasional stoning of women for being raped by their older cousins, or maybe a beheading or 2 of college students trying to access the internet.

Well, so long as God says its ok, it’s none of our business.

well, Dick-Bush would make more sense, and we are living present-tense in the scenario their shadow government envisioned for us Little People. What their sorry union “engendered”, Yeats’ Rough Beast, bestirring his thighs in Egypt…?! talking about prophesy. Bush Jr. hand-in-hand with his Daddy’s buddies, the shieks of Arabie.

Lew, I mention Bush-Dick to remind all that the current American situation (two costly & bloody foreign occupations, huge federal debt, the worst recession in fifty years, a yawning gap between rich & poor, insufficient social services, inadequate public education, increasing numbers of children hungry, increasing numbers of Americans w/out health care, &c.) can be laid at his feet and those of the Republicans who ran Congress for fourteen years and still run the Supreme Court, which stole the election of 2000, placing Bush-Dick (whom the people rejected) into office.

I know that you, despite your union-secured and government-funded health-care & pension, cannot take a breath without mentioning the Vietnam War, and I agree that John Kennedy & Lyndon Johnson were two of its architects (with your full support), along with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. I began arguing against it at age nine and had joined protests by age ten. I lost a beloved cousin to that stupid war, and I cannot stand how many people have lost loved ones to the wars begun by Bush-Dick, who was too cowardly to fight in Vietnam (as you did) or fight against it (as I, as a child, did).

I hope that that answers your question. I would say more, but a busy day awaits. Enjoy your retirement, and get the house clean while your wife works.

@BrianCrook (apropos of Hamlet)

This isn’t a good forum for discussing Shakespeare scholarship, and the “facts” about Hamlet 1.4 (Hamlet’s speech on the battlements about the dram of “eale”—actually, “esil,” vinegar; see 5.1.271) are blurred even by Jenkins, who substitutes the traditional abstraction, “evil.”

I apologize for not explaining that Q2 dropped the slurs on Denmark but not Hamlet’s speech on his uncle’s alcoholic excess, which wouldn’t have offended Queen Anne although it does annoy modern scholars. Hamlet in fact is praising heroic Danes whose exploits are stained by Claudius’s debauchery.

For a recent emendation of the speech, see the article in A Certain Text (2002, U. of Delaware Press). Evidently Shakespeare got his theme of drunken “Dutchmen” (i.e. Germans and Danes) from Thomas Nashe, whose pamphlets were the rough equivalent of an Elizabethan Doonesbury.

Sorry fbjsr. All my friends and relatives … for ALL 8 years of the Bush administration, were whining about Clinton. Many of them are STILL complaining about Clinton! They can’t even remember why … only a vague recollection that he was “a sleezebag”.

Living is the past is a classic slur used against conservatives, but ever since the 70’s it’s been something that many more folks on the left are guilty of.

It’s childish no matter who does it. I lost a grandfather in WWII and an uncle in Korea, but it would be a much different world had we not entered those wars, as it would be had we not been in the Middle East. It would be foolish of me to rail against Roosevelt and Truman as a way to solve the issues of today.

Duke and Earl with their “protocols” are a satire on tyrants and their enablers. It’s as simple as that. Look at the “protocols” Suleiman and Mubarik (or, to use BrianCrook’s style, S-M) have just proposed to “change” the constitution so they can mop up Tahrir Square in the name of restoring “lawn order,” as Nixon used to say.

Specific historical events like revolutions aren’t generic, but tyrants are. They’re all versions of the brilliant portrait Plato drew in The Republic. Towards the end of that dialogue, Socrates explains that anarchy begets a new tyrant—the strongman who tells the mob, “Give me a bodyguard and I’ll protect your property.”

From the safety of our Constitutionally-protected democracy, Americans should use what leverage we have to guarantee that Egypt emerges from this revolution as “a nation ruled by laws not by men” (I’ve switched from Plato to Aristotle).

Iraq seems to have a 50/50 chance of achieving this kind of democracy. If it does, we’ll have to give Bush-Dick much of the credit.

Ps. @prfesser & Texas (below)

Many of these comments that you find impertinent to the Doonesbury strip come from fans like myself who want to know what GT’s take is on actual political events.

It’s easier to talk about a fantasized past or an apocalyptic future than to examine the confusing, everchanging present. Trudeau shows his genius by distancing the political present without quite losing sight of it.

Agreed. I hear my conservative acquaintances still griping about the Clintons and accusing the current administration of corruption in appointing Hillary, as well as being the Anti-Christ Muslim-loving Socialist Nazi Gun-grabbing End of Civilization as We Know It. I also hear my liberal/progressive acquaintances griping about Bush 41, Bush 43, and Reagan, accusing them of creating the problems of the entire world and calling the current President a spineless coward for not having them Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld charged with war crimes. Give it a rest, guys.

Clinton? Heck, Republicans are still complaining about Carter.

Thank you, prfesser. You’ve now contributed to your own pile.

Carter who?

As Ahhnold might have said, nonstop complainers are just girly-men. It’s easy to be a critic on others’ lives while letting one’s own go to waste. WWSPD?

fbjsr, we all know what must be done to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. In addition, Bush’s action have a strong and direct bearing on many of today’s issues, thus they will continue to be discussed. He was and is a conservative, thus one of your “side”, and his results were crappy. Grow up and get used to it.

Obama took over a country with bigger problems than any POTUS since FDR. He has continued what Bush does in some ways, and in other ways he has changed things. There are conservatives like you saying he has done nothing different, and conservatives saying he is presiding over a massive “socialist” shift. Neither, of course, is true.

Jmerm, cudos for a (somewhat) balanced view of Bush. Likewise, I agree that Clinton cannot be held blameless as far as terrorism goes, but your assertion that Bill is completely responsible for the terrorism under George is ridiculous. All evidence I have seen says that the outgoing Clinton administration fully briefed the incoming Bushites on Al Qaeda and other threats, but the new administration did little or nothing until 9/11. Bush first threw the majority of his efforts into slashing taxes and regulations for the wealthy backers who got him elected.

I love how the complainers all complain about other complainers complaining. At least they have something to keep them going while the world crumbles. Come Palin, complain. :-)

As to the cartoon: we still haven’t gotten the best dictatorship money can buy overseas and supporting them has been such a success from VietNam on. ;-)

All evidence shows that, after the failed WTC attack during the Clinton presidency, our CIA and FBI worked very well with any special laws to stop any further attacks and in fact broke several terrorist plans up. It was only after GB arrived and chose to ignore the leftover Clinton appointees who wanted him to focus on foreign terror threats, that we got our little gift from Osama.

Obama meanwhile chose to follow the leftover bush financial advisor’s advise and we hear the repubs do nothing but complain about that one. Both were clearly in error, though the US has certainly made back a lot of its “rescue’ funds to the auto industry, the only real maker of anything to get funds.

Freeholder Love to cross swords with you though I haven’t learned the art of the false personal jab. When the ” Bush administration gave the taxpayer dollar to greedy capitalists after Jan 3, 2007 (DOW 125000, unemployment 4.9%). who was in charge of law making and disbursing cash as stated in the Constitution? So what did Bush do and What did Congress do? Why you mean it was a Democratic Congress that passed TARP. Please inform me or I will have to give back the “B” I received in 6th grade civics.

Nemesys: Interesting that you raise the spectre of Sharia law. So let’s look at the history of Sharia (or equivalent Strict Islamic Law) in the region…

We’ll start (chronologically) with Iran, which had a secular democracy back in the ’50s, until it made the mistake of demanding that the people of Iran get a reasonable share of the oil revenues. Well, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as bp) couldn’t tolerate that, so the MI5 and CIA organized a revolution which installed Reza Palavi as Shah (“Shah” is Persian for “Dictator”). After more than twenty years in power, the Shah’s abuses (ever hear of the Savak?) were more than the people could bear, and they threw him out. They also threw out the US (who had armed and trained his secret police). The revolution was led by a Muslim cleric, as the mosque was about the only place where it was semi-safe to oppose the Shah’s government. As last year’s semi-revolt demonstrates, the Iranian people are not particularly happy with the Islamic government, but they’re even less happy with US covert attempts to overthrow it.

Let’s now move to Afghanistan and the notorious Taliban, as fine a bunch of Islamic fanatics as the world has ever seen. Afghanistan was an independent, largely secular country until the USSR tried to take it over. The US responded by arming and training the “muhajadeen,” who successfully kicked out the Russians, but then instituted extremely strict Islamic law.

Then there’s Saudi Arabia, the home of the Wahabi movement, a nation where it’s illegal to be a Christian, the nation that finances those madrassa schools in Pakistan (the places that teach jihad against the Great Satan), and of course the birthplace of Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda. It’s also a major source of US oil, and its repressive regime has been a close friend of the US ever since the House of Saud established a tenuous control over the oil fields.

Then there is Iraq, which had a secular dictatorship until the US eradicated all trace of government. Since then there’s been inter-sectarian civil war, complete with beheadings, suicide bombings and people being killed simply because their names (e.g., “Omar”) are identified with the wrong sect. What little “stability” has emerged since Operation Iraqi Chaos has been the stability of the grave. And most observers figure that in the long term, Iraq will draw closer to its Shia neighbor, Iran.

See a pattern yet? The technical term is “blowback.” The repressive Islamic states are either a reaction to a repressive, US-backed dictatorship, or the direct product of US meddling.

This is why I don’t worry much about Egypt going Sharia–so far, they haven’t gotten enough “help” from the US.

BrianCrook, didn’t Harold Jenkins sing as “Conway Twitty”???

Boy, I thought Duke n Sons was a small Mom and Pop operation. I didn’t know they were bigger than Xe.

I guess when things aren’t going so swell it’s easier to take an ostrich view of the past, and hope it doesn’t bite you … but I noticed that some of the people who coned their way into Iraq were Contracons before they were Neocons, and I’m wondering if we don’t wise up soon what kind of con they’ll run next. If this happens many more times, people will start to think we’re a bunch of Okey Dokes. Did you hear what they’re saying about Egypt? They act like they have more cred than ElBaradai. Do you remember what the Neocons said when ElBaradai reported about Iraq: “I can’t find any WMDs anywhere, and I’ve looked everywhere”, and they have scorned him ever since. If they don’t want to learn from their past, how can they begin to understand what’s happening now?

I’m struggling to express what I really mean, maybe all I need is a little more rhythm and bass, and I apologized for the gruesome images … of Robert Novak.