CSotD: Truthiness as a pre-existing condition
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(INSERT IMAGE: A whole lot of cartoons
I'm not featuring here)
The laziness and piling on is getting kind of discouraging. I wrote recently about how cheap, unexamined gags perpetuated the "Al Gore lies" phony meme, and, as I said then, there's really nothing new about baseless partisan attacks, but at least the "Bob Dole is old" jokes were based on the fact that Bob Dole was old.
And attacks on Dan Quayle were unfair and untrue but at least they were personal and not serious attempts to undo the process. Passing them on was lazy but not really unpatriotic.
Furthermore, if you truly believe that Negroes aren't capable of articulate speech, then I guess making fun of a Negro who uses a TelePrompter when every white man in the past half century who held that job also used a TelePrompter is more about you than it is about that particular Negro. At least you're only fooling other people with the same peculiar need to believe the same thing.
But people need affordable health care, and, while cartoonists are free to join the insurance lobby in keeping them from getting it, I think they owe the country the respect to be honest and to do their homework.
Here are a couple I did think were worth passing along:
Chris Britt is right. The computer flaws handed the GOP the hammer they wanted.
We can debate how all the "safeguards" against cheating contributed to the complexity, we can debate over how all the states who refused to take part contributed to the size of the problem. But the failures of the website don't have anything to do with the quality of the law itself and it's stupid, lazy and dishonest to say otherwise.
The problems with the website should not have happened. That's the fact, jack.
Still, irrelevant as they would be in an honest discussion, they were a godsend for the insurance lobby, because they allowed opponents of affordable care to pile on over that instead of addressing the law itself, and Sibelius is to blame for handing them a wedge.
Meanwhile, Tom Toles rightly accuses the GOP of fake outrage.
I find it very frustrating to watch these dog-and-pony shows, in which legislators are empowered to subpoena people for the purpose of strutting and posing for the press.
It's even more disturbing when they are asking "Do you still beat your wife?" and "Do you love America half as much as I clearly do?" questions of Supreme Court nominees, but it's a degrading spectacle under any circumstances.
Particularly when the Washington Press Corps is so willing to pick up the soundbites and help make the whole thing work so well for the politicians and so poorly for the cause of good government.
It rarely takes long to get down to the "Are you that stupid, or do you think I am?" part of the discussion, but I think the answer is that the press may not be quite that stupid, but they're lazy enough — and passive enough — that it really doesn't matter.
And one of the most blatantly foolish remarks in the current round of skits didn't come from the GOP but from Obama's side of the aisle.
"Amazon and eBay don't crash the week before Christmas," Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif) said in grilling the techies. "ProFlowers doesn't crash on Valentine's Day."
It's a great sound bite, but it doesn't stand up to much examination.
It's entirely possible that she thinks those commercial sites started out on Day One with the volume of traffic they currently enjoy. She may honestly believe that they also have to connect with more computers than simply the ones at Mastercard and Visa and are required to verify tax records and citizenship status of each customer.
But reporters should ask her that, or at least note that the ACA launch was considerably different.
Maybe they just don't know themselves. After all, the mainstream press didn't question Ted Stevens' explanation of how the Internet works until he had been gloriously mocked by everyone else, at which point they covered it as a viral meme, not a political story.
Stevens might as well have been a bulldog on a skateboard or a waterskiing squirrel as someone setting laws to govern our digital infrastructure, for all that Ken and Barbie Hairspray cared.
They also never questioned the veracity of the little doe-eyed Kuwaiti girl whose perjured testimony before Congress was set up by a DC public relations firm to get us into the first Gulf War, nor did they show a lot of interest in examining the yellowcake stories and WMD evidence that got us into the next one.
Why should I expect them to bother probing into the bogus stories of anecdotal witnesses who claim they lost coverage because of the law?
Ah well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, thousands die unnecessarily.
On a lighter note:
I've confessed my love for the Rip Kirby classics at Dailyink, but today's gobsmacked me with perhaps the finest use of three panels in a single day by a continuity strip that I've ever seen. It's like the montage before the rumble in "West Side Story."
To bring you up to date: The secretary of the fading actor (Panel #1) thinks she has murdered his latest love interest, but, in fact, she shot one of his former wives. She, of course, loves him but can't compete with the starlets he wooes.
In Panel #2, Kirby — having discovered that the body in the burned cabin was not Pagan Lee — has taken the police into his confidence and is trying to find out who went to the cabin, shot the ex-wife, set the place on fire and escaped in the ex-wife's car.
Then, in Panel #3, we see Pagan Lee herself, waiting at the apartment and about to be face-to-face with her would-be murderer.
Talk about selling the next day's newspaper!
And then we have this:
PC & Pixel plays around with the thin line between crowdfunding and panhandling.
Personally, I like Kickstarter, and here's an example: Mandrake the Magician's latest artist has retired and King Features sees no profit in bringing in a new artist to keep the nearly 80-year-old strip going.
But according to the Dailyink blog, there may be a Kickstarter set up to fund an on-line, non-syndicated revival. And, given that Kickstarter doesn't fund anything unless it reaches its announced goal, this is a win-win proposition. If fans care enough, the strip with continue. If not, well, then they don't care enough and so why bother?
Indiegogo works differently: The money raised is paid out, even if the goal is not reached. I wouldn't contribute to a project through Indiegogo, because the risk of paying something for nothing is one I won't take. But it's a reasonable way to raise funds for more open-ended purposes, like helping to pay someone's medical or legal bills.
Alan Gardner is currently using Indiegogo to raise funds for his blog, The Daily Cartoonist, and I've contributed. I value the site and Alan will likely stick with it, even if he doesn't raise the full amount.
Plus he's got some cool incentive gifts from other people who value the site.
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