CSotD: As seen from beyond the moat
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There were a flood of cartoons based on what was assumed to happen in the SOTU address, some based on the portions of the text already released, others based on past experience, yet others based on partisan talking points. Here are two that I found worth passing on.
(Tom Toro)
It might be that you had to wade through all the dumb and dumbly toxic other examples to get a chuckle out of Mike Thompson's piece.
There were way too many riffs on what John Boehner would be doing behind his back while he spoke, some relatively insightful, some not so, as well as a lot of truly stupid ones based on his promise to use executive orders to accomplish what a gridlocked, partisan Congress would not.
That latter being based on the outright lie that Obama has issued a large number of executive orders. I was delighted when Bob Schieffer noted on the CBS Evening News last night that you'd have to go back to Benjamin Harrison to find a president who issued fewer executive orders in his first term than Obama. And, even if he goes nuts from this point on, it's not like he's in a whole lot of danger of setting any records.
However, Thompson's panel points out why he might want to give the process a try.
If you look at that list, you'll see that Theodore Roosevelt was a prodigious issuers of orders, and there's a reason. Well, two reasons.
One was that he didn't take a lot of sh*t from Congressional obstructionists, bearing in mind that the dumb bastards made him vice-president in the first place because, as governor of New York, he was upsetting their corporate overlords and they wanted to salt him away somewhere where he would be obscure and powerless. It turned out to be a flawed strategy.
The other is well known to conservationists: He was trying to protect birds from plume-hunters but worried about trying to get stronger laws through Congress when someone reminded him that he could "declare" wildlife refuges. "I so declare it!" he said, delightedly, creating the first of what would be a large number of such sanctuaries. He also managed to finagle a bill into law that allowed him to "declare" national monuments, which gave him the power to functionally sidestep Congress's obstruction of the creation of national parks.
We're starting to see more appreciation of TR, whose reformation of the Gilded Age of robber barons has largely come undone by an increasingly bought-and-paid-for Congress. If this turns out to be the remedy for Citizens United, well, it's more in keeping with the spirit, IMHO.
Tom Toro, meanwhile, spotlights what Obama is up against. Toro's work is currently appearing on the New Yorker's Daily Cartoon site, which is worth bookmarking. They rotate cartoonists by month, and while the combination of a daily deadline and magazine's style produces some bland, suburban New Yorkeresque observational panels, the doubles and triples well outnumber the singles.
And beyond the speech …
Derf illustrates the need to resurrect the much-passed-around crack about people who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
By the way, Derf has a gift for dark sarcasm, and that's a tool best applied when it confirms what is going on by extending its logic to an absurd extent. But as the blind, insensitive stupidity increases, it becomes hard to make it sound any worse than it is.
Case in point: When some plutocratic jackanapes compares the Occupy movement's backlash against the 1 percent to Nazi persecution of Jews, it seems like prime fodder for ridicule, but, while several pretty good cartoonists have dug in, nobody has come up with anything much more damning than the actual statement.
You suppose it's possible that the plutocrats held some secret meeting in which they seized upon pre-emptive idiocy as a political strategy? (See Panel 3 of Derf's piece)
Not all the stupid are wealthy, mind you …
Today's Soup to Nutz makes a lovely Juxtaposition of the Day with Nick Anderson's panel. The critical difference being that Stromoski's fools may attain a little more wisdom before they gain the right to vote.
So groovy to be living intense
I've commented before about the need to consider what percentage of the audience will understand your cultural references. Today's PC and Pixel is about a war that essentially ended (on this continent, at least) a quarter of a century ago. The fact that the strip is aimed at a geek audience makes this quite acceptable, since insider humor is part of that game.
But I thought it tied in nicely with Rudy Park, where Darrin Bell just turned something akin to 40 two days ago, which comes as nothing to someone who is, today, finally face-to-face with the question of renting a cottage on the Isle of Wight (it turned out to be too dear), but even his barely-creeping-into-early-middle-age status brings back memories of some moments of aged introspection, including a real heartbreaker.
And now, your incredibly apropos moment of zen …
Not only oddly prophetic nearly a half-century later, but this is the guy who performed the first concert to which I brought the son whose birthday I share. It was a double-bill with Arlo.
It's a father's duty to raise his kids right, with or without videophones. Here's to ya, kid.
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