Happy Anniversary, Obamabots!
Well, here we are, a year into this glorious new post-racial, post-partisan Hope’n’Change Era, so let’s just pause to take stock of all the momentous Change that President Booker T. Obama has brought us:
The Economy: worse. President Hope has given away absurdly huge buttloads of our tax money to bankers and Wall Street. Bonus? Of course. That’s what the bankers have done to us for the past year or so.
Health Care: worse. To paraphrase a recent Keith Olbermann broadcast, it’s not health, it’s not care, and it sure as hell isn’t reform. President Change’s idea of health care reform involves shutting single-payer supporters out of the “debate”, massive corporate giveaways to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the threat of fines or jail for people who don’t buy corporate health insurance even if they can’t afford it — and if you can afford decent health insurance, President Yes We Can wants to tax the living shit out of your benefits. Still, with any luck, that Coakley woman will lose that special Senate election in Massachusetts, and it’ll be Sayonara Charlie to The Bill That Needs Killing.
Civil Liberties: worse. Some doorknob in Detroit tries to blow up a plane with his underwear, and the next thing we know, President Hope wants to institute Jim Crow for Muslims and make us all to pose for digital x-ray porn. Meanwhile, one of President Hope’s fellow Harvard punks over at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs wants to assign CIA spooks to troll duty at any blogs that happen to bug him.
Illegal Foreign Wars: worse. President Change — or, as Code Pink called him during the campaign, the “Peace Candidate” — makes a big-ass deal out of appearing to seriously ponder the situtation before initiating a 40,000-troop escalation of the war in The Graveyard Of Empires — or, as it’s more commonly called, Afghanistan. The Nobel Prize committee finishes slurping the dregs out of the bottom of the Kool-Aid bowl and awards President Change a Nobel Peace Prize; President Change, on accepting the Prize, gives a pro-war speech. Now, that’s class.
So, congratulations to one and all of you Obamabots who allowed yourselves to be motivated by fear and desperation and fall for the first slick-assed huckster who can speak in complete sentences and knows how to pronounce the word “nuclear”. I just can’t thank you enough.
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T-shirts and Stickers at Mike’s Schwag Shop.
Between the Teabaggers and the Birthers, I’d thought I’d pretty much seen the pinnacle of evolution for Rightist nutcakes.
Then, the Oath Keepers showed up, a bunch of current and retired military and cops howling about the new dangers to the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold with all the bluster they can muster on a Web site which, like all similar right-wing sites, is hopelessly swimming in Revolutionary War-era metaphor and imagery. Oh, and don’t forget to check out their video, in which they declare their intent to disobey their Top Ten Unjust Orders with a lush backdrop of inspiring patriotic and military imagery and overwrought music. Yeah, you might think we Lefties get a bit over the top, but for sheer Drama Queen goodness, you can’t beat the Right Wingnuts.
What’s especially interesting about this bunch is that they were founded just this past March, not even two months after Barack “Timberlake” Obama took office. Now, mind you — during the eight goddamn’ years in which the Bush Regime was instigating illegal wars of aggression, censoring the news, arbitrarily declaring people “enemy combatants” and detaining them without charges or a trial, criminalizing Muslims and the Left, suppressing dissent, allowing torture, and otherwise generally pissing on the Constitution at every opportunity, the people comprising the Oath Keepers were nowhere to be found. In fact, when US service personnel were refusing to comply with illegal or unconstitutional orders under Bush, you could hear the future Oath Keepers howling for courts martial and trials for treason.
Now that there’s a Donkeycratic administration in power, though, the Oath Keepers have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, bellowing at full throat about illegal orders and detention camps and the military occupation of American cities and threats to the Constitution. Never mind that Obama’s pretty much continuing all of Bush’s favorite programs such as imprisonment without charges, rendition, torture, suppression of the news — not to mention that he’s escalating the war in Afghanistan. That sort of pertinent information is totally lost on these doorknobs: all they know is that now the Donkeycrats are in the White House, the President is a N!gg3r, and the Republic is in grave danger. Oh, yeah, and they don’t want to pay taxes, either; they want highways and schools and National Parks, but they don’t want to pay taxes — like the Teabaggers, but with more brass and swagger. Basically, the Oath Keepers are for people who think the Teabaggers are too liberal.
(…and read more about the Oath Keepers’ association with White Nationalists at Lady Liberty’s Lamp.)
Continue reading "Oath Keepers: When the Teabaggers Just Aren’t Whacked Enough" »
Decision 2012 (pardon my Herblock)
Oh, gaahhhdddd! Not only another election cartoon, but a cartoon with items metaphorically labeled, old-school! Jeez, I can hear my pal Gregor yelling right now… “Goddammit, Mike! Herblock is DEAD!”
Yeah, y’know… once the election ideas get going, it’s pretty much hopeless. The usual Repuglican “stars” are already making noises about running; we’re hearing about Sarah Palin possibly running (sigh), and Newt Gingrich (spit) — and I even heard about Dick Cheney (double spit) on Joe Scarborough’s program this morning (triple spit).
OK, granted, 2012…I may be a bit ahead of myself, here, but still… if you check out The One’s record of achievement (or lack of same) in just his first year in office, plus the rash of FAIL in the special elections this year, you’re looking at a raft of Donkeycratic politicians with a whole fistful of “achievements” pinned to their respective asses, and damn’ near little ability to defend them come next year’s midterms — which, by the way, will be held after the Afghanistan debacle’s had about a year to soak in.
So, would that be next year’s repudiation of last year’s repudiation?
2012: They Were Warned
It’s the end of the world as they know it…
but they feel fine!
Those of you who’ve followed my work for any length of time will remember my complaints about the early start of the Presidential “election” cycle (John Edwards announced on Christmas Week, 2006) in the form of the four-part “Jackass Slate for 2008”.
So, here it is, at least a year before the “official” start of the 2012 Presidential campaign season, and here I am already doing a ’12 Election cartoon. I don’t know what else I can say for myself, other than that when the muse visits me, she absolutely refuses to quit pestering me until I’ve committed a creation to paper. It really was a “perfect storm” of events, recently: we had the epic FAIL of the Obama Administration in the areas of healthcare, the economy, and the war in Afghanistan; the Democrats stumbling in the recent elections in Virginia and elsewhere; the GOP hopefuls for ’12 already jockeying for position; Obama’s approval rating finally dropping to a level representative of normal objective reality; the ominous spectre of a sound butt-paddling for the Democrats in the 2010 off-year elections — and a movie just out about the end of the world in 2012, which was pretty much the icing on the conceptual cake.
Now, I’m not into clairvoyance or prophecy or any of that woo-woo, but the events of the past year — most notably the healthcare “reform” debacle — had gotten me to thinking that at least in one respect, the Mayans may have been on to something…
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