Cartoonists With Attitude

From your “liberal” New York Times:

But havent I read economists saying that a bill that small will make almost no dent in unemployment? Is that sort of thing the only hope for bipartisanship?

It depends on what you mean by bipartisanship. Nothing is stopping Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats from adding more Republican ideas to their health plan and not just fig leaves. If the Democrats did that, they would have a bill worthy of the name bipartisan.

Emfuzzies mine. If only Democrats would just reach out to the other side and invite their input and listen to their ideas and stroke them under the chin and greet them at the door in nothing but a big ribbon and a bottle of champagne, then they would truly earn that most honored most esteemed most thigh tingling mantle, “bipartisan.”

But if they don’t, then they will have earned naught but spite and enmity from the great hive mind of the people, who shall shew them utterly the door. It’ll be Obama’s fault for going all Red up in here.

That thar is yur Konsensus Thinkin thar.

Meanwhile in Utah the governor is poised to sign a bill that would criminalize miscarriage. How is that related? Well, I live in a land of crazy theocrats and patriarchal opportunists who warp the health care needs of people to either reap profit or punishment points in the name of their false gods. There. That’s how.

Hey, look! The U.S. Supreme Court decided to let corporations spend more money on elections. Says Ken Rudin:

The decision overturns a 20-year ruling — Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce — that prohibited corporations or labor unions to pay for campaign ads. Today’s decision removes spending limits for independent expenditure groups. It threatens to remove spending limits already established in 24 states. And it struck down part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that bars issue ads paid for by corporations or unions in the closing days of a campaign.

NPR’s Peter Overby adds that one limit remains intact: corporations still cannot give money directly to federal candidates or national party committees. That limit dates back to 1907.

Oh, I’m sure that little barrier can be quickly overcome. As ever there’s lotsa doom & gloom predicted, but it is hard for me to see how the floodgates can be more open than they already are. The last election cost the current President nearly $750 million. Total spending in 2008 by presidential candidates was $1.3+ billion — almost double the amount spent in 2004, which itself was a doubling of 2000 expenditures. Congressional races are getting more expensive, too, and it has been no secret that Congress critters serving on important oversight committees are well financed by corporations with a vested interest in the legislation those committees produce. Sometimes a Dodd gets punished, but he’s an exception to the rule — and hardly the worst offender.

Yes, the ruling is outrageous, but no more so than the entirely corrupt two party system of corporate toadies who have been running pseudo-democratic puppet shows all along. Let’s reach back in the time machine to dredge up a classic and still relevant George Carlin routine:

Sure, the weather’s shit, and both candidates ran awful negative campaigns that started during the holidays, which soured all normal folks on this election, but your vote is important. If you don’t vote, only the tea bag nuttos will turn out and get to pick the douche who’s going to represent us for the next three years.

I believe this election wouldn’t be close if Capuano won the primary, but the Democratic establishment is a mighty beast here, so we got Coakley. There are many valid reasons to bitch and moan about her, but she is the only choice if you care about ending wars (or at least not starting any new ones), gay marriage, health care, or think Ayn Rand is a selfish twat, rather than a financial genius.

So vote, and don’t let Kennedy’s Seat get stunk up by a dude who’s gonna be embarrassing us on Fox News for the next three years.

This woman was paid real U.S. currency to write these words:

By staying in Hawaii, the president has sent the message that the situation really isnt all that serious, that things can proceed just fine until hes back. And isnt it that kind of reasoning that emboldens our never-vacationing enemies into thinking Christmas Day is the perfect time for them to strike?

The president took a nap! Do terrorists take naps? No, they don’t! They are specially trained with advanced methods of sleep deprivation. While the president sleeps, America’s enemies are loading their underwear with explosive chemicals and accidentally torching their testicles. Is the president torching his testicles? We can’t have a torched testicle gap!

Perhaps this picture is a more adequate rejoinder.

Here is today’s In Contempt, another single panel on global warming.

And today’s installment of the “Search Party” story of Wanderlost.

I didn’t do a Lieberman cartoon, because, really, as much of a dick as he is, his exaggerated power merely underscores the political witlessness of the Democratic leadership. According to Mike Madden, here is what we have to look forward to:

They managed to kill not just the notion of a public health insurance option, but also the compromise Democrats had hatched just a week ago, which would have expanded Medicare a bit instead of launching a government-run insurance plan. That’s not the end of the damage. To get the bill through the Senate, Democrats will probably have to fund its $900 billion price tag by taxing expensive health benefits packages, instead of with a new tax on the rich, as the House prefers. Some sort of language restricting access to abortion under the new, government-supervised insurance exchanges will be thrown in, as a sop to win Nelson’s anti-choice favor. Access to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, won’t be expanded as much as many progressives want. And yes, the bill would dole out $50 million to groups teaching abstinence-only sex education plans, which helped buy the support of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.

That’s $50 million toward programs that don’t work, of course. Nice job, changey pants.

Things what make my eyes cross in pain:

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” said Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.), when asked Monday if the Medicare “buy-in” proposal was dropped. “To use the old cliche, the general consensus was that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.”
[via Wall St. Journal]

Or the bullshit the enemy of the ridiculous. Or the severely compromised the enemy of the forget-it-why-bother.

I don’t know where these people live. What planet they are on. What language they speak. What air they breathe. They step into our world from another dimension, squawk shrill noises at us and give our babies wedgies and push homeless people off bridges and tell us we are free.

This is not “reform.” It’s a “tweak.”

In this time of escalating exploitation, poverty, imperialist wars, torture and ecocide, we don’t need a piece of art that consists of a mattress dripping orange paint, cleverly titled “Tangerine Dream.” In this time, as countless multitudes suffer and die for the profits and luxuries of a few, as species go extinct at a rate faster than we can keep track of, we don’t need an orchestra composed of iPhones. In this time, when the future of all life on Earth is at stake, spare us the constant barrage of narcissistic tweets juxtaposing celeb gossip with quirky food choices.

If we lived in a time of peace and harmony, then creating pretty, escapist, seratonin-boosting hits of mild amusement wouldn’t be a crime (except perhaps against one’s Muse). If all was well, such art might enhance our happy existence, like whipped cream on a chocolate latte. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure, or decorative art.

But in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.

The foundation of any culture is its underlying economic system. Today, art is bullied to conform to the demands of industrial capitalism, to reflect and reinforce the interests of those in power. This system-serving art is relentlessly bland. It is viciously soothing, crushingly safe. It seduces us to desire, buy, use, consume. It entertains us and makes us giggle with faux joy as it slowly sucks our brains out through our eye sockets.

The system exerts tremendous pressure to create art that is not only apolitical but anti-political. When the dominant culture spots political art, it sticks its fingers in its ears and sings, “La la la!” It refuses to review it in the New York Times or award it an NEA grant. Political art is vigorously snubbed, ignored, condemned to obscurity, erased. If it’s too powerful to make disappear, then it is scorned, accused of being depressing, doom-and-gloom, preachy, impolite, and by the way, your drawing style sucks. Also by the way, you can’t make a living if your work’s not vacuous, cynical and therefore commercially viable, so go starve under a bridge with your precious principles.

We’re taught that it’s rude to be judgmental, that to assert a point of view violates the pure, transcendent and neutral spirit of art. This is mind-fucking bullshit designed to weaken and depoliticize us. In these times, there is no such thing as neutrality — not taking a stand means supporting and assisting exploiters and murderers.

Let us not be the system’s tools or fools. Artists are not cowards and weaklings — we’re tough. We take sides. We fight back.

Artists and writers have a proud tradition of being at the forefront of resistance, of stirring emotions and inspiring action. Today we must create an onslaught of judgmental, opinionated, brash and partisan work in the tradition of anti-Nazi artists John Heartfield and George Grosz, of radical muralist Diego Rivera, filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, feminist artists the Guerrilla Girls, novelists like Maxim Gorky and Taslima Nasrin, poets like Nazim Hikmet and Kazi Nazrul Islam, musicians like The Coup and the Dead Kennedys.

The world cries out for meaningful, combative, political art. It is our duty and responsibility to create a fierce, unyielding, aggressive culture of resistance. We must create art that exposes and denounces evil, that strengthens activists and revolutionaries, celebrates and contributes to the coming liberation of this planet from corporate industrial military omnicidal madness.

Pick up your weapon, artist.

Let us play the world’s smallest violin for Lou Dobbs. Then cut the instrument in half and rub it on rat genitals for Sarah Palin.

Dobbs went on O’Reilly to imply with the subtlety of a railroad spike through the head that CNN is in the tank for Obama and could not countenance his “rigorous, empirical forethought, analysis and discussion.” Or perhaps after years of tolerating Dobbs’ increasingly dishonest and paranoid racism, CNN had to draw the line at birther conspiracies. I mean, really, Lou. There’s disinformation and then there’s just plain crazy talk.

Speaking of which, Palin went on Oprah to demonstrate that when it comes to self-victimhood, O’Reilly and Dobbs are rank amateurs. Can you believe Katie Couric had the nerve to ask follow up questions? Is she like a journalist or something? In Palin’s world, asking an Alaskan about reading material is typical Lower 48 bigotry, and not, say, an invitation to reveal more about yourself, your ideas and your world view. “Read any good books lately?” “What?! Of course I read!”

When it comes to “the Levi question,” I’ll leave snark aside. Frankly, she’s probably right. What good can come of that young dude’s squeezing out every last second of fame? I mean, other than our schadenfreude? Palin chose the “better part of valor” here, refraining from a media spat and gaining the rhetorical advantage as a Caring, Suffering Grandma. That’s not snark, that’s semiotics.

Oh, but wait, she did get in that dig about his “aspiring porn career.” Spat on.

Tea Party organizers in Danville, Virginia are planning to burn Congressman Tom Pierriello (D-VA) in effigy, because they object to Pierriello’s yea vote for national health care reform. This has caused some consternation over at Talking Points Memo, where commentators have likened effigy-burning to hate speech, anti-patriotism, and the Ku Klux Klan. In this respect, they share the sense of alarm expressed by the local Democratic Party chairman:

“These shocking and despicable acts are becoming all too common at extreme right-wing Republican rallies. Hanging Members in effigy or displaying images of Nazi concentration camps on the steps of the Capitol have no place in any debate and Republican Members of Congress must condemn these actions….”

One commenter had the presence of mind to point out that this sort of activity is actually protected speech — much like flag burning — and has a long tradition going back to the Revolutionary War period. But why go back that far? Do a Google image search on “Bush effigy” and see what you get.

It’s not hard to find images equating Bush with Nazis, either. Personally, I think there are much sounder arguments to make that analogy (torture, domestic surveillance, secret detention, etc., etc.) than the paranoid fantasies teabaggers would suggest. But we on the Left should at least be intellectually honest enough to recognize our own overheated rhetoric in the mouths of our opponents.

I understand the alarm. I share it with my colleague Jenn Sorensen. Intellectual honesty is certainly sorely lacking among those who equate the “public option” with Joseph Mengele or the mass graves of Nazi concentration camps; by all means, criticize it. And the mentality behind such associations — the paranoia, the ahistoricity, the racism — becomes all the more worrisome when expressed by gun-strapped idiots eager to “water the tree of liberty.” Paul Krugman diagnosed this paranoia brilliantly the other day, and rightly worries that “the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.”

What he didn’t mention, although I bet it was in the back of his mind is that the teabaggers are not only the latest expression of right wing irrationality, but also the latest manifestation of populism-preluding-fascism: “Right-wing populism can act as both a precursor and a building block of fascism, with anti-elitist conspiracism and ethnocentric scapegoating as shared elements.” Sound familiar? This is what really concerns me about this movement, not the effigies. I don’t see what “politeness” will do in the face of these people.

From Jeff Sharlet’s Salon article on Bart Stupak and Joseph Pitt’s house-mates:

In its internal documents, the Family refers to itself as an “invisible organization” and the “prayer cells” into which it organizes politicians as “invisible believing groups.’”

The connotations run wild: part Manson Family, part Al-Qaeda, part Illuminati, part Scientology. I try not to invoke the word “post-modern” much these days, but I can’t think of another word that fits. Well, other than “creepy” and “ludicrous” and “risible” and “scary.”

Thanks to Stupak and Pitts, I learned another interesting word:

Together, they’re poster boys for the evangelical/conservative Catholic alliance known as “co-belligerency,” a culture war strategy designed to take territory within the Democratic Party as well the GOP. [em-phassis mine]

I don’t know if that’s the Family’s word or Sharlet’s own diction, but it raises an eyebrow or two (or three, if your third eye is alarmed.) On Sharlet’s part, it could be rhetorical overload; he’s genuinely –and rightly– concerned about the religious right’s (admittedly smart) tactic to infiltrate both parties to push their agenda forward. But the rest of us –secular left, religious left, or middle, or whatever word choice you wanna make– could take a page from the fanatical fundy insurgency manual and (hopefully) adapt it with more intellectual honesty and transparency.

Anyhoo, just to be self-promoting “hoower”, here’s my relevant cartoon for this week.