Cartoonists With Attitude

This is sort of a follow up to yesterday’s post as well as a cartoon I did last month, but Atrios has been making some great points lately about another key reason Democrats are totally screwed in November.

The irony of Gibbs’ moronic “professional left” comment the other week is that there actually is a “professional left” and they’re really important in helping Democrats get elected. The problem is, when there are less of them being professional, they have less time to be left.

I’ll try to say that in a less cutesy way now, and using real-life experience: I worked for two separate left-leaning organizations for over four years. I left DC in 2008 before Obama was elected, and after the election, even in the terrible economy, it appears to have been a good move, job-wise. Why? Because once Obama won the election, people stopped caring about supporting left-leaning organizations. Donations dropped. Campaigns dwindled. People assumed they had done their job and were ready to harvest the fruits of their labors. That… yeah, that didn’t turn out exactly as they hoped. This is where the “sensible” people start explaining how everything these hundreds of thousands of people think is merely an illusion and a conspiracy launched by angry bloggers because that is both helpful and will change everything. But I digress.

Now, combine this with the fact that jobs are in the toilet right now (the major point Atrios keeps making) and you have a perfect storm of why this isn’t 2008 anymore. The people who would normally be out there pushing hard for Democrats to win are 1. unmotivated simply to work hard for a campaign and 2. far more interested in getting a damn job. The right used to joke all the time that anti-war activists and Obama supporters were just “lazy kids with trust funds” and “stupid college students on their parents’ money” and well, guess what, that’s a lot of the base and now they’re not out there volunteering and campaigning because what they really need is rent money.

There is no type of email nor any measurable level of yelling that can be made to the so-called “professional left” to convince them to clap harder. I’m at the point where I truly think the Obama team honestly had no idea the economy was going to collapse like this, and they had absolutely no plan (or motivation) to deal with the Tea Party and the total Republican opposition in the Senate. Their strategy was, quite literally, to hope that the 90-year-old and the dude with terminal brain cancer didn’t die for two years.

And that is not just disappointing to the “professional left” but outright insulting, because I can see how many of them feel like they tried harder two years ago then the effing president is doing right now.

I realize that highlighting the comedic wrongness of Megan McArdle is basically an full-on internet meme at this point, but if you haven’t read this detailed takedown of McArdle’s 2003 defense of the Iraq war, it’s worth your time to do so. Seven years down the line I’m not sure how many people are aware of just how completely wrong most of the pro-war right was. And I don’t mean in a “oh our opinions vary” kind of wrong, I mean articles like this, with hundreds of words gushing about the technical and financial aspects of the war that were just crap. Now don’t get me wrong, McArdle’s only a few years older than me, and seven years ago I wrote even worse and less-educated garbage than I write now… but no major century-old political journal is paying me to pretend I know anything.

What I also remember were the snotty segments from pundits like Bill O’Reilly that mocked people like, say, Jeneanne Garofalo for saying at the onset of war stupid, hippie ideas like “we’re going to get stuck in an insurgency” and “we could end up being there for years” and “there aren’t any WMDs” and other nonsense that explain why Air America is bankrupt and O’Reilly makes millions still. And to be honest, it’s one of the reasons I’ve had a harder time blogging and writing and cartooning these last two years than any other time in my life.

I don’t tend to delve into the personal much on this site and I’m not really going to now, but sufficed to say while there are a lot of people out there worsr off than me, things could also be a lot better. Things were a lot better only a few years ago. I’m starting to compile the last two years of material for my next book now, and looking at the optimism from only two years ago against what’s happening now is… well… depressing as hell.

I want so hard to believe in Conan O’Brien’s departing message that great things will happen if you’re just not cynical and are kind to people and work hard and everything in politics right now just fights that idea. Megan McArdle, seven years later, makes more money than I’ll ever see in my life, despite making mistakes that would get me fired from my job if I made them on that level. Pam Gellar and Glenn Beck, who have spent the last few years doing nothing but promoting abject racism, have TV shows and hundred-thousand-dollar book deals. Sarah Palin exists.

I don’t know how long this current political (and emotional) climate will last, I really don’t. But in the midst of all the people who keep telling me to stop whining and complaining, I really wish there were more coherent explanations as to why. Because it looks like the bad guys all won right now.

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Most right-wingers never heard of Saul Alinsky before Barack Obama got elected. Then one right-wing commenter (probably Glenn Beck) made a reference to him, and every right-winger who wanted to sound educated on his work started repeating it. I meant what I said in this week’s strip; I really believe they think they sound smarter when they do this.

The only thing funnier in this vein is when the wingers don’t do their research, as exemplified in the final panel. Not only is the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii real, that argument was actually made a few weeks ago by a troll who couldn’t be bothered to check Google first.

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I’m actually quite curious to see which conservative pundit suggests altering one of the major aspects of one of the world’s largest religions so as not to offend, you know, “real people.” My money’s on Bill Kristol.

I just got my copy of War is Boring from Matt Bors in the mail. He’s in Afgnanistan right now trying not to die, and for that I wish him only 100% success. Mostly it’s becuase on the same day I got my copy of the book I also got confirmation that we’ll be tabling together at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco in October. I’m excited because this won’t just be my only public appearance for the year, it’ll be my first since 2008. Imagine how excited Matt will be when he finds out… in September when he’s back in America.

Also, I’ve got to get started on my next book myself. As I mentioned earlier, the tentative title is “You’re Still An Asshole For Voting For Nader,” but I’m open to suggestions over the next month or so of layout and printing. Feel free to email or Tweet any suggestions about your favorite articles, blog posts, etc. There’s definitely going to be a lot of stuff about the 2008 election in there.

But back to non-self-promotion. Go buy a copy of War Is Boring right now. When I got the copy I thought I was going to wait until the weekend to read it. Instead I sat down and ended up reading the entire thing before I even changed out of my work clothes. It’s awesome.

The Parents Television Council (the organization responsible for 99% of all indencency complaints to the FCC- no, I am not making that up, ninety-nine percent of all complaints come from this one organization) likes to emphasize how much they don’t like saying dirty words. Nearly a dozen times.

William Shatner, of all people, stands at the center of television’s latest moral battleground.

He’s the cantankerous lead character in a new CBS sitcom, “(Bleep) My Dad Says,” that is scheduled to air on Thursday nights. Rather than “bleep,” the title uses a series of symbols that suggest the expletive included in the book title on which the series is based.

The Parents Television Council last week sent letters to 340 companies that advertise frequently on TV urging them to stay away from the show unless the name is changed. The group argues that the title is indecent.

“Parents really do care about profanity when their kids are watching TV,” said PTC President Tim Winter. “All parents? No, but something like 80 or 90 percent of parents. Putting an expletive in the title of a show is crossing new territory, and we can’t allow that to happen on our watch.”

Winter’s letter to companies asks bluntly: “When you advertise on television, do you want your customers to associate your product with (bleep)?”

His letter uses the expletive, not the word “bleep.” Winter uses the real word 10 times in two pages.

The PTC – totally reading Playboy for the articles.

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Not that relations were awesome before, but since 9/11 it’s been pretty much standard policy for America to not really give a damn how Muslims are treated. It’s important, rhetorically, to completely seperate them into an “other” group, because it makes it so much easier to dislike them as a collective entity that way, and pretend there are actual, logical, non-racist arguments for banning some of them from “building a mosque at Ground Zero,” also known as “building a cultural center three blocks away from where lots of people, including Muslims, were killed by lunatics who were intolerant of religious diversity.”

Of course, there is no non-racist way to say that it would be “better off for everyone” if Muslims just shut up and moved their pesky little freedom of religion somewhere else, any more then there’s an unbiased analysis on the benefits of segregated drinking fountains. If 9/11 has done anything in terms of racial and cultural tension, it’s making blatant racism a mainstream act that no longer gets you shunned from public discourse.

There used to be organizations-leagues, if you will- devoted to stopping defamation. They appear to have dropped the ball and then upset its grave with a bulldozer.

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Stupid bigots embarassing themselves.

…for oil companies, that is.

Lovely people.

So here’s a little known fact about Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas: apparently, the glass countertops in the hotel rooms spontaneously explode.

At least, that’s what we assumed was a feature of the room when this happened to us Friday morning as we were sleeping there. Well, I was sleeping there. My friend who actually booked the room got the bed. I got the couch in the living room – second tip, folks: when you go to Vegas, tip the desk guy $20 and you can often get a room that, well, has a living room – which was mere feet from the credenza with the minibar, ice bucket and of course, tempered glass countertop.

It should be repeated that this was a spontaneous explosion. We were all asleep when it happened. This isn’t some kind of weird way to excuse us for doing something stupid. We’re still wondering what combination of pressure, air temperature or other matter of science beyond our hungover capabilities at the time caused a countertop to, at about seven in the morning, suddenly burst into several thousand pieces of chipped glass and spread out all over the floor of the room. I work up to the sound of what I thought was the television falling off the wall.

Now, if this was a curiosity to us, it was even more of a curiosity to the entire staff of Caesar’s Palace, who over the course of the next half hour ended up in our room. They appeared in hierarchal progression, like bosses in a video game. The front desk first sent, as they of course would when you called them and said part of your room exploded, the cleaning lady. We were quickly elevated to two cleaning ladies, followed by a cleaning lady who spoke English natively. This elevated to repair guy – he had a belt with things on them – who begat repair guy with radio, who used radio to summon security. Security was apparently low-tier security, as he came not with a gun but a camera to take pictures of the damage. Guns were, wisely so, deemed useless against suicide bomber tables.

Finally, we started getting the people who actually wore ties. Ties meant business, as these were the serious men who started asking the serious questions. Not to us, I mean. They were pretty much done with us at this point. No, now it was time to ask the questions of the building contractor, questions that were phrased as to be very clear about what the real issue here was but not actually addressing it. Questions like: “Has this ever happened before?” “Will this happen again?” and naturally the immediate follow up “Are these countertops in every room in this hotel?”

Somewhere after repair guy with flashlight but before first guy with tie, I got a quarter inch cut on my wrist from a shard of the glass. It wasn’t a terrible cut, just the kind that bleeds a lot. So while everyone employed by the Harrah’s Corporation was convening in our living room, I went to the bathroom to ruin a Caesar’s Palace hand towel. What I was really scared about was that a guy with a tie was going to show up, flail wildly, and demand that I lose a day of my vacation doing something stupid like go to a hospital, and, well, no. So instead I felt the appropriate thing to do was to pour Dewar’s on the wound to cauterize it and then ask for a band-aid. Oh, and of course then text my friends to tell them I did that.

And that was the second best part of his Vegas trip, he said, winking.