We’re Back (Hopefully) And Watching the Bill-Barry Sparring Match

Lilliputian Attack Dogs

Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I took off Martin Luther King Day weekend and the following weekend because I was going to be doing Artist Alley at Setsucon in State College PA, but I was also in the middle of finishing a manga parody that I wanted to have printed so I could sell it at Katsucon down here at Washington Harbor in February. Now, if you’ve ever done a publication, you KNOW that in the last week or so you’re doing nothing else but finishing things you forgot you hadn’t finished or had left for the end and FINDING PROBLEMS with the pages you thought you were already done with before you commit the whole damn thing to posterity. So, I’m running on 3 hours of sleep every night and get the mess to Ka-Blam in time to pack for Setsucon, when (ahem) KA-BLAM! another attack of whatever stomach ailment laid me up in December threw me onto a bed of pain for the day I was supposed to drive up to State College. Although the con lasted two days, it wouldn’t make much sense to drive up the next day since I’d get there in time for maybe 2 hours before I had to close the table for the day, so I sadly cancelled my plans.

BUT THE GOOD NEWS–BLECCH! Part One, will be on sale at Katsucon (manga and anime lovers can probably guess which manga/anime is the main focus of my parody ) Along with my book of reprints from my Bush era cartoons: BUSHWHACKED–The Wurst of HAIL DUBYUS! For those who aren’t going to be at Katsucon, you can get both of these at IndyPlanett, or rather BUSHWHACKED now and BLECCH! when it is finished printing.

However, it looks as if I have a LOT of catching up to do. Tea party representatives coming to free us from socialist government health care at the same time as demanding their socialist government health care. A state of the union address with Republican/Democratic mixed seating (oh, the shame! what will their parents say!). Keith Olbermann–quitting or fired? An uprising in Tunisia and *drumroll* another one in EGYPT! We’re really caught between a pillow and a mattress there–on the one hand, we have our favorite Middle Eastern dictator, the only person the US has been able to trust near not-so-shrinking violet Israel for the past 30 years, and on the other, a populist democratic uprising against the tyranny he’s unleashed against his own people. Wow, smothered with kindness–do we back the devil or the deep blue sea?

As much as we want to plant democracy in the rest of the world to make the world safe for democracy, we’ve discovered that unless we’re sitting in a country with an army of 100,000 or so, elections don’t always go the way we’d like them to. The “soon to be canonized in honor of his 100th birthday” Ronald Reagan found that out in South America where people actually voted in governments that were interested in people instead of profits–so he ignored the elections and sent in the CIA to provide money and other care packages to right wing goon squads to protect American commercial interests. More recently, we found that out in Palestine and Lebanon. And right now, Fox News is creaming in their jeans about the possibility of The Islamic Brotherhood–their current bugaboo version of the Si-Fan–turning Egypt into an anti-American/anti-Israel haven, delaying the apocalypse for a few more weeks. Or bringing it forward. Or something. In any case, as always on Fox News, it’s Obama’s fault.

With that in mind, and trying to start out to slowly figure out where the world is after my illness and publication cramola, I turned to Bill O’Reilly’s interview with our President before the that icon to American excess, the SuperBowl. Barry grants an interview to whatever network is hosting the game, so this year was Fox’s turn, so they sent over the only potty-trained member of their attack dog squad to perform the interrogation. Bill O started off by playing nice and thanking Obama for helping to get Fox News’s reporters out of perilous peril in Egypt and Obama replied that that was his job. Then the gloves came off. O’Reilly came in with, not fair but tough questions, but questions worded and designed to tempt Obama into pique or anger, for example, when O’Reilly called the Health Care package by the politically loaded monicker Obamacare. This maneuvering didn’t do O’Reilly much good against the King of Cool. Trying to bait Obama by practically being insulting to his face–at several points, O’Reilly literally tried to shut Barry up by cutting him off (I thought he was going to yell at his engineers, “I’ve had it with this pinhead, shut off his mike.”)–but the President kept it together and brought things back to what he was saying like a patient parent faced with a child who hadn’t taken his Ritalin. For Several Days.

Big O almost lost control of his narrative at one point. Explaining that he was faced with a disaster in the first two years of office, he described those years AS a disaster. One can imagine what the RW blogosphere is doing with that one! But beyond that, Bill never managed to nudge him into a shouting match, despite trying to play gotcha on health care, on the fact that people HATE YOU (They don’t hate me, Bill, they hate a funhouse mirror image of me–a nice way to describe the workings of Roger Ailes’ pet network). Finally, Bill got to the SuperBowl and asked who Obama wanted to win–of course, since the Chicago Bears weren’t playing, Obama really couldn’t care less, but he phrased it nicer. “AH-HAH!” cried O’Reilly, “you don’t care who wins the SUPERBOWL?” Finally he had it on record, Obama saying the most un-American thing short of “Jesus Christ’s mom made lousy apple pie.” Could he really be Kenyan? But Barry brought it back and said that there were two great teams and he wanted to see a great game. Offered to let Bill come and watch with him. But Bill said no, “I wouldn’t want to spoil anyone’s fun,” as he thought:

“The way you just spoiled mine.”

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Giffords Shooting Prompts Reactions From Around the Web

Animated GIF: 2nd amendment rights over crosshairs dissolving to Ooops over funerary cross.

Within minutes, all sorts of things started disappearing from conservative websites...

Various reactions to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords from around the web:

Sarah Palin: Well, ya never thought anyone but a lunatic would take me seriously, you betcha.

Sharron Angle: You can’t blame me for what happened in Arizona!

John Boehner: SOB!

John McCain: BUILD THE DAMN FENCE!

Wayne LePierre, EVP, NRA: It would be a tragedy to use this isolated incident by an obviously deranged lunatic to impair the rights of ordinary citizens to semi-automatic weaponry.

Heinrich von Grammarrecht: Obviously insane, he used imply when he meant … WTF did he mean?

Gilbert Gottfried: A funny thing happened on my way through Arizona. A congresswoman got sh … what, too soon? OK–this family walks into a talent agent’s office. He says I don’t do family acts. The father says “Wait’ll you see this one!”

Anne Coulter: I can hear all the liberals whining now…

Glenn Beck: Is it possible this liberal got herself shot to help in her future run for the Senate? I’m only asking the question.

Wolf Blitzer: Some people are suggesting Congresswoman Giffords got herself shot to help in her future run for the Senate.

New York Times: . . . although, according to some commentators, it’s possible Congresswoman Giffords got herself shot to help in her future run for the Senate.

Rush Limbaugh: Congresswoman Giffords got herself shot to help in her future run for the Senate. It said so in the New York Times.

FoxNews: Communist baby-killer Congresswoman provokes citizen to defend himself.

Tucker Carlson: They should just take him out and hang him… oh, no, wait a minute, no, they shouldn’t…

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I Need to Scream!

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin make Al Sharpton flip as they co-opt Martin Luther King's civil rights dream

CHIBIS ..... FROM ..... SPACE!

Well, what with Glenn Beck’s 9-12 movement, you’d think he’d have used THAT day to present his plan for America. But you’d be wrong. You see, Glenn has discovered that God is big bucks, and Glenn certainly wouldn’t want people to be working on the Sabbath. He’s right about that. Listening to Glenn Beck is HARD @#$%^& WORK!

So Glenn looked about for another day to hold his political rally–errr religious revival? And lo and behold, God made him chose the very anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech. Purely by accident–or by the Hand of God. Quite frankly, I think Glenn totally capable of not knowing when MLK gave that speech, considering the mish-mash he makes of American history. But considering the low cunning that usually pervades his work, it’s JUST possible that the choice of date was intentional.

Anyway, he delivered a plan for America–as short of details as Mr. Beck is short of cards in his deck–with Sarah Palin on hand to rescue the civil rights movement from liberals and black people. Huh? You see, in Mr. Beck’s reformulation of MLK’s dream, Dr. King was fighting for civil rights for ALL people, not just oppressed minorities. He wanted to protect white people’s rights. Like the right of Dr. Laura Schlesinger to say “Nigger nigger nigger” on her radio program. And the right for poor people to stay dirt poor while the rich maintain their right to get filthier rich.

Glenn even found a niece of MLK who agreed with him–not that anyone ELSE of Dr. King’s family had the wool pulled over their eyes. Al Sharpton held a counter-rally to try to uphold Dr. King’s ORIGINAL dream–you know, the one Beck is trying to rescue from progressives who, consarn it, want to extend civil rights to immigrants and poor people. For a while, we had Dueling Rallies down here in Washington. And not very musical.

This wasn’t about politics tho. It was about that old time religion that America lost 240 years ago. 240 years ago, that’d be 1770? What happened then? Perhaps he was rounding up the years from the Declaration of Independence…hmmm, I guess that’s when we abandoned God. Or King George. Or the Church of England. Or somebody. I guess that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” is too progressive for Mr. Beck.

After all, this country was founded by the Puritans–so goes the American myth–the most obnoxious bunch of holier-than-thou’s that ever walked the face of the earth. They left England for the freedom to practice their religion–and made other religions illegal the day after they hit Plymouth Rock. Then they outlawed Christmas and burned a few neighbors for firewood on the grounds that they were witches. The Puritans don’t exist today. There’s a good reason for that. Oh yeah, they held a Thanksgiving celebration–the next year they had a war with the Indians who’d helped them.

See Mr. Beck–you have no monopoly on mish-mashing history!

Glenn wants us to turn back to religion. He has no interest, he says, in becoming President. NOT THAT ANYONE ASKED! No, he’d rather be seen as one of God’s prophets.

Only Glenn spells it with an “fi” instead of “phe”.

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Here a Mosque, There a Mosque, Everywhere a Mosque Mosque

Obama plays Hamlet, the man who could not make up his mind...about anything!

Speak the speech, I pray you, tripping over your tongue...

So a moderate Moslem cleric wants to build a mosque and Islamic center. Where? Two blocks from “Ground Zero.” Why? Was this meant as some sort of insult to the victims of 9-11? No, he got a good deal on the property. He’ll be happy to build it someplace else, if a deal can be made.

The problem is that this has given all the yahoos something to scream about in a month when people should be hiding from the heat. Once again, it has become obvious that the so-called “War on Terror” was understood by all and sundry as some 21st century Crusade redux. Our enemy wasn’t al-Qaeda, the guys who actually carried out the deed, but all of Islam, which is why we attacked Afghanistan, letting al-Qaeda move a couple of miles into Pakistan, and then attacked Iraq, which had nothing to do with anything except we didn’t like Saddam Hussein’s moustache. And we’re still in both places, with Americans fronting the bill for two quagmires that have done nothing but drain our economy and are as much a reason for the Great Recession as the thieving banks were.

The banks aren’t terrorists. Unless you’ve gotten behind in your mortgage payments, or haven’t opted into overdraft insurance, at which point, you can’t answer your phone in the daylight hours without being attacked by some customer service rep. But all of Islam is, because we are bound and determined to hold a billion people guilty for the work of a handful of crazies. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, those paragons of bravery while someone else does the fighting, have been leading the charge. No Mosques at Ground Zero.

Our fearless leader, of course, has taken a principled stance. Anyone has the constitutional right to build anything anywhere in the United States–he said at a Ramadan dinner with an Islamic group. Then when he heard the howls from the hinterlands–you know, the people who were convinced that Saddam Hussein was going to nuke their local mall on 9-12–President Obama turned around and said he didn’t necessarily think it was a good idea. Despite Fox News having said he’d done the right thing and defended the Constitution. I guess if Fox News says you did something right, it’s best to assume you pulled the biggest boner in creation.

Well, I happen to believe both statements are right, but, for crying out loud, Barry, can’t you take a stance on anything that doesn’t have a picket fence poking a hole in your ass? I mean, you could’ve said both things at the same time, but no, first you had to play to one audience and then turn around and play to the opinion polls. Leaders lead, they aren’t lead. Not everything has a golden mean of compromise to be found.

I swear, one day, I’m gonna wake up to read the headline that Barry brokered a deal between God and Satan where Satan accepted a 50% cap on souls he reaped. With a proviso that the terms will not take effect until after 2016.

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