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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STAMPEDE!

Republicans rush from the Obama Q&A with their tails between their legs as Roger Ailes finds something to cut away to...

Roger Ailes must have ended his war on Obama AFTER the GOP Q&A session last week

Feeling a bit achey after shoveling out of this weekend’s snowstorm (and thinking a little global warming would be good right about now), I realized that I’ve been giving President Obama such a hard time lately, I should really celebrate a signal triumph, the GOP Q&A session which has been described as Barry in the Lion’s Den, otherwise known as the GOP strategy conclave. Faced with salivating opposition party members WITHOUT knives and forks, Barry not only managed to hold his own, but did so on LIVE TV! For some reason this has shocked people, in spite of knowing that all Republicans, no matter how otherwise intelligent they might be, have to sign a waiver against the use of their own brains and limit themselves to parroting “talking points” despite how nonsensical it sounds when you play back a montage of Sunday morning talking head bites. Or that Obama can actually think and talk on his feet without benefit of teleprompter. So much for mainstream media propunditry. Congratulations to Virginia Foxx (R-NC) for taking advantage of the situation and getting Barry’s autograph! Way to go, Virginia!
What makes it all worthwhile is that Fox News was so disheartened by the event that they cut away to their own tiny car of clowns to inform the loyal viewership how bad Obama was doing so they couldn’t see for themselves how WELL he was doing. Of course, Fox viewers don’t know what to think unless they’re told, so undoubtedly a poll of viewers would have told us that Obama was soundly defeated by chants of “TAX CUTS.” But no poll was taken as Roger Ailes, Fox News Channel President, declared to “This Week” that he was no longer at war with the Obama White House. Maybe he isn’t, but the information hasn’t yet “trickled-down” to his staff of commentators yet. In any case, he had no ready answer for Arianna Huffington’s asking that if he wasn’t, why the cutaway. At which point he lamely countered that Fox News was the most trusted news in cable, a non sequitur that was no better than if he’d put on a big false nose and got up to hoarsely sing “I did the Strut-A-Way in my Cut-A-Way! Ha-chachachacha!” (OK there’s my age again–Jimmy Durante? Anyone ever hear of him? Sigh, the disadvantages of being 205!)
However, good news for finance–I hear Bernanke’s been re-upped and dear Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs is scheduled for a $100 million dollar bonus. Boy, oh, boy, isn’t recovery sweet? Remind me to celebrate on my way back from the Unemployment Office. Take care!

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