Looks like I spoke too soon

Well, only in the sense of using up my store of knowledge on the topic of Executive Orders before the flood of post-SOTU cartoons had arrived ...

 

(Pat Oliphant)

 

(Drew Sheneman)

 

(Jim Morin)

 

Well said, all.

But, as said, I went through the "executive orders" thing yesterday, so you can scroll down if you missed it, but, basically, it boils down to the fact that Theodore Roosevelt used executive orders to accomplish what Congress would not.

Which bought us three-quarters of a century of fair and decent government before Congress was able to regain control.

I'm not taking credit for prophecy, because some of these cartoons were on the drawing board even earlier, I'm sure.

Rather, I take comfort in the idea that some very good cartoonists are standing up for the idea that you don't have to let the United States "Things Go Better With Koch" Congress determine the fate of the nation.

I like all three panels for slightly different reasons. Taking them in reverse order:

Morin goes professorial at a moment when that is a critical and constructive approach. There is a futility in making a statement that people will have to verify on their own, because they won't.

So no homework is required: Here are the facts. You want to disprove them? Ah, but now you've given yourself homework. And, boy, are you gonna be disappointed in the results.

The plain statement of fact is the perfect approach for these blatantly dishonest times, and I hope it gets a million Facebook shares, because it's tailor-made for those people who only look at da pichurs and never read the words and comments that go with them.

Meanwhile, Sheneman makes his point with simplicity. He doesn't rail and fume and say that the GOP is getting what they deserve, but he certainly points out the ludicrous dishonesty of their outrage, and he does it with not just simplicity, but with a graphic approach that is eloquent without being distracting.

That is, a more cartoony, silly elephant would become an attack rather than an argument. By contrast, his depiction simulates the faux-gravitas with which conservatives like to declare their talking points these days.

(Or have you not noticed how, in recent years, right-wing trolls have begun to trot out latin phrases like "ad hominem," debating terms like "straw man" and bizarre, fanciful references to Saul Alinsky, things they have heard on talk radio that have little if any application to the argument at hand but that can be waved around with a confident air of wisdom and knowledge that would make Jethro Bodine proud?)

On the other hand, dignity is not the only valuable weapon in this art form, and Oliphant is one of the most gifted of contemporary cartoonists when it comes to constructive ridicule. That is, there are all sorts of cartoonists who use ridicule in place of logic, and too often in place of facts, and their cartoons are no more valuable or creative than the graffiti on bathroom walls.

But Oliphant employs a style of ridicule that is pointed, occasionally cruel, yet makes a coherent point. For an extreme-but-therefore-appropriate example, when Mel Gibson unleashed his bizarre neoChristian snuff film, "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004, Oliphant greeted it thusly.

This was two years before Gibson had completely slipped the mask of sanity with his "sugar-tits" and anti-Semitism outburst, and it certainly fed into Oliphant's well-established hostility towards medievalism in the church, but the point is that, as sharp and potentially offensive as the cartoon might be, it's not off-topic: Oliphant is drawing a line from that medieval interpretation of religion in day-to-day church life to the medieval style of religiosity central to Gibson's film.

Which is to say, there is no obligation for cartoonists to be kind, but there is an obligation for them to be on-topic and honest, and to make a point beyond, "boy do I hate this guy."

Oliphant's current cartoon ridicules the obstructionist GOP Congress by comparing it to the Victorian out-of-touch imperialism that sent well-fed, well-funded twits like Cardigan and Raglan* off to fight today's war with yesterday's strategy and to thereby generally waste the lives of their subordinates with ambitious but incompetent dreams of social-climbing glory.

And he does it with a lovely comic twist that makes Obama Bugs Bunny, to their Elmer/Daffy bafflement.

 

*And speaking of Lord Raglan and Lord Cardigan:

I miss the days before Ann Telnaes switched from panels to animations, and so I haunt her blog, where she occasionally uses illustrations like this to go along with her brilliant, trenchant remarks.

In her latest entry, she offers a unique and wonderful response to the State of the Union Address that I have seen nowhere else, based on the obscenity of anybody having "a tenth deployment."

It's a topic I've dealt with before, at which time I observed:

I was home last summer and had a conversation with a buddy from high school who had a tough landing when he came back from Vietnam. I don't know much about what he did over there, except that he was at Khe Sanh, which was no bed of roses.

***

Butch and I were talking about the repeated deployments, and he shook his head in frustration over what we are doing to our GIs. As tough as it was in Vietnam, he said, they knew when it was going to be over. ... And then home was home. Butch and Larry and Danny and Ray and Crandall and Kenny and the rest could deal with their experience however they needed to, but it was over and done and they wouldn't be sent back for second and third helpings.

Butch said a loud noise will still sometimes send him across the room, and his wife shook her head and looked down at her feet for a moment. He's been home for nearly 45 years.

***

Butch was saying that it's not the basket cases, the extremes, that we need to worry about so much as the guys who need some counseling, some treatment, some help ... the guys who startle, who lose their tempers, whose wives look down at their feet when the topic of the war is mentioned.

How many will there be, if we keep sending them back again and again and again?

The cost of that, he said, is going to be a lot more than the cost of the war itself.

 

Yes, you've seen it before. Consider this just another "redeployment")

 

Comments

[Julia]

And yet, they DO argue with the plain, unadorned fact that Obama is nowhere near the top of the Executive Orders list. From my Facebook feed:
"Again: It isn't about how many EOs he has written. It's that the Constitution does not allow the President to use them this way."

(This was in reply to my rebuttal-with-actual-numbers from this same person posting an article by that noted Constitutional scholar and penis-nosed clown Ted Cruz on "O NOES EXECUTIVE ORDERS TEH OBAMA IS TEH DICTATOR!!!!1!")

(And I've already seen the rebuttal-to-end-all-rebuttals, though from a different Facebookian source: "BENGHAZI!")

[Mary in Ohio]

"O NOES...TEH DICTATOR111" looks like the Tea Party has invaded the LOLcats. Thank goodness spring training is coming!

[Mike Peterson]

I'm currently frustrated by the urge to not let toxic folly go unchallenged (mostly on Facebook), and yet the knowledge that you cannot argue with a double-naught spy and expect any sensible outcome. Obama's socialism, Noah's Ark, Benghazi, The Garden of Eden, the impact of raising the minimum wage and whether Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy are all rattling around under the cast iron hat and that's all that's rattling around in there.

And yet to allow this folly to spread without a protest, however vain, is just not acceptable.

[Lost in A**2]

Mr. Peterson, that last pretty much explains why I've largely abandoned a blog I've enjoyed just about from its inception.

[franz]

"And yet to allow this folly to spread without a protest, however vain, is just not acceptable."

I agree, but it is not good for your health to fight with idiots... on the internet or in real life.
Maybe you're doing a better thing by pointing out what's what in this blog. Sanity does not speak as loud as insanity, so it needs more voices to be heard.

Of course you know this: http://xkcd.com/386/