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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

That damned commerce

What's Mallard raving about today?

Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, Commerce.

Right.

More than 53% of the American people, primarily concerned with the Economy, chose Barack Obama for President.

The "many Americans" to which Mallard is referring may come from the Know Nothing Wing of the Republican Party, the lobotomized followers of Fox, or the irrationally angry zombie hordes commanded by Bill O'Reilly.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll just ignore the inanity of questioning whether Obama "believes in" the existence of a system of purchasing goods and notice that Tinsley actually drew a Democrat that doesn't look totally disfigured. Still has buck teeth though.

Anonymous said...

Factinista, that's what "stunned" me: a drawing that is not so much a caricature as it is a portrait.

Now, artistry aside (surely it's someone else's hand), Mallard is still flat out wrong.

ajm said...

Because nothing signifies "believing in commerce" like the government bailing out Detroit to the tune of $17 billion, right, Tins?

Anonymous said...

OK, there's really is no other way of saying this: This strip is just stupid.

Other folks have pointed out the inanity of basing this "joke" on the question of whether Obama "believes" in an objective fact.

But, to be fair, I suppose it's conceivable that an actual, semi-thoughtful strip with genuine substance and relevance to the real world might have be written along these lines. Say, something like:

"...the first indication that George W Bush believes in...
- "... the criminality and blatant evil of torture."
- "... Darwinian evolution."
- "... preservation of simple human constitutional rights."

rewinn said...

"...there's really is no other way of saying this: This strip is just stupid..."

"This strip is just stupid" is applies to so many Mallard Fillmore's that it should be Mallard Standard Code #1.

The joke is stupid for several reasons:

* It restates the claim that Obama's anti-capitalist; how did that work for McCain?

* It's stale. Obama named Richardson Dec 3, a thoroughly uncontroversial pick since Richardson's well qualified for that or any executive position. The American public moved on.

* It's a play on the word "commerce", which almost no-one ever uses anymore. "Business", "market", "economy" are how people talk about "commerce" now-a-days. One might as well make a joke about puttees or velocipedes.

===

But it IS nice of Tinkley to point out that Obama is loading up his Cabinet with A-Team players. Richardson was a plausible candidate for President, as are several other others on the Obama team. If talented leadership were enough to get us out of the hole that 30 years of Reaganism has put us in, we have better days ahead.

(It won't be enough by itself; we all have a lot of hard work to do. Right now, Tinkley's simply getting ready to blame Obama for the economic problems that the GOP's been desperately trying to stave off until after they're out of office. But that's not really news.)

Drogon Saurischian said...

Ditto everything above with the added note that Tinsley's "joke" is also demonstrably wrong. Front and center on the Obama-Biden campaign site is the ObamaStore and, while Tinsley would hate to admit this, the commercial sale of anything is, by definition, commerce.

WV: chestia - a bitter, souring agent produced from the pulverized chest feathers of Mallard Fillmore

Michael Foley said...

Mallard, didn't you get the memo? The election is over. You need to concentrate your efforts on pinning the financial meltdown on Democrats and/or minorities.

GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

See, this is what I'm talking about. No normal human being would conclude that Obama is a communist or has any leanings in that direction. But that's not important to Tinsley: he has the TEH DEMOCRATS IZ TEH MARKSSISTS talking point, and he's just gonna mindlessly repeat it over and over. It's a good deal for him, since not bothering to think about the way things are in the actual real world allows him to write a comic with virtually no effort, but you gotta wonder about the mindset behind a newspaper willing to pay for a guy to do the exact equivalent of shouting LIBERALS ARE POOPHEADS! every day.

Unknown said...

How's this for commerce: I would sell my organs on the black market for this strip to go back to just being about how Christmas sucks.

wv: upetio
A big seller in this season's Williams-Sonoma collection.

Anonymous said...

And I thought the problem with the Democrats is that they're too concerned with commerce and not enough with important issues like the Weather Underground....