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Friday, April 15, 2011

That damned Coincidence

What's Mallard raving about today?

Taxes, President Obama

I found myself strangely excited to read Mallard Fillmore today, thinking this very public mental breakdown would just get more insane in the telling.

I should have known the story wouldn't get any more interesting, and that all we're going to do from here on out is listen to Mallard bitch about the same stupid thing over and over.

Meaning the only thing left to figure out is how many days will this go on?

20 comments:

Tog said...

Actually, I think he's done. These fits do tend to come in threes: in the first strip, Batshit thinks he's a genius; strip number two, he's already flinching ("I'M TOTALLY NOT MAKING THIS UP, YOU KNOW!"); by the third or fourth strip he's running away, bawling that some day the truth will come out and we'll see, WE'LL SEE, that he was right all along.

Hence the suggestion that today's strip will get him "in trouble" with the IRS. Because the IRS acts like a vengeful eight-year-old, amirite? (...Or a forty-year-old Republican. Oh, and there's that "prove them wrong" bit again. Batshit, you couldn't win an argument with a dog turd. Admit it: you depend on your liberal civil-rights-lawyer wife, for whom you have such open contempt, to save your ass in such situations.)

When a guy (or "foundation," per the first strip) that constantly disdains all taxation gets visited by the IRS three years in a row (charitably assuming you aren't lying outright), Occam's Razor doesn't scream "political conspiracy" so much as "got caught."

Beef Wellington said...

I wanna file this under dellusions of grandeur, But grandeur isn't really enough to describe mallard perception of his own self worth.


[spoiler] He's worth exactly jack shit [/spoiler]

Anonymous said...

Oh God, he seriously believes it. He seriously believes the first thing Obama does each morning is look for his strip, get angry and then demand that he be dealt with. Bruce: I doubt Obama has heard of you. I doubt anyone in a prominent enough position within the IRS to 'come after you' has heard of you. What has happened is YOU GOT CAUGHT. And you're too stupid to learn from it and start paying your taxes.

Seriously, Mallard's readership is, what, 80% people reading it to snark? He doesn't have some devoted Conservative following a la O'Reilly or Limbaugh, nor is he seen as some major irritant to those in power. Him assuming that he's getting reprisals for criticising Obama (or for not carrying on with his Clinton shtick during the eight Bush years) is like me assuming that the next person to be rude to me is doing so because I posted this and they're working for Tinsley. We're both operating at the same level.

Anthony said...

"and oh yeah shhhhure, that other time wash in 2008 but whatsh that got to do with anything...?"

John E. said...

That's what he gets for trying to deduct booze as a business expense, I guess...

Anonymous said...

Of course this doesn't add up, as Obama became President in Jan. 2009. So unless the 2010 tax return (filed this week, perhaps?) has been audited already (very unlikely), then it doesn't seem possible that three tax returns had been audited since Obama became president. Or did he just get three letters, reminders that quarterly, estimated tax payments were overdue?
Does the IRS even have any political, staff appointments?

Anthony said...

Also - he doesn't say that the pre-Obama audit was a "mistake" which means he may have been caught that first time thus red-flagging all questionable claims from that point on. (Not to mention the criminal record.)

Point being: that one pre-Obama audit (two really, as second anon rightfully points out) is one more than I've had since I started working 20+ years ago.

Raynfala said...

Oh man, seriously! I mean, I know that Tinsley has tried to be funny, and often failed. But abandoning all pretense of humor to sit there and whine and cry about your personal problems? That's just beyond the pale.

If this doesn't get him punted from a few more newspapers, I would be very, very surprised.

Rootbeer said...

Maybe the IRS would stop hounding Ol' Fingerpencil for back taxes if he, y'know, paid his back taxes.

I imagine some feckless IRS auditor reviewing Tinsley's tax return and thinking, "this can't be right... $12,000 in receipts to Long's Discount Liquors for 'research materials'?"

Anonymous said...

At least kids growing up in Kenya don't have to read this stuff.

Frank Stone said...

"Maybe it's a coincidence..."

That may very well be the first sensible thing Mallard has said in... well, ever. Granted, he undercut it in the next panel, but still.

Kip W said...

Yeah, each time Tinsley failed to pay his taxes, they sent him a letter reminding him. The MAN's keepin' him DOWN! ATTICA! ATTICA!!

Kip W said...

ps: The mention of Earthworm Jim's creator makes me wonder if he ever came back to earth. He was pretty entertaining until 9/11 made him outraged over Chappaquiddick.

Steve-O said...

@Kip W,

Man, that totally describes Dennis Miller. I remember watching him when he had an HBO show and thought he was quite witty and topical. Then he became a born-again right-winger and the best he could do (based on catching him in passing doing a fawning "interview" on Billo's show) were 'Nancy Pelosi is ugly' and 'Senator Byrd's in the KKK' jokes. He was so lame and Billo chortled and guffawed all the way through it. Tough to watch with a working gag reflex.

rewinn said...

You have to wonder how much money Brewsky's accountant is charging him. The guy has a single source of income: King Features. Maybe his wife has a paycheck too. Unlike professional cartoonists, he doesn't have income from repurposing his content, e.g. Mallard Fillmore plushies. So why would his tax filings be more than a couple of hours of punching numbers into Microsoft Money?

Maybe he's running some other business on the side, to make up for declining revenues from MF. Or maybe he's just claiming every trip to the grocery store as "research". His story just doesn't add up.

Bill the Splut said...

He really did mean 3 years out of Obama's 2...Wow.

Oh, right. The Evil Secret Muslim Kenyan Socialist used the same time machine he used when he put those birth notices in 1962 Hawaiian newspapers! He's nefarious, and only some paranoid, alcoholic, hack cartoonist can stop him!

Neo Tuxedo said...

@Steve-O: But Dennis Miller was on that trajectory well before 9/11. In his third print collection (I Rant, Therefore I Am) he flat-out called Bill Clinton a rapist in the very first rant. I saw that in my then-local Barnes & Chernobyl and instantly knew I would not be adding that volume or any subsequent one to my collection alonger The Rants and Ranting Again.

Ironically, he predicts his own career in his rant about power: "Now, I may seem to have some power, but if you think about it, I'm really just a mindless fuck-chimp for HBO. At any time, they could back a truck up to the studio door, pull out a Pillsbury Doughboy costume, order me to put it on, and then what? Well, nothin' says lovin' like somethin' from the oven, that's what. Tee-hee!"

Steve-O said...

@Neo,

Wow, that is lame. Ok, I think you're correct, I think I remember him saying that what pushed him over the edge was someone comparing GWB to Hitler. I thought, "That's it? Really?". It was painful watching hime tie himself into knots trying to defend Bush, it was obvious to me that he knew Bush was full of shit but DM had already made his bed. For example, someone asked Miller how he could defend Bush on the environment. Miller's response was "well, his ranch is really nice, that's got to mean something right?". I know he's not that stupid.

Marion Delgado said...

Dave:

I THOUGHT you meant the insane coincidence that the ad at the top of this blog is THIS:

http://www.projectwonderful.com/img/uploads/pics/755-1285723616.jpg

WV: awnesse What I'm feeling contemplating that damned coincidence.

Kip W said...

I agree that Dennis was on the wane before 9/11. I used to enjoy him quite a bit, and had high hopes for his talk show — which I thought was okay — and was unhappy when it folded. Then he went to HBO, but it seemed like he was just phoning it in. When he re-emerged, he was like an audio-animatronic of his old self. Four or five years ago, I wrote the following:
----

Miller used to be funny. (Hell, Johnny Hart used to be funny!) But, you know, things change.

I suspect Miller writes his jokes with big blanks to be filled in later — yes, you’re way ahead of me: MAD LIBS®. After he gets all the bile in place, he gets busy and puts in the all-fired smartypantsiest words he can find in his Big Book O’ Culture.

I suggest we could do just as badly all by ourselves. We could assemble a bank of blank-fillers for categories like “things that are so ugly,” “things that are so stupid,” “things that are so fast” and then write the all-purpose Dennis Miller generantor. Suggested prototype:

“Now, I don’t want to go into a rant here, but how bad is it when [person who is so liberal] is called the new [person who is so respectable]? That’s like having [person who is so stupid] take over for [person who was so smart] at [event which is so prestigious]. You might as well have one of these [adjective chain for stupidity] [very stupid thing]s over to [perform very demanding activity] for your next [esoteric event]. Every time I hear about one of these [thing that is so stupid]s trying to [do thing that is so smart], I just have to [pointless physical activity that isn’t masturbation].”

In this case, we can fill in the blanks and get:

“Now, I don’t want to go into a rant here, but how bad is it when Howard Dean is seen as the new Ronald Reagan? That’s like having Soupy Sales take over for Stephen Hawking at the College Bowl. You might as well have one of these no-neck drooling inbred clown-hatted mongoloid planaria worms trying to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem for your next Burning Man Festival. Every time I hear about one of these liberals trying to second-guess Bush, I just have to club myself over the head repeatedly with a cast-iron statue of Fatty Arbuckle.”

See? It doesn’t even have to make sense! We could put the real Miller out of business. They’d replace him with a chimp who’s trained to open and close his mouth repeatedly while a stagehand reads the dialog.
----

I suspect I'm not the first one to think of this — when I Googled to find my words above, I saw that I was far from the last. I guess the libs are really mad at ol' Dennis for turning his back on what they believe in deeply: actual humor.