Category Archives: Newpapers
That 70s Show
The going got weird on Friday. 70s icons, musician James Taylor and ‘Nam vet John Kerry, teamed up to soothe hurt feelings in Paris. The hurt feelings stemmed from the Obama administration’s failure to show up for a march in solidarity with those murdered by Islamist thugs at a Charlie Hebdo meeting and at a Kosher food store. Or “parade” as Valerie Jarrett called it.
70s Show
Taking the “better late than never” approach Secretary of State Kerry showed up in Paris 5 days late with Taylor in tow. He actually said he wanted to “share a hug with all of Paris”. Then Taylor serenaded the trapped Parisians with You Got a Friend.
It’s bad enough that jihadis are killing cartoonists. Now the liberal elites are stealing all the jokes. You really can’t make this stuff up. Oxford University Press has ordered its authors not to mention pigs, pork, or bacon so as not to offend Muslims or Jews. Really.
The best I could add to the farce was an imaginary Governor Chris Christie offering to hug France.
Offending Islam
The New York Times and some others are worried that the murder of cartoonists by radical Islamists will cause offense – to Islamists.
Brendan O’Neill in National Review calls fear of an Islamophobic backlash “a myth”.
Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims.
Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.
Muslims against radical Islam
Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today says, “the most significant criticism of Islam in past weeks came not from traditional critics in Europe, but from inside the Islamic world itself, in the form of a speech, little-reported in the West, by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Muslim clerics in Egypt.
Al-Sisi commented:
“I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
“That thinking — I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”
The Muslim mayor of Rotterdam seems to be on board with al-Sisi.
And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can f*** off.
“This is stupid, this so incomprehensible. Vanish from the Netherlands if you cannot find your place here. All those well-meaning Muslims here will now be stared at”.
Victor Davis Hanson says the obsessive fear of offending other cultures a form of appeasement that leads to cultural suicide.
Artful Art and Big D
My father was a big man. In fact we called him “Big D”. He encouraged it.
Dr. Arthur Bernard Bok, Jr. served 23 years as team physician for the University of Dayton. He was a pioneer in the field of sports medicine. Before that he was team physician for the Dayton Gems IHL hockey team. He was an expert face stitcher. My brothers’ mugs as well as my own were canvases for his work. The same goes for many of our friends. Dad donated countless hours of medical service to everyone from neighborhood rink rats to college athletes. Any kid trying out for any team in any sport was entitled to a free physical at Doc Bok’s office.
Artful Art
He was born in Cincinnati, grew up in Toledo and came to Dayton on a football scholarship.
He played in the first Ohio high school North/South all-star game in 1946. Notre Dame legend Frank Leahy coached the South team. Leahy tried to poach my pop for the Irish. But, this being the pre-Urban Meyer era, dad kept his commitment to the Flyers. This upset my grandmother but pleased my grandfather. It also pleased my siblings and me because Dayton is where he met a pretty cheerleader, Jeanne Stewart, who became our mother.
He really was big for a back in those days – 6’2″ 192 pounds. And fast. He ran a 10 second flat hundred yard dash. The 40 had not yet been invented.
As a 17 year old in training camp he competed against much older returning war vets and earned a starting job as a freshman. He went on to become the Flyers’ all-time leading scorer. In 1948 he averaged 6.7 yards per carry.
The papers called him “Artful Art” and “Mr. Inside Outside”.
Following a 72 yard touchdown run against John Carroll in Cleveland stadium, Paul Brown paid him a visit in the locker room. His hopes, however, of playing for the Cleveland Browns were dashed when the Baltimore Colts drafted him in 1950.
He signed a $5,000.00 contract. Today’s NFL was not my father’s NFL. The team was lousy and the equipment worse. He stuck around long enough to get mentioned in Art Donavan’s book Fatso but soon gave up football for med school and marriage.
He attended the Chicago School of Osteopathic Medicine and returned to Dayton to begin his practice and raise his family.
Everybody loved him. I wanted to be just like him. When I was 12 or so someone asked if I would be a football player too. Big D’s reply was, “he may be small but he’s slow”. That stung but not too much because it was funny. I got bigger and faster but in the end he was right. I became a cartoonist.
My dad lived a rich and rewarding life. He was surrounded by our loving mother, 5 children, and 16 of his 19 grandchildren when it came to an end. After he breathed his last we said a prayer, poured martinis and toasted him. Old number 44 was 86.
Now, back to drawing the people I don’t like!
Washington Post Fact Checks SNL
The Washington Post actually fact checked a Saturday Night Live skit. Zachary Goldfarb rated the skit not helpful to the president.
The sketch was about Obama’s executive action on immigration (mislabeled as an “executive order”, Goldfarb helpfully corrects). It was set to “Schoolhouse Rock” and featured a “Bill” singing about how a bill becomes law. A cynical singing “Executive Order” explains how things really work, while President Obama repeatedly kicks the crooning “Bill” down the Capitol steps.
I rate it Damn Funny.
Since the Post is now rating comedy routines Michelle Malkin immediately wanted to know why it didn’t fact check Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin character for claiming she could see Russia from her house.
Personally, I want to know if Super Colossal Jimmy Carter is really 90 feet tall.
Cartoon Fact Check
My cartoon deliberately confuses Zachary Goldfarb’s fact check with the Post’s Glenn Kessler’s pinocchio ratings. I hope they don’t fact check cartoons now. On the other hand I could use the publicity.
Harry Reid’s Desk
A year ago President Obama said, “If you don’t like a particular policy, if you don’t like a particular president, go out there and argue your position, win an election.”
And so it came to pass.
Now that his party has lost the Senate, Obama says he’s willing to listen to Republican ideas – if they have any. Whether he is or they do remains to be seen. But they have had some ideas in the past. Those ideas were packaged into about 350 House Resolutions and passed on to the Senate where they sit in Harry Reid’s desk.
The way Mitch McConnell sees it Reid protected the president from legislation he didn’t like by not bringing bills to his desk.
The New York Times, in January, called Harry a brute.
Politifact, however, says some of those bills are simply caught up in committee. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post says it’s not at all unusual for Harry Reid to have 300 bills to be stuffed in his drawers.
