Category Archives: Newpapers
Bystander President
Reagan was the Teflon president. He had an easy charm and nothing bad seemed to stick. Obama is the bystander president. He reads about bad things that happen on his watch as if they had nothing to do with him. He’s just like you and me, sitting at the bar madder’n hell. Except he gets to go on TV and complain. At least I get to draw a cartoon.
Disney World Government
Departed Secret Service director Julia Pierson wanted the Secret Service to become more like Disney World – more welcoming. Omar Gonzales felt welcome enough to dash through the unlocked front door of the White House with a knife. Former Director Pierson has a legacy. In fact the new culture seems to be taking hold throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Peggy Noonan calls the attitude “the new bureaucratic brazenness”. Actually not so much welcoming as we don’t give a damn what you think.
Everything sounds like propaganda. That will happen when government becomes too huge, too present and all-encompassing. Everything almost every level of government says now has the terrible, insincere, lying sound of The Official Line, which no one on the inside, or outside, believes. The other day, during the big Centers for Disease Control news conference on the Dallas Ebola case, a man from one of the health agencies insisted in burly (and somehow self-satisfied) tones that the nation’s health is his group’s No. 1 priority. And I thought, just like a normal person, “No, your No. 1 priority is to forestall a sense of panic. To do that you’ll say what you need to say. Your second priority, connected to the first, is to assert the excellence and competence of the agency with which you are associated. Your third priority is to keep the public safe.”
Doyle McManus just wants to know what happened to good old American know-how.
I like my Grumpy character – Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Since Obama threw him under the bus I drew him with tire tracks on his back. Too bad he’s facing you.
NFL vs. NOW
The NFL is in a panic over angry women and angry sportswriters, sometimes one and the same. Commissioner Roger Goodell held a press conference yesterday to announce a crackdown on football players behaving badly. It played to very bad reviews. He apologized and promised a new and more sensitive NFL. But no number of pink ribbons will satisfy the National Organization for Women. President Terry O’Neill immediately renewed calls for Goodell’s head.
Never mind that the arrest rate for NFL players is lower than the rate for adult men in the general population. Here’s a chart from Deadspin.
NFL vs. NOW
So, why the uproar now? Ray Rice was seen last February dragging his unconscious fiancé Janay Palmer out of an Atlantic City casino elevator, caveman style. It was obvious something brutal had happened. Rice was charged with aggravated assault and placed in a one year pre-trial intervention program. The NFL suspended him for two games. With the unpleasantness behind them, Janay and Ray got married and lived happily ever after.
That is until an elevator video surfaced this month on TMZ showing Ray actually dropping Janay with a left hook. Then the NFL took action to punish the victim by taking away her husband’s of income. Rice was suspended indefinitely.
Video footage evidently concentrates the mind, whether it’s of a knockout punch or a beheading. That puts Commissioner Goodell and President Obama in the same boat. Well, not actually, NOW still likes Obama.
Arctic Sea Ice Challenge
UK Mail Online published satellite photos that show this summer’s arctic sea ice increased from 2012’s all-time low. Slate was quick to point out, with its usual annoying habit of answering a question you didn’t ask, that “No You Can’t Claim Arctic Sea Ice is Recovering”.
Sea Ice Challenge
The increase represents a change in weather not climate. Like the Lake Superior ice that wouldn’t leave until June. Or the drought in California. Oh wait, that’s climate not weather.
Anyway, maybe you can’t claim arctic sea ice is recovering, but you might say polar bears are. 
Stupid Shit Obama Doctrine
When President Obama is not saying “the Bear is loose”, as he pretends to break the bonds of his keepers, he likes to say he “doesn’t do stupid shit”. Not doing stupid shit seems to be the Obama Doctrine. (I changed “shit” to “stuff” in the cartoon to get it in the newspaper. Harry Truman wouldn’t have given a shit:
Reportedly, at a speech to a Washington garden club, he kept referring to the fact that flowers need manure. Now, in those days, even the word “manure” was a little extreme for such ladies, and afterwards one complained to Mrs. Truman. “Can’t you get the President to say ‘fertilizer?’” “Heavens, no,” Mrs. Truman replied “It took me twenty-five years to get him to say ‘manure’.”)
Anyway, with 2016 approaching, Hillary decided to put some daylight between herself and Barack I. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in Atlantic, the former secretary of state said, “Great nations need organizing principles. “Don’t do stupid shit” isn’t an organizing principle.”
Obama’s response? “That’s horse shit!”
Dana Milbank accuses our fecund fecal minded ruler of going on vacation “while the world burns”. “If not in the category of “stupid “stuff” it could fall under the heading of tone deafness.”
Even Obama agrees.
