Political Cartoons 2013: Click Here To Hate Yourself

IainC · Feb 9, 2013

Bill Dungsroman said: ↑

So...we never used drone attacks before Obama? Wow that's an interesting piece of war-based history I suppose!

To be fair, the scope of drone attacks has significantly increased in Obama's presidency. Not only in the number of strikes but also in the fact that drone strikes now occur in countries that the US is not formally at war with. All of this justified by US exceptionalism.

It's a legitimate point to attack Obama on but the criticism would sound a whole lot less hollow if it wasn't coming from people who are 100% behind American exceptionalism, have previously lined up wholesale behind the War on Terror and who generally don't have an issue with brown people being blown up.

Bill Dungsroman · Feb 9, 2013

Thanks IainC! ^__^ With these conservos I can never tell what's what.

Also:

Not really a funny comic except I love the snowman reporter losing his shit so bad he pulls his own head off all :O

Also jesus mister your wife is ugly

aaron · Feb 9, 2013

What's with that Old English shit? I'm pretty sure god loves Helvetica.

naum · Feb 9, 2013

IainC said: ↑

To be fair, the scope of drone attacks has significantly increased in Obama's presidency. Not only in the number of strikes but also in the fact that drone strikes now occur in countries that the US is not formally at war with. All of this justified by US exceptionalism.

It's a legitimate point to attack Obama on but the criticism would sound a whole lot less hollow if it wasn't coming from people who are 100% behind American exceptionalism, have previously lined up wholesale behind the War on Terror and who generally don't have an issue with brown people being blown up.

I don't think you can bucket Margulies as one of those "people who are 100% behind American exceptionalism". Not saying he's categorically "liberal", but his cartoons seem to more often target Republican/conservative tomfoolery.

Sjofn · Feb 9, 2013

Bill Dungsroman said: ↑

Thanks IainC! ^__^ With these conservos I can never tell what's what.

Also:

Not really a funny comic except I love the snowman reporter losing his shit so bad he pulls his own head off all :O

Also jesus mister your wife is ugly

Forget his wife, that couch is hideous.

Shake · Feb 9, 2013

Otterloop said:

I think this is the best cartoon you've posted in a long while. The Communist-Baphomet-Bama. The horror-terrorist. The little man shooting at fucking aliens. I love every part of this.

Lhowon · Feb 9, 2013

Via A Good Cartoon, this one:

I thought it too obvious to pass up:

Without the firm hand of unions keeping it under control, an unchained economy is free to trample over workers' rights. A good cartoon.

drew · Feb 9, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

Yeah, it's that classic "behind the head stretching" pose that, once again, no one but models do for no reason*

*heritage.org

Oh there's a reason why they do it.

I still don't get the "guns are for pussies" nightmare.

Elyscape · Feb 9, 2013

drew said: ↑

I still don't get the "guns are for pussies" nightmare.

Read the quote immediately after. It's the cartoonist's attempt to get on the NRA's list of anti-gun organizations and public figures.

Matthew Gallant · Feb 10, 2013

drew said: ↑

I still don't get the "guns are for pussies" nightmare.

The guy owns a gun because he is scared of various things that don't exist or don't exist in the form he imagines.

Otterloop · Feb 10, 2013

Shake said: ↑

I think this is the best cartoon you've posted in a long while. The Communist-Baphomet-Bama. The horror-terrorist. The little man shooting at fucking aliens. I love every part of this.

Kreider is very good but he doesn't do political cartoons too often

Elyscape said: ↑

Read the quote immediately after. It's the cartoonist's attempt to get on the NRA's list of anti-gun organizations and public figures.

Here's the full essay, spoilered for long

(toggle_spoiler)
spoiler_warning

"Guns Are for Pussies," February 8, 2013

Artist's Statement

One of several reasons why the “debate” over guns, like a lot of other debates in this country, has been so intractable for so long is that neither side trusts in the other’s honesty or good faith. Each side believes its own stated arguments to be, quite simply and truthfully, their real arguments, and sees their opponents’ arguments as transparent smokescreens for their "real," more insidious agendas.

In my more charitable moods I ascribe gun owners’ passionate attachment to these weapons to fear. Their fear is grotesquely distorted--cultivated by the media and exacerbated by their own chosen propaganda--and guns are a delusional means of placating that fear, a semiautomatic security blanket. But fear is at least a motive I can empathize with. But I also suspect that some gun owners are driven by something deeper and creepier—a kind of castration anxiety or overcompensation, for which guns serve as fetish objects.

It’s clear enough to me that gun-owners’ need for their guns is just that—not a liking or a right but a need, something irrational and scary, the sort of thing that, when you try to take it away, makes them not just sorry or mad but frantic, insane, dangerous. They remind me of those types on the other end of the political spectrum for whom the legalization of hemp is the single most important issue in the United States today. It’s not that I disagree with those guys, exactly--our nation’s drug laws are ridiculous and unjust, a waste of resources and a crime against all the people in prison for a piddling offense, and by now pretty much everyone from the President of the United States on down has done bong hits, so it obviously should’ve been legalized decades ago--it’s just that I don’t think any of those perfectly valid reasons are the real reason the issue is so important to them. It’s because they’re addicts. In fact gun advocates' behavior is scarily similar to that of addicts when you try to gently divest them of their required substance: they offer up every good argument in the world why this thing is harmless, beneficial, even, it's vitally necessary, a God-given right, and it’s none of your goddamn business anyway, until finally they abaondon all pretense of debate and bare their teeth and start foaming at the mouth threatening to kill someone.

It’s sort of a pro forma convention of editorials about gun control to insert a disclaimer about how you, the author, grew up in some backward gun-happy Red state and owned your first rifle when you were twelve and enjoyed many happy hours sitting in a duck blind with your grandpap. Unfortunately my parents were Mennonites and pacifists and I grew up thinking of people who owned handguns as fearful and weak, and of people who killed animals for fun as sick. To be fair, I have met some gun owners in adult life who’ve given me cause to moderate these judgments, like my friend Randy, who worked with me going door-to-door for the environment back in the day, campaigns for local Democratic candidates, and makes his own excellent barbecue sauce, and once shot a 600-pound boar, an animal so large there was literally not one room in his house big enough to contain its mounted head. Or Erik, who is cooler than me for many, many reasons, including, obviously, having the same name as the Phantom of the fucking Opera, as well as being the front man of a punk band, a Baltimore City public school teacher, and a collector of Orwell first editions, but also because he has a sleek steel G-man briefcase that turns out to contain several handguns cushioned in custom-contoured foam rubber, including a .357 Magnum, the kind Dirty Harry uses.

Erik once took me to an indoor shooting range in Baltimore, where I got to fire a rented Thompson gun (it’s Baltimore—you can do anything there). I was told to hold the machine gun like a rifle, with the butt against my shoulder, and to fire only in short, controlled bursts, but once you’ve got the thing in your hands the conditioning of 800,000 gangster films takes over and you find yourself with the Tommy gun at your hip, having depleted your entire clip, the barrel hot enough to sear flesh, surrounded by smoke. I admit I could definitely see the appeal of this sport, especially if you were screaming/laughing on the roof of a burning abandoned warehouse and Johnny Law was closing in. Eat lead, coppers!

I digress. What I’m saying is that I feel like I can see plainly what gun rights advocates’ real motives are; it’s less easy for me to understand what they think gun control advocates’ motives are. It seems to me as if my own investment in the gun debate—not wanting so many people to get shot—would be self-evident. But they seem to think there is some liberal conspiracy to Take Their Guns Away, for sinister, pathological reasons I can’t guess at–gun envy, perhaps. Or maybe it's just that, as they said about The Terrorists, "we hate freedom." The shadowy motives conservatives ascribe to what seem to me like liberals’ common-sense positions--an “anti-petroleum agenda” to describe climate change activists, for example--don’t make whole a lot of sense to me. Every time there’s a mass shooting and we plead, once more, for the most obvious and sane gun legislation—an assault weapons ban, better background checks, waiting periods--they affect disgust at our shameless opportunism in “politicizing” the tragedy. To us this seems like accusing someone of politicizing 9/11; it is obviously, inherently, a political issue. But politics are always invisible to their beneficiaries, even if they feel like shackles or instruments of torture to their victims.

To me, this disparity of evident motives is the most parsimonious way of evaluating the respective merits of opposing sides in any debate. If one side has no evident self-interested agenda beyond truth or fairness or the public good, that's the side you should probably be listening to. Climate-change alarmists seem motivated either by evidence (in the case of the few people who actually know what they’re talking about—climatologists and geologists) or by faith in scientific consensus; climate change deniers seem motivated either by naked, mercenary self-interest (in the case of the oil industry and its flacks) or by a more general hostility toward inconvenient data (in the case of the Fox watchership). Gun advocates’ fervid idealism in defense of the Second Amendment reminds me of the uncharacteristically teary-eyed patriotic sentiment with which pornographers cite the First. Yeah clearly firearms are protected, in some sense, under the Constitution, as is freedom of expression. As a cartoonist and a writer, I'm kind of a First Amendment hard-liner. But in all honesty I have to wonder whether, if Alexander Hamilton or James Madison were to hear about the mass execution of schoolchildren in Massachusetts or happened to catch Busty Backdoor Nurses on hotel-room cable, they’d agree that this is just what they were envisioning.*

Both sides in the gun debate are motivated primarily by fear. The difference, I would argue, is that gun-control advocates are motivated by realistic, adult fears, and gun-rights advocates by delusional, childish ones. We’re afraid of something that actually keeps happening out in real life—innocent people being murdered or accidentally killed by firearms. Their fear is of something that mostly happens in their imaginations, in sensational tabloid stories, or in movies or on TV—a dark intruder breaks into their home with the intention of killing them, raping their wives, molesting their children, taking their things. And the comforting fantasy they indulge, derived from all the action movies and TV shows they’ve absorbed, is that they will save everyone by killing this evil man. As Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, put it with creepy little-boy innocence: “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” They imagine that in a moment of utmost terror they will react with cool, discerning precision. Whereas even police, who are specially trained to make split-second decisions using firearms with deadly force in a crisis, sometimes accidentally massacre guys who were reaching for their wallets.

Of course no one's actually talking about taking away handguns. But a lot of gun owners--or at least their spokespeople in the gun lobby--now seem to believe that any gun legislation is only the beginning of The Government's plan to confiscate Americans’ firearms as preamble to some Third-Reich-style roundup and purge of freethinking people everywhere. This is not a straw-man representation of their position. The grandiose paranoid fantasy is that they and their gun collections are the lone bulwark against a totalitarian socialist takeover, just as we left-wing cartoonists, drummers, and puppeteers like to think we're the vanguard against a totalitarian fascist takeover. I am not unfamiliar with this strain of thinking; back during the darkest days of the War on Terror I was certain that the Bush administration would find some way of remaining in power beyond their constitutionally allotted two terms. I even placed a bet on it. But real-life evil tends to be well-meaning and halfassed, not malevolently omnipotent, and the Bush cabal turned out to be as inept at managing America as they were at occupying Iraq, and history and the next election ground unglamorously on. Anyway, I hate to be the one to break it to gun owners, but The Government has satellites that can read your latest blog entry over your shoulder and drones that can blow up your backyard bomb shelter at the touch of a button from seven thousand miles away, so if it were ever to decide to liquidate its most feared subversive element, paranoid rednecks, your home arsenal will prove as formidable a defense as Wile E. Coyote’s fragile pink parasol is against boulders.

I suspect these vivid terrors of the dark intruder crawling in the window or jackbooted ATF agents kicking down the door are nightmare-symbols for all their real, more nebulous fears--fear of living in a country in decline, of an economy that's never bouncing back, that has no further use for their whole class; fear of a political tide that's turned against everything they believe in--unregulated free-market capitalism, Traditional Marriage, Christmas; and, maybe most of all, fear of that grim eventually I once overheard foretold from a stall of the men's room in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library: "the White Man's day is gonna come." After all, there's a black man in the White House; the fags are getting married; the illegals' kids are going to college. What left for the beseiged and cowering White Man?

This fixation on firearms as a guarantee of freedom seems like an embarrassingly crude, childish understanding of what constitutes political power. It’s pathetic, even poignant in a way--a cartoon fantasy of invincibility for people who have been deprived of any real political power for generations and have no hope of ever wielding it. They're like working joes who listen to talk-radio and think it’s “class warfare” to target taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year--as if the truly wealthy even calculated their worth in terms of a yearly wage. It’s snobby of me, I know, but when I read some pro-gun comments on the internet I can’t help but think that if gun owners could spell as well as they can shoot they might value their First Amendment rights as much as they do their Second. At heart, they subscribe to the homily of that great founding father who said: “All political power flows from the barrel of a gun.” But most of the successful revolutions in recent history have been accomplished by unarmed citizenries taking to the streets; the decisive moment generally comes when the military (or the police, in those places where they are one and the same) switches sides and joins the people. It is not firepower per se that ultimately determines the outcome, but numbers, loyalties, a shift in the popular will and in moral authority. Which is what the gun lobby irrevocably lost after Newtown. The revolution is already underway. The White Man's day has come.

(Note to Randy: looking forward to discussing further over beers in the Land of Pleasant Living.)

*It isn’t a blanket conservative hostility toward science that’s at work here; if some new scientific report showed that homosexuality was learned behavior or that trilobite fossils were only five thousand years old, it would be trumpeted as gospel on Fox and in the tabloids and cited with Talmudic authority by right-wing bloggers and barroom blowhards everywhere. Conservatives have historically been antagonistic to science only because, due to some insidious agenda of its own, it’s pretty consistently controverted conservatives’ most cherished beliefs.

Mike Lester has comedy cancer

Holy fuck guys. Holy fuck. I can't make a hand gesture dismissive enough.

quatoria · Feb 10, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

From SA:

I feel like making this into a game: I seeeeeee three things stupid about this. Beat that stupid!

Gosh, that's heartwarming. Right wing or left wing, liberal or conservative, editorial cartoonists on both sides agree that insulting your targets by comparing them to women is hilarious, and incredibly humiliating for them. They're either pussies or wearing girly ti-tus of Liberalism, but either way, right and left can come together to remind us that no matter what your politics are, the worst thing you can possibly be is a womanly, pink, skirt wearing pussy. That's fucking poetry, right there.

Otterloop · Feb 10, 2013

In a thread literally filled with Muir you managed to ferret out the real criminals

Sjofn · Feb 10, 2013

Plus if your goal is to piss off a gun nut, then yes, calling them pussies is pretty much the way to go there.

OZ 4.0 · Feb 10, 2013

Otterloop said:

I feel like making this into a game: I seeeeeee three things stupid about this. Beat that stupid!

No kidding. Idiot, calling a running play on second and long.

OZ 4.0 · Feb 10, 2013

God help me, I laughed at the last panel.

What have you done to me????

Sjofn · Feb 10, 2013

Oz, we can't be friends any more. :(

OZ 4.0 · Feb 10, 2013

Sjofn said: ↑

Oz, we can't be friends any more. :(

Fuck Day by Day for making me laugh!

Better?

Otterloop · Feb 11, 2013

Hey great! Now I never have to listen to OZ ever again!

OZ 4.0 · Feb 11, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

Hey great! Now I never have to listen to OZ ever again!

"Tell me Professor Marvel, what do you see in your crystal?"

"The crystal tells me that Otterloop is full of shit."

Otterloop · Feb 11, 2013

OZ 4.0 said: ↑

"Tell me Professor Marvel, what do you see in your crystal?"

"The crystal tells me that Otterloop is full of shit."

Good comeback bro. Hey, remember that time you laughed at Day by Day?

OZ 4.0 · Feb 11, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

Good comeback bro. Hey, remember that time you laughed at Day by Day?

Sjofn · Feb 11, 2013

That mutant woman makes me laugh, that doesn't count as laughing at Day by Day, rite?

Otterloop · Feb 11, 2013

Sjofn said: ↑

That mutant woman makes me laugh, that doesn't count as laughing at Day by Day, rite?

It's more "having a laugh at the expense of" so we coo'

Sjofn · Feb 11, 2013

Phew!

Bill Dungsroman · Feb 11, 2013

Wow, Sjofn almost legit laughing at DBD. That was a close one!

Otterloop · Feb 11, 2013

Muir demonstrates that he knows what breast are, just not what they look like.
Also the first punchline contains the idea of a joke, but not a joke. And I don't get the second punchline. Also what does a fracking company need with a pilot?

Also he found this. Big day for Muir you guys!

I mean he's still wrong

More photoshop fuckery. I guess when you have 16 hours a day to masturbate/make cartoons you get bored.
I like that Muir seems to have taken his cues on male/female relationships from fucking "Laser Mission" ("You are no sergeant: you are a woman!!")

You have no right ever to joke about how slow the post office is after this two month old "joke".
Also I should start a pool on how long this ctrl-v goes on.

I don't blame the kids

WHAT??? WHHHHHHHHHAT???

Those sneaky Democrats! Always getting in the way of the Republican's true message.

I feel like I should censor this...

"I know it's true just don't SAY it! GAHD!"
Also what the fuck is up with the desk?
PS: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/the-bush-years-2004-2009/

Nice

I like this one solely, SOLELY because Danziger was all "Fuck it, I'll just draw what I did today." No fucks atall.

PLEASE. PLEASE if you can draw or you know anyone who CAN draw

Otterloop · Feb 11, 2013

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SAY SOMETHING VAGUELY NICE ABOUT MIKE LESTER???

OZ 4.0 · Feb 11, 2013

Why?

shift6 · Feb 11, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

THAT'S NOT IN THE BIBLE!

madkevin said: ↑

Maybe not in YOURS.

Oh my God yes. This isn't exactly topical but man the whole "my Bible says" thing coming non-ironically from pulpits and sermons has really gotten my goat lately. RAWR!

OK back to hating myself because politicomix.

Otterloop · Feb 11, 2013

Oh yeah OZ 4.0??? Yeah?? Well let it be on your head! Here's Mike Lester's syndicated comic strip! Enjoy!

Edit:
Fuck you bullshit man

OZ 4.0 · Feb 11, 2013

Those make his political cartoons look good.

No, wait. I lied. They don't. Of all of our comic friends, Lester is the one I'm most convinced is seriously unhinged. And in a world with Ramirez and McCoy(s) and Asay and Rall and Tinsley and Fuck You Day By Day. . .

I will NOT say something vaguely nice about Mike Lester.

Sheepherder · Feb 12, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

Vanishing points, how do they work?

lesslucid · Feb 12, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SAY SOMETHING VAGUELY NICE ABOUT MIKE LESTER???

His ability to derive pleasure and amusement from the "novel" sound of the word "Zumba" is, if not terribly witty, at least somewhat... humanising?

I think that's the best I can do.

eotinb · Feb 12, 2013

Otterloop said: ↑

I feel like there is a decent USPS cartoon waiting to jump out of this cartoon diary.

Jam · Feb 12, 2013

quatoria said: ↑

Gosh, that's heartwarming. Right wing or left wing, liberal or conservative, editorial cartoonists on both sides agree that insulting your targets by comparing them to women is hilarious, and incredibly humiliating for them. They're either pussies or wearing girly ti-tus of Liberalism, but either way, right and left can come together to remind us that no matter what your politics are, the worst thing you can possibly be is a womanly, pink, skirt wearing pussy. That's fucking poetry, right there.

As I've pointed out before, "pussy" has been in use to mean "cowardly" long before it became associated with anything feminine. It's about cats, for fuck's sake.

Otterloop · Feb 12, 2013

Jam said: ↑

As I've pointed out before, "p***y" has been in use to mean "cowardly" long before it became associated with anything feminine. It's about cats, for fuck's sake.

I can't believe we had to censor that. It would have been such a nice moment.

Jason T · Feb 12, 2013

It's integrally gender/sexuality related, which is why it can start a bar-fight, as a few people pointed out. There's no saying its contemporary usage isn't heavily affected by its far more common "non-cat" meaning, it flies in the face of common sense.

In a slightly more etymologically worn down sense the whole modern vocabulary of "cowardice accusation" is gender/sex related - "wuss," "sissy," "pansy," leaving aside outright slur-terms for homosexuality like "fag." Knowing the author I suspect his point was to pick the language that would most offend cis-hetero-bigots but in doing so he erred by endorsing effeminacy-as-ridicule.

Jam · Feb 12, 2013

Jason T said: ↑

It's integrally gender/sexuality related, which is why it can start a bar-fight, as a few people pointed out. There's no saying its contemporary usage isn't heavily affected by its far more common "non-cat" meaning, it flies in the face of common sense.

It really doesn't. There's two completely different meanings. One is crude slang for a vagina, the other means a cat. The "coward" aspect comes from the latter. Which is why you can hear it on daytime TV. It's been in constant use with an unchanging meaning for hundreds of years.

In a slightly more etymologically worn down sense the whole modern vocabulary of "cowardice accusation" is gender/sex related - "wuss," "sissy," "pansy," leaving aside outright slur-terms for homosexuality like "fag." Knowing the author I suspect his point was to pick the language that would most offend cis-hetero-bigots but in doing so he erred by endorsing effeminacy-as-ridicule.

Alternatively he chose a word that has nothing to do with gender.

Jason T · Feb 12, 2013

Jam said: ↑

It really doesn't. There's two completely different meanings. One is crude slang for a vagina, the other means a cat. The "coward" aspect comes from the latter. Which is why you can hear it on daytime TV.

Think about the Venn diagram of "people who use the word pussy to impugn" and "people who know the etymology of the word pussy."

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Political Cartoons 2013: Click Here To Hate Yourself

IainC Your Tour Guide For Los Angeles

Bill Dungsroman Magister Mundi Elyscape

aaron Elitist Negative Nancy

naum Oh, Come On

Sjofn Magister Mundi Elyscape

Shake Keeper of the Elemental Materials

Lhowon Hard Cider Gal

drew This Is SEWIOUS

Elyscape Hatoful Pigeon

Matthew Gallant Despondent Fancybear

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

quatoria Learned From Drunk Admins How To Shoot Vodka

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

Sjofn Magister Mundi Elyscape

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

Sjofn Magister Mundi Elyscape

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

Sjofn Magister Mundi Elyscape

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

Sjofn Magister Mundi Elyscape

Bill Dungsroman Magister Mundi Elyscape

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

shift6 Magister Mundi Elyscape

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

OZ 4.0 Despondent Fancybear

Sheepherder Armchair Designer

lesslucid This Is SEWIOUS

eotinb Oh, Come On

Jam Armchair Designer

Otterloop Beardy Magnificence

Jason T Keeper of the Elemental Materials

Jam Armchair Designer

Jason T Keeper of the Elemental Materials

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