Saturday, December 26, 2015

The Cruz cartoon: And it wasn’t even funny!

What happens when liberals can’t defend President Obama’s foreign policy anymore or the fact that ObamaCare is going broke one exchange at a time?   
Or that they voted for “hope and change” but black districts from coast to coast are not doing very well in the 7th year of our first black president?  
Or that they party of diversity has two old white people running for president plus the mayor of Baltimore? (Frankly, there ought to be a Constitutional Amendment saying that no mayor of modern Baltimore should be taken seriously as a candidate for president!)
I guess that they call you a racist or homophobic, or they take a cheap shot at Senator Cruz’ daughters.    
Mollie Hemingway has a great post about the cartoon. This is my favorite of the 10 reasons:
It’s Not Funny
This is actually quite important. The Washington Post has always been a bad page for editorial cartooning. For something like 60 years they featured the ghastly work of HERBLOCK, whose distinctions were drawing like a particularly uncreative five-year-old and labeling literally everything in said drawings. Partly he needed to label because he lacked any imagination at all and kept pushing out the same clichéd metaphor for…everything. Partly, some suspected, it was because he was huffing airplane glue. If you’d like some delicious take-downs of HERBLOCK (his name was Herbert Block, so this all-block-letter-combo-name thing gives you an indication of his dazzling intellect), I’d recommend “Cartoons Without Humor: The underwhelming oeuvre of Herblock, America’s worst political cartoonist” and “Washington’s Blockheads: The perpetual adulation of Herblock.” From the latter, by the great Andy Ferguson:
Vampire bats sweep across a skyline, their bellies covered in writing: “takeover tactics,” “raiders,” “greenmail specialists,” “junk bond finances,” and “stock manipulations.” (This must be Wall Street!) And there’s always a caption, too, another 15 or 20 words. “If you don’t get my meaning,” Block seems to be saying to his reader, “I’m going to make you sit here until you do.” It was his politics, mostly, that lifted Herblock above his lack of technical skill to the Pulitzers and the medals and the honorary degrees. His ideas were as simple as his draftsmanship, and perfectly matched to the prejudices of the powerful journalists he hoped to please.
All of which to say, Telnaes reminds me a lot of HERBLOCK. She can draw better than he could (all humans can), but her ideas are just as predictably progressive, clichéd, hyper-partisan, and so on. She obsesses over the same, few causes (supporting abortion is her favorite and disdaining Christians is right up there, too). In fact, herattacks on pro-lifers are so hackneyed that nobody will be surprised that she’s been given awards by the country’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. (Interestingly, this pro-abortion cartoon, which passes for perceptive at the WashingtonPost, also features children on strings, which says nothing about pro-lifers but a great deal about Telnaes.)
That’s very important: It wasn’t even funny.   
The cartoonist had to know that portraying the girls as monkeys would not be funny. Furthermore, did she ever consider doing a cartoon of Mr Obama saying to his daughters (as monkeys) that you could keep your insurance under ObamaCare? Or that ISIS was the JV team?  
My good guess is that the cartoonist would not dare publish a cartoon with Obama’s daughters as monkeys. All hell would break loose and the Washington Post would apologize for its editorial insensitivity.
Moral of the story: Don’t take cheap shots at the kids. After all, they are not responsible for what their fathers say. It wasn’t the Obama girls who told us that Obama Care would translate into cheaper premiums for all!
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

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