When Political Cartoons Get Snowed Under
Cidu Bill on Feb 10th 2010
Okay, personally… I found this amusing until I saw the “debt” caption in the snow. and that was just too much going on at once. If they’d just shown Obama trying to dig his way out of the snow (debt) without the elephant and his comments, that would have made a valid and timely point — but as it stands, there are two different cartoons here, pushing against one another.
As always, your results may vary.
Filed in Bill Bickel, Joel Pett, global warming, humor, political cartoons, politics | 31 responses so far
Sal Feb 10th 2010 at 06:18 pm 1
What I get from this is Obama is trying to dig his way out of debt, and the elephant has nothing good or constructive to say and he certainly isn’t helping to dig. Just like real life.
paperboy Feb 10th 2010 at 07:06 pm 2
Except in real life, Obama is piling on the debt.
Robert Feb 10th 2010 at 08:36 pm 3
Yeah, like that commie bastard FDR. How dare he spend taxpayer money on gov’t programs at a time like this!
paperboy Feb 10th 2010 at 09:49 pm 4
You don’t go into debt by spending money you have; you go into debt by borrowing money.
David N Feb 10th 2010 at 09:56 pm 5
Yeah, cause everybody knows Obama invented government debt. :rolleyes:
Mark M Feb 10th 2010 at 10:06 pm 6
Obama didn’t invent government debt but he sure is adding to it.
src666 Feb 10th 2010 at 10:13 pm 7
What choice does he have, really? Revenues are down - the economy and prior tax cuts saw to that. Expenses are up - the economy and ongoing wars see to that. Pick the programs YOU want to eliminate to balance the budget.
Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid? Defense? The boondoggle which is “Homeland Security”?
You find a couple trillion that can be eliminated without causing either a further collapse of the economy or an outright revolution, and then you can bitch about “he sure is adding to it”. He didn’t create this situation, and he can’t “solve it by waving his hands around and chanting a magic spell. In the words of the former president, “This is hard work”.
Blaming him for the debt is like blaming the paramedic standing at the crash site for the accident.
src666 Feb 10th 2010 at 10:16 pm 8
On the subject of the comic, I saw it as using the blizzard as a straight up metaphor for the current debt crisis. Wasn’t really that funny, but no where near a CIDU from my standpoint.
Cidu Bill Feb 10th 2010 at 10:25 pm 9
My point, src666, was that the blizzard as metaphor for the debt would have been fine. The Republican elephant kibbitzing rather than doing anything to help would also have been fine. But throwing it all together into one comic is just a mess.
PeterW Feb 10th 2010 at 11:07 pm 10
Oh, yeah. Obama’s pouring on the debt like mad, because only a Republican would propose a spending freeze or a balanced budget…
Mark M Feb 10th 2010 at 11:13 pm 11
Okay src666, tell me how Cash for Clunkers helped the economy. How about the stimulus package that has crippled the next generation. I don’t expect him to wave his arms and fix it. Just don’t add to the problem.
Charlene Feb 10th 2010 at 11:48 pm 12
So is this an off-topic political discussion or an on-topic one? I’M SO CONFUSED, BILL.
CIDU Bill Feb 10th 2010 at 11:54 pm 13
If you must categorize it, Charlene, I’d call it on-topic since it relates directly to a specific comic. In fact, my only comment about the comic (see #9) was entirely comic-related.
Sili Feb 11th 2010 at 02:08 am 14
You mean the stimulus package that the reepublans are gushing about and taking credit for, praising the jobs i creates in their constituencies, posing with novelty checks when the money’s handed out?
mkilby Feb 11th 2010 at 04:22 am 15
@ Sili (14) - this isn’t exactly on topic, but what is the magic word to get a quoted passage inset with the cute quote mark? It’s not listed in the FAQ. (The following is a test of the two probable methods.)
> Use a “greater than” sign at the left margin, OR
Sandwich the quote inside “quote” tokens
mkilby Feb 11th 2010 at 04:23 am 16
Sigh, neither method worked.
Carl Feb 11th 2010 at 05:58 am 17
mkilby, you have to manually type HTML, in this case the word “blockquote” enclosed within the less than and greater than tags.
Carl Feb 11th 2010 at 05:59 am 18
… and end your quote with “/blockquote” also enclosed, sorry.
mkilby Feb 11th 2010 at 06:36 am 19
Thanks. The syntax was familiar, I just wasn’t sure what the magic tag name was (another blog that I frequent uses “QUOTE” in square brackets for quotes, and HTML “angle brackets” for everything else).
Mark M Feb 11th 2010 at 06:57 am 20
Sili @ 14
Yeah, that one.
Powers Feb 11th 2010 at 07:02 am 21
Uh, not to put too fine a point on it, but economists are in general agreement that *without* the stimulus package, things would be a whole lot worse right now. As in, unemployment would be well over 10% and major employers would be failing left and right.
src666 Feb 11th 2010 at 07:34 am 22
Mark M, Cash for Clunkers cost us $3 Billion. To you or me, that’s a lot of money, but in terms of our economy it’s chump-change. While it’s effects were at best debatable, I would say in the worst case it was mostly harmless. On the other hand, please lay out a program to prop up one of the very few industrial sectors this nation still has, which ensures that our automakers have a fighting chance in a horrendous economy, and which is also guaranteed to work.
That’s the big problem - “guaranteed to work”. There is no economic policy you can make that is guaranteed to have the effects you desire, unless your desire is to collapse the economy. Lowering interest rates, raising interest rates, lowering specific taxes, raising specific taxes, these all have effects that far exceed their obvious scope, and they all ripple throughout the economy in ways that are VERY hard to predict.
The best anyone can do is listen to rational advice, target their efforts as best they can, and cross their fingers.
RHJunior Feb 11th 2010 at 07:41 am 23
Horseleavings. The original projections were for the unemployment rate to be nowhere CLOSE to 10%. It is now OVER 10%. But hey, when you can revise history to suit yourself…..
Getting back to the comic: Bush’s domestic spending plan had already doubled the deficit; Obama and the Democrats, with their MULTIPLE TRILLIONS of dollars doubled it again. The national deficit for this year alone is four times deeper than any point in history—- and it took this nation over two hundred years to gain as much debt as Obama saddled us with in ONE YEAR.
This makes the entire premise of the comic— Obama “trying to dig out of debt”— a farce. Only in fairyland, in a drug-addled delusion, or in a Democrat socialist daydream do you get OUT of debt by spending MORE. He and the Democrats have put us further and deeper IN debt than ever before in history.
src666 Feb 11th 2010 at 07:49 am 24
Whups, sorry, I forgot to put any flame-bait in that one. Here’s my theory regarding the debt: The republicans have railed against “entitlement” programs for decades, but have been totally unable to make any headway in eliminating them. That’s because they are VERY popular with the people, even the people who don’t currently benefit from them.
During the previous administration, they implemented a plan that would allow them to reduce or eliminate the entitlement programs they despise so much: Crushing Debt. By spending their way into record deficits, they could so thoroughly cripple our ability to generate revenues, and increase our debt obligations, that it would no longer be a matter of convincing the people to cut the programs.
Putting the economy into a tailspin helped ensure that no further expansions of these programs could be made, and that it would soon be necessary to start trimming them. If they could sustain the pressure on reducing the government’s income, they could, over time, eliminate the entitlement programs by the simplest measure - make sure there was no money for them.
Meanwhile, they were also reducing the government’s ability to regulate industry, due to the fact there is no money available to expand oversight. This takes care of any pesky rules that prevent them from raping the economy upside down and backwards.
All this was done by a sect that loves their ideology more than they love their nation. For more information on this sect of “conservatism”, see “Iraq, War in.”
Enjoy!
mkilby Feb 11th 2010 at 08:56 am 25
If the flame-baiting continues, at some point CIDU Bill is going to shut the door on this thread. That might even be the logical strategy for our collective mental health: [troll mode] Republican entitlements simply have a different target audience; they are concealed within weapons allocations for the Pentagon, plans to open up coastal regions for off-shore drilling and old growth forests for clear-cut logging, and tax cuts for the wealthy. [/troll mode]
Or, we could simply cool everything off with a nice link to a funny cartoon about snow (with a dab of politics thrown in). See: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/walters10.jpg (discovered in the Comic Riffs blog).
gramma(r) Feb 11th 2010 at 11:58 am 26
Okay, on a somewhat related note: the climate issue is actually CLIMATE CHANGE, not global warming. Warming is only one part of the changes we’re seeing, but I’m getting tired of jokes based on the idea that any excessive cold disproves the existence of climate change because it’s been mislabeled. Maybe Bill should start a new category, The Yawn Page, for every unfunny global warming cartoon. There sure are a lot of them.
Scott Feb 11th 2010 at 12:23 pm 27
And, back to the cartoon, note that while Obama is dressed for the weather, the Republican elephant is not. In his tux, he looks clueless about his environment, or perhaps he is in denial that there even was a snowstorm.
Kind of like supporting the increase in debt when times were good, and debt should be decreased, while complaining about it when times are bad, and a stimulus is needed.
paperboy Feb 11th 2010 at 01:28 pm 28
Yes; back to the CARTOON. The point I (and others) made is that, good or bad or whether he started it, Obama ISN’T “digging out of the debt”, so the image is misleading. (Now let’s all go read what Paul Krugman says about the National Debt)
Dyfsunctional Feb 11th 2010 at 04:13 pm 29
gramma(r): I agree. If there’s one area where CIDU Bill has dropped the ball, it’s in the lack of a page specifically dealing with the lame global warming jokes, exactly as you described it. Yessirree.
Steffen Feb 11th 2010 at 11:48 pm 30
I think this is a very apt political cartoon.
The elephant is really rubbing the shoveler’s nose in it… but he’s just as trapped.
Jamie P. Apr 20th 2010 at 04:24 am 31
What, no one’s commenting on “your hat is gay”?