It's Sunday!

And that means two things: A longer lead time on comic strips and a big expanse to fill. That means that we're treated to not one but THREE rants from the duck.

And Tinsley's bizarro world predictions include a US pull-out from the UN, an OJ reality show and some strange CBS news prediction (which is either a bizarre synchronicity with the daily strip or Tinsley was stuck for ideas this past week and decided to look at what he'd submitted for the Sunday to see if that inspired him).

So taking these one at a time: The UN. This is a favorite target of conservatives who find the UN useful only when it blindly supports the US. And when it doesn't it never occurs to them that maybe we're doing something wrong, like, oh, I don't know, maybe starting a war on false premises? I was a Model UN nerd in high school and college, which meant among other things digging through all kinds of UN documents looking at voting records on resolutions and their texts. One of the rather striking things I noticed was on a lot of common-sense-seeming resolutions before the General Assembly, the vote came down to, oh, EVERYBODY IN THE FUCKING WORLD yes, the US/Apartheid-era South Africa/Israel no. We're talking things like, let's get rid of land mines, or slavery, or apartheid.

Can't see why residents of any other countries would object to that.

As for the effectiveness of the UN, I would strongly recomend reading The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power by James Traub. A big part of the UN's inability to act effectively has been the lack of will of its member states to commit to action, and the US is a big part of that problem.

OK, number two, the OJ thing. A reality show? I doubt it. I wonder if this was written before Rupert pulled the book. It is amusing to have the duck talking about how Fox news is going to rule the world and then have to address the fact that NewsCorp was behind OJ's book. Or for that matter, that it seemed to the extent to which anyone defended the book, they were from the conservative side of the spectrum. What will happen is that the book is going to end up being published by someone somewhere and it'll sell millions and we can all wring our collective hands over the decline of western civilization.

And number three. This seems to be a continuation of the duck's misogynistic attacks on Katie Couric from last fall. I've not seen her on the news, but when the Katie Couric strips ran, neither had Tinsley. His critique boiled down to "she's a woman, how can she possibly be a serious journalist?" I had to google Lara Logan whose picture appears to the right, but apparently his problem with her is, "she's an attractive woman, how can she possible be a serious journalist?" I don't know, maybe sixteen years of journalism experience including newspaper reporting and dispatches from multiple war zones has something to do with it?

And was there anything remotely funny here? At least Prickly City makes an effort to tell jokes.