Is Bruce trying to make a monkey out of me?

Every so often, there's an attempt at a joke that completely falls flat. Is this meant to be a jab at the pro- or anti-evolution crowd? Is the recycled caveman attacking evolution or creationism? Who the hell can tell? Not me.

Personally, as a Christian, I find the creationists to be offensive. They've managed to reduce Christianity to an absurdity. Trying to read Genesis chapter 1 as literal natural history rather than as the beginning of salvation history not only forces Christianity into defending absurd propositions (e.g., carbon dating has errors in huge orders of magnitude), but misses out on the primary message of Genesis chapter 1: That God created the earth and all that is in it, and that it is good.

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Caveman bush, perhaps?

I'm guessing that Bruce, in his timeliness, is making reference to Bush's sliming of McCain back in 2000.

In other news, Clinton won the New Hampshire primary on the Dem side and McCain on the R side. While I was hoping for Obama to make a clean sweep, it is nice that it's likely that my vote on February 5th will mean something. I just fear that my curse will continue and I will end up, once again, never voting for a winning candidate in a presidential election.

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Once again priorities are mixed up

I've gotta say that while a real playoff system for college football would theoretically nice (although what do I care? Most of the colleges I've attended didn't even have football teams, and those that did were so low in the hierarchy, they took public transportation to away games), it would be even nicer if people wouldn't be declaring the elections over after exactly one state has had its say.

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Bruce channels Johnny Hart

That's the only possible explanation for today's especially incoherent strip. I sometimes wonder whether it might be better if Mr Tinsley didn't try to make jokes.

So as near as I can tell, this is a strip set in the bizarre world of B.C. where there are both cavemen and Christianity. But perhaps most amusing about the whole thing is that Bruce has to be enraged by the fact that politicians no longer run to the right, but there is effort among the Democratic candidates to appeal to the left-wing segments of the party. And what's more, that those candidates are the ones winning elections

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O O Obama

And today Bruce continues his metaphorical accounting of his disappointment in the Republican field. His boy Mitt Romney had a pretty sad second-place finish behind Huckabee. Now, winning Iowa doesn't guarantee much as Pat Robertson can attest, but it can be a boost, and I'm hoping that my man, Obama can take the momentum of Iowa and turn it into a nomination.

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New Year's Prediction: Readers will be shocked when Mallard Fillmore tells a joke (but not today)

When you've got a party which has decided that they and they alone have a monopoly on religion, particularly Christianity, and Romney himself makes a big (albeit lame) speech on religion (I mean, come on, freedom requires religion? As a religious person, I don't buy that), of course he's going to be asked about religion, especially since a sizable number of Republican primary voters consider his religion to be non-Christian, if not a modern-day form of Baal-worship.

But I'm sure that Bruce is really just upset that there's all this focus on the negatives of the Republicans and nary a peep about the note in Vince Foster's briefcase.

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I lied

Heavens, the thought of reading a week's worth of the strip and commenting on them all in one sitting, no not for me.

Instead we get a stereotypical attack on Clinton. Because in Bruce's twisted mind, she's so desperate to win, she'll slime people merely for endorsing and supporting one of her opponents. Even if, as he claimed in one of the strips last week, their impact is minimal. I guess I'm next, for my own Obama endorsement.

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The inevitability meme

So Bruce is pushing the inevitability meme. Just in time for Obama to pick up some steam against her.

It's too bad the republicans don't have any strong candidates. Every single one of them has some huge disqualifier:

• Giuliani - cross-dresser, serial adulterer, corrupt
• Romney - Mormon, dubious history on abortion and homosexuality
• Thompson - senile, dubious abortion credentials
• Huckabee - not paying attention to world events, freed serial rapist to rape and kill again, religious fundamentalism won't play beyond evangelicals
• McCain - too old, blew maverick credentials by cozying with religious right
• Paul - libertarian schtick doesn't play beyond internet faithful, the Howard Dean of 2008

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And it's back to the misogyny

I'm starting to regret this resuscitation of the blog... all the toxic attitudes of Bruce's strip are a bit much.

I suppose we could substitute "senator" for "president" and have the strip be about Dole, or "representative" for it to be about Bono. But we're talking about Clinton, a woman who has a law degree from Yale, was a congressional legal counsel, and was twice named one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America. She was active enough during her husband's administration that Mallard was indignant enough to cry, "who elected her?" and is in her second term as the junior senator from New York. That's a better resume than some of the Republican candidates for president have.

But you see, she's a woman and therefore an inferior being in Bruce Tinsley's eyes.

In other news, this blog is currently search result #11 for "Mallard Fillmore". Breaking into the top ten will take a bit of effort since positions 1-5 and 7 are the strip itself, with Wikipedia at 6 and amazon at 10. That means I most likely would be displacing a Huffington Post article or Don Markstein's Toonopedia to get in the top 10.

For "Bruce Tinsley" I'm currently at #19, but since I don't mention his name that often, it's understandable.

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It's been almost seven years and STILL

He's got an anti-Bill Clinton fetish. Which I suppose is part and parcel of the anti-Hillary Clinton fetish. Of course all the statements he attributes to Bill are even more applicable to the current resident of the White House.

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Because we have people who live to provide fodder for satire...

Well, it appears that the duck is off the topic of Hillary Clinton and has decided to turn his eye towards some other topic.

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Omigosh, a conservative producer!

Because, after all, isn't everyone in Hollywood a Godless homosexual communist?

Hmm, I was curious about the context for the quote, and noted among other things that this appeared only in the Moonie-controlled Washington Times (so in case there was any doubt as to what paper Bruce Tinsley reads, that's been settled once and for all). There's no context given for the quote, but let's look at the man himself. He describes himself as a "right-wing nut" and he got a visit from the dean of West Point himself to talk about his TV show 24. Seems, that the dean of West Point felt that the TV show had a "toxic effect" on efforts to train soldiers and he'd "like them to stop".

In that same speech, Surnow indicated that he favored Rudy Giuliani, he of the mysterious accounting and collossally bad judgment. Now that's nuts.

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Sometimes he just makes me so sad

It's the continual harping on the same topics over and over. This is virtually the same lame attempt at a joke as yesterday's post.

And insofar as there's any basis to the claims, the truth is, professional women get shoved into a narrow corridor between these two extremes and get savagely attacked for any deviation out of what's allowed for them. Be too feminine and you get this, don't be feminine enough and you get this. One hopes that comics editors everywhere will have the good sense to pull the strip should Clinton be elected president next year rather than print day after day of misogynistic rantings.

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Welcome to 1979

Seriously, this looks like it's a critique of feminism ca 1979. I guess the "Wow, Abby, you'd be a great presidential candidate!" is supposed to be a reference to Clinton. Because Bruce thinks that she's stuck with 1970s era views of gender roles just like him.

Umm, Bruce, I think I know why you're still single and living in Mom's basement.

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He's so cute when he's incoherent

I'm an Obama man in this campaign cycle (although if Gore were to run this year, I'd take a leave of absence from my job to campaign for him full time, especially if it were a Gore/Obama ticket), but if Clinton makes Bruce this apoplectic, there's something to be said for her being the nominee.

As for the critiques, I have to say that the planted question thing is rather damaging, and John Dickerson does a pretty good job of explaining why in a column at slate. Personally, we've already had four years of Bush-style politics. I don't want any more of that.

Driver's licenses for illegal aliens? On the merits, this is unquestionably the right thing to do. But courtesy of widespread xenophobia whipped up by demagogues who don't think past the next election, it's an irrationally unpopular one. Personally, I think that Clinton's response was as good as you can get if you hope to get elected in the current political climate.

And waffling? I did some quick googling, and it's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot with Hillary, but again, I'd rather have someone who is willing to consider all sides of a story than someone who mindlessly refuses to change their mind no matter what the facts may say.

And let's throw in a bit of art critique: Bruce gets a lot of criticism for drawing characters as racial stereotypes, but looking at his version of Hillary, you can see he's given her the buck teeth that he puts on his Asian characters and the nose he gives his Jewish characters. Maybe he just can't help but draw characters as racial caricatures.

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Joe's hair has grown out

...but his eyes remain closed. Having spent about fifteen minutes at Joe Biden's photo gallery trying to find a picture I could use in yesterday's post, I can appreciate how hard it is to find a picture of the guy were he isn't either facing away from the camera, out of focus, badly lit, or any combination of the above.

As for the "joke," yes, I know about the time delays and all that, but everyone else has managed to get their Ana Nicole and Brittney jokes in on time (and funnier) I suppose we should just be thankful that these came in 2007 and not 2027.

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times has dropped Marmaduke to return La Cucaracha to the comics pages. Franklin Avenue is pushing for a return of Candorville, and while I agree that it's a good strip, I fear that the Faustian bargain that would allow it to reappear on the comics pages might also result in Get Fuzzy being dropped for the return of Mallard Fillmore.

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It's name recognition week

And to prove his point that nobody knows who Joe Biden is, Bruce Tinsley draws a generic white guy (with his eyes closed, of course) to illustrate his strip.

Come on, Bruce, we've got a guy who creates material for satirists. That's storybook, man.

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Because it's all about Hillary vs Obama

One of the recurring features of Mallard Fillmore is the misogyny which is barely concealed beneath the surface. In a lot of ways, Bruce Tinsley is the classic movie serial-killer: He hates women because he ain't getting any (it would explain the whole drunk driving thing too).

Let's see what's wrong today. At this point, there's not much pointing out the complete lack of scansion (although at least he does get AABBA right). But there is the standard-issue viewpoint that the dem primary is pure Barack vs. Clinton (never mind that Edwards has strong support, Clark and Gore aren't officially in (yet), and it's all a year away. Heck in November of 2003, I boldly predicted that John Kerry was going to be the first to drop out of the dem primary, an outcome which turned out to be far from the truth).

Then there's the claim that Hillary Clinton married her way to the spotlight. See, there's why I brought up the misogyny. Any serious observer of politics has to recognize that in fact, Hillary's marriage was the exact opposite of that: By marrying Bill, she ended up putting her own political career on hold for decades, and while it's certainly true that without the name she wouldn't have been a serious contender in New York in 2000, it's also certainly true, that without the marriage, she wouldn't have needed the name because she would have had a long serious political career of her own. She's far from my first choice in the dem primary, but she sure ain't the K-Fed of politics.

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Wrong in so many ways

Of course there's the formal things: Like something that I suppose is maybe a really weak attempt at a limerick, although usually Bruce at least gets the rhyme scheme and here we have something like ?ABBA.

Or "Mallentine" which I suppose is supposed to be Mallard+Valentine and rhyme with Valentine, but the double-L makes it seem like it's an ode to indoor retailing.

Or #23, which implies, that there are 22 more of these in the Bruce Tinsley archives.

How about the substance? Dude, nobody offers a rival a cabinet position as a consolation prize. VP maybe (unless you have Dick Cheney search the country for the best VP candidate), but not cabinet. And while I'm sure that every candidate would like every other candidate to drop out, this sort of deal-making just doesn't happen.

It does, I suppose, give Bruce a chance to draw a poor charicature of Hillary.

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Maybe he thinks one article is victory

Guess what! There's actually media coverage of the Walter Williams-Mallard Fillmore thing.

OK, it's the Washington Times, but it is at least a newspaper, sort of. You can read the article here along with commentary here, here, here and here. I wouldn't bother though, here's the short and easy-to-digest version: Walter Williams isn't running because Mrs Williams won't let him. He's received "hundreds" of supportive e-mails, almost as many e-mails supporting him running as offering to sell him v!agra without a prescription.

As for today's strip, come on, everybody who follows politics (including the media folks), knows at least one prominent black conservative.

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