A daily analysis of the comic strip which manages to be less funny than Mary Worth
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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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:
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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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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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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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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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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Umm, Bruce, I think I know why you're still single and living in Mom's basement.
Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip
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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Today, as part of Tribune Company mandatory cost reductions, the L.A. Times had a ritualitistic blood letting on the comics pages resulting in the dropping of several comic strips, including Mallard Fillmore (as a matter of balance Candorville, which is sometimes funny also disappeared along with La Cucaracha, which was rarely funny and had an eye-melting visual style which I won't miss). Doonesbury and Prickly City remain, as does, inexplicably, Rex Morgan M.D.
As for today's strip, name recognition of Clinton? Of course people remember Clinton. The republicans have been trying to blame everything that's gone wrong for the last six years on him. Curse him for abandoning the search for Osama bin Laden to embroil us in an endless quagmire in Iraq.
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0
rants
Labels:
bill clinton,
cutting comics,
hillary clinton
The cardinal rule of comics is that once the holiday's over, you move on to another topic for jokes. Unless, of course you're Bruce Tinsley and you're so busy supporting the troops you forget Veteran's Day (even though it's always November 11th), or you decide that your "wit" demands that you continue your "Mallentines" on the 15th and beyond.
Because, gee, there's nothing funnier than Bill Clinton is promiscuous jokes.
And I thought that Bill was supposed to be responsible for her career, and not her baggage. Bruce, you only get to have it one way.
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2
rants
Labels:
bill clinton,
hillary clinton
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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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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We get some more brilliantly unfunny commentary from the duck today. Let's see, "joke" one: Hillary Clinton is running against Barack Obama. She'll be fighting hard, but does Tinsley really believe that she'd really say something as openly racist as "America's not ready for a black president"? I'm sorry, I don't think even Pat Robertson would be that stupid.
"Joke" two: "Barack Obama" is hard to pronounce. Umm, only if you have some sort of large prosthetic appliance in your mouth (get your mind out of the gutter, I'm talking about orthodontia). Of course that puts aside the right-wing wags who say things like Barack Osama or joyfully point out that Obama's middle name is Hussein. Which is a really effective political tactic--if you're running for Junior High Class President. Personally my first choice pick for 2008 is Al Gore, but he's almost definitely not running. Obama is my second choice and I believe that he'll be the next president of the US (barring a Bush impeachment/resignation). But at least those comments are a lot funnier than what Tinsley came up with.
"Joke" three: Milton Friedman. OK, I'll admit I had to go to wikipedia on this one. I've heard the name, but I'll be damned if I knew anything about what the man claimed, although I think that Michael J. Fox's character might have declared him his favorite economist back in the Family Ties days. Skimming over wikipedia, it seems that he's a big-time laissez faire guy. Fair enough, there's a lot to be said for that, although I think there are limits and so, apparently did Friedman. I think though that I'd draw the line a lot farther back than Friedman would, and his support of school vouchers is a classic example of that sort of ideological blindness. When anyone actually starts looking at how vouchers work in practice, flaws become grossly apparent. What people forget is that the purpose of public education is to make sure that we have an educated population to avoid gross failures in the democratic principle.
