Bruce Tinsley admits it.

It turns out that all of my speculation about his love life is true (read the strip). Gee Bruce, maybe if you weren't such a racist misogynist, you'd be able to get a date.

In the Walter Williams watch category, there's another article. Well, not an article actually, more an opinion piece by a Wall Street Journal guy, well not really an opinion piece, more a bit of lame reportage to fill the contracted number of column inches.

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.

Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip

Maybe he doesn't know what "threaten" means

Anyone remember way back when, the duck saying that he was "going to threaten an African-American"?

Then he went on to write:

I think it's high time you were reviled, vilified, slurred, demonized and discriminated against by the media!
/
I demand that you run for president!!

That's not a threat. Not even close.

There's no outrage because (a) you didn't make a threat and (2) you're a cartoon duck! With random italicization and too many exclamation points!!

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Maybe Bruce doesn't know that Barack smokes too

Or at least he did until recently.

But of course, since Bruce Tinsley seems to take the stance that he's for all evil, I half expect him to claim that smoking doesn't cause cancer and that the tobacco companies are poor persecuted companies which are selling a harmless product..

We already know what Walter Williams thinks on the subject.

Personally, I find Christopher Buckley's take on the subject to be one of the best one.

Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip

Maybe trying to do a week of headlines with the same first word isn't a good idea

I mentioned global warming yesterday and I feel compelled to note this factoid courtesy of Kevin Drum. It's not just Walter Williams. It's a large and growing fraction of Republicans who insist that global warming isn't real.

As for today's strip, let me point you at Brendan Calling for a good response to the strip. I did try and see if Walter Williams said anything offensive about slavery, and while I'm sure he did, the best I could find was that Abraham Lincoln was a bad man who cared more about building a strong central government than about ending slavery. Oh, and that despite all evidence to the contrary, economics and the free market would have brought about an end to slavery on its own. Because, as we all know, slavery is economically unviable in today's economy.

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Maybe it's Groundhog Day over and over and over...

So the Walter Williams/Howard Dean nonsense continues from Bruce Tinsley. Oh so much wrong. And yet there's also so much right: With a paper-trail like Walter Williams has, he will never have to worry about being elected president.

• Airport inconvenience and racial profiling is OK, Mr Williams doesn't fly commercial
• WW already was able to take advantage of affirmative action, now that he's got his, time to make sure that colleges go back to being filled with rich white kids
• The minimum wage is just a way to prevent us from paying black people less than whites. Therefore it's bad.
• Some colleges have wacky sounding classes that "some students are required to take." This is responsible for poor K-12 education.
• Let the Africans starve: That's the best way for them to get out of their mess
• Second-hand smoke is perfectly harmless.
• Charity is bad

When I was in college (and I'm sure it's still the case), there were groups of kids who read Atlas Shrugged or some other piece of dreck and decided that they liked the idea that selfishness was good and went about spreading their newfound faith with the zealoutry of Jehovah's Witnesses. Most of them grew out of it. Walter Williams appears to be one of the ones who didn't.

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Maybe the earth will be wiped out by an asteroid

Because at least that would put an end to this Walter Williams stuff. I did another quick check to see if I was premature about the groundswell when I checked on Saturday (if only I had saved that for today, but I thought for sure that Bruce Tinsley would have moved on to ranting about something else by now). Nope. Although a date-sorted google news search on "Walter Williams" (and also "Walter E Williams"), reveals that Mr Williams is one of the last people on earth to still think that global warming isn't real. Yeah, that's just what we need in the 2008 election cycle.

Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip

When in doubt, just make things up

So today, Bruce asserts, "The media keep saying that we're 'not yet ready for an African-American president'."

We'll let the google link speak for itself.

Ok, how about not ready for an African-American president? Nope, no go there either. We've got three stories. The Chicago Defender, a black paper which quotes Sam Greenlee indirectly as stating that America is not ready for an African-American president, but who then goes on to say that Obama should run anyway (and that he would vote for him).

From the University of Nevada Las Vegas' The Rebel Yell, we have the words not appearing in a quote (direct, or indirect). Ooh, they're named The Rebel Yell. Good ol' boys, pick-up trucks and confederate flags. This should be good, right?

Some claim that the United States is not ready for an African American president, but this can be played off as simple generalizing buggery. While many still hold certain racial stereotypes as true, the number of minority candidates elected to large offices has increased by leaps and bounds in recent years.

Curses, foiled again.

We have a quote from the Daily Southtown of "Jan" who's afraid that racism will result in even further attacks on Obama along the lines of the cocaine "story" and presumably, although she doesn't mention it, the Madrassa story. I'm sure that Monday's rant will be a take-down of the Washington Times and Fox News for pushing that garbage.

The duck goes on to claim that he's never met a single person who wouldn't vote for a black candidate. And yet, one out of three Iowans are willing to say that they believe that America isn't ready for an African-American president (the numbers are even worse for women and Hispanics). Apparently Indiana is a lot more progressive than Iowa.

Oh, and since it's Saturday, let me point your attention at our current sponsor (until someone raises the bid), Neon Hearts. Not a web comic, but rather an on-line bookstore, with a unique twist: They use a simplistic method for calculating postage for shipping your order, but if your postage is less than that number, they'll give you that much as a credit on your next order. It's all used and often obscure, but there may be something you'll like there.

Update: Speaking of things the media hasn't talked about, I tried doing google news searches on "walter williams mallard" and "walter williams tinsley" to see if there was any media coverage of Bruce's efforts this week. Nothing. Not even a letter to the editor.

Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip

He's not even trying to make it funny anymore

Not that he ever was. I could comment about the bizarre belief that a ranting comic duck would ever do anything more than fill up the RNC and Walter Williams e-mail boxes with crank letters.

So let me talk about this article from last year (and whence came the illustration above). Clif has already commented on the substance of the quote and the pretentiousness of Williams's use of the word "fortnight" (yeah, who does use that these days?). I'll instead note that Walter Williams refers to his wife as "Mrs. Williams." That must be some interesting home life.

One more thing: Many of you have blogs or websites of your own. I'm thinking that it would be fun if google searches for "Mallard Fillmore" and "Bruce Tinsley" came here as the first option. Here's how a googlebombing on these terms works. Paste the following into a blog posting (or a web page)

<a href="http://whatswrongwithmallardfillmore.blogspot.com">Mallard Fillmore</a>
<a href="http://whatswrongwithmallardfillmore.blogspot.com">Bruce Tinsley</a>

and that's it.

No need to do it more than once, and it's important that the text that's part of the link be those words. With enough links, this blog can be the top search result on "Mallard Fillmore" and "Bruce Tinsley."

Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip

All of the time = not as often as you might think

In Ventury County (California), there's someone who thinks that Mallard Fillmore is "entirely factual, complete with citations from current news sources."

Oh dear.

But that's what I do every day, show that it's not entirely factual.

Let's take today's assertion, that Walter Williams is "speaking all of the time on college campuses", and offers the handy "citation" of yaf.org. So I check the site. Let's see, in the current events calendar, Dr Williams is scheduled to speak, um, once.

OK, but they just might not have put up all his speaking engagements yet. How about the past events calendar? He's listed seven times. Well that's a lot better. Until you realize that the calendar goes back to January 2001, with Williams's first appearance in the spring of 2003. So he's been averaging just over two speaking engagements a year. And at $10,000-15,000 per appearance, that's not really fundraising money either.

I wonder if Dr Williams is embarrassed about this whole thing? He doesn't mention it on his home page which is full of typical right-wing spew (ooh, Canadian health care rations care--no mention of how American insurers will just deny it outright or come up with bureaucratic hoops whose whole purpose is to discourage seeking healthcare; pacifists are causing the war against radical islam to drag out--never mind that the neocons have been working to expand it as much as possible). So I'm guessing that maybe he his embarrassed. Unless, as that page seems to indicate, he's incapable of embarrassment.

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I did not know that

No sign of the duck today. Instead we're treated to a figure who's apparently supposed to be Howard Dean and--actually I don't know who the blonde is supposed to be, some lesbian latte-sipping liberal I suppose.

Anyway, actual dialogue from the strip:

Dean: Oh geeez! Mallard Fillmore's starting a populist "draft Walter Williams for the G.O.P. nomination" movement!
LL-sL: But isn't that how your "grass-roots" campaign in 2004 started sir?

How about that, Howard Dean's candidacy began with a Mallard Fillmore comic strip!

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Walter who?

Ah so the big reveal comes, and it turns out that the "threat" is a demand that Walter Williams run for president.

The wikipedia article, in that blandly non-controversial way that wikipedia talks about controversial people, says

Dr. Williams is also a critic of the minimum wage and affirmative action, believing that both practices are detrimental to blacks. Dr. Williams especially emphasizes his belief that racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States are overemphasized as problems faced by the black community and do not adequately explain the situation blacks face today.

Of course, he also thinks that the confederate states had a right to secede. Because after all, the secession had nothing to do with slavery, it was all about state's rights. And you wouldn't believe the great deal he got on the Brooklyn Bridge. He'll be making a mint on the tolls as soon as the paperwork comes through.

He also lauds capitalism as being much superior to feudalism. Apparently it allows people to amass large amounts of money by "serving your fellow man" rather than "looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man.". And it also, of course prevents us from establishing feudal dynasties.

Personally, I have to admit that I have my own preferences for who Bruce should have named in this strip if he were to go this direction.

In the department of I'm-clearly-not-qualified-to-write-this-blog, I had no idea that the duck is supposed to be a TV reporter. There had been some clues that he was a journalist of some sort, but I had always assumed he was a newspaper reporter. How old media of me.

Be a glutton for punishment: Read the strip