The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

A Tip O’ the Satirical Cap to Station Agent

Fill in the blank. A New Yorker magazine cover is to Barak Obama what a National Review cover is to (blank).

A geriatric John McCain in a wheelchair! Get it? Now THAT’S funny! But, what about those thousands of Nimrod-in-Chief Hitler caricatures? Funny as hell they were. Why, some of the Photoshopped mash-ups of Lil’ Napoleon dressed as a terrorist rival the New Yorker’s noteworthy effort. And don’t even get me started on the Cindy McCain and Laura Bush robot jokes - it’s comic gold I tell ya’, comic gold!

It’s also time for a slap up side the head.

Dueling Typewriters and Pens
The much-excoriated New Yorker cover is no more over the top than a thousand other satirical cartoons produced by the left and right. Satire, especially political satire, always goes for the gut. By its nature, it’s a knife fight of dueling typewriters and cartoonists’ pens. It’s often over the top and vicious and it’s supposed to be. If it wasn’t, it would be a wonkish, stuffy policy discussion - boring as hell and not nearly as stress-relieving as a good belly laugh.

Political cartoons - especially good ones - often reveal a truth. In this case, a truth about those who cry over spilt cartoonists’ ink with claims the cartoon will bring about a sure victory for Yertle the Turtle McCain and the simultaneous collapse of Western civilization.

Hogswallop! If Obama is such a weak candidate a satirical cartoon will topple him, we’ve all got much bigger worries.

Satire’s a Good Thing
Many of the righteously indignant claim the cover only enforces the misperceptions and outright lies of the anti-Obaminator crowd. It probably does, but given the New Yorker’s position as one of the ring leaders in the right’s liberal media elite, I’m guessing not many Bushies or McCainiacs will pick up a copy to nod with satisfaction that the media finally got it right and has come over to the dark side. Therein lies the satire. The cover’s not a satire because it confirms anti-Obama views. It’s a satire because it lampoons the addle-brained, fear-mongering anti-Obamans.

Satire’s a good thing. It allows us to laugh when, by all rights, we should be crying. Righteous indignation has it’s place too. We should be righteously pissed at the things going on in our country and a good rant is a way to make that point strongly. And if you’re handy with a cartoonist’s pen or a keyboard, satire is a particularly delicious way to do it. I satirize my political opponents often and when I do there are plenty of pats on the back for administering a good, old-fashioned, ass-kicking screed against the dark forces of the right - comments that come from some of the same people now seeing satire in a different light.

This satire also reveals another dark truth. By wasting energy on a satire with the weight of a politicized Dilbert cartoon, the righteously indignant crowd puts themselves exactly where those being lampooned want them - firmly among the hypocritical for laughing at right-bashing satire while carping about vicious pens turned on their own main man.

Your attitudes only help those who want to see us fail and want to harm us. Why do you hate America and want the terrorists to win?

BTW, that last sentence was satire.

Get it?

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

I’m an atheist, but I have no problem with believers who don’t force their religion on me. I’m OK with In God We Trust on our money. If school kids want to have prayer meetings, I don’t object as long as they don’t try to convert others and adhere to the same standards as any other school group. I couldn’t care less if you call the holidays Christmas or pledge allegiance to one nation under God. Personally, I view Jeremiah Wright as the flip side of the same wacky coin as John Hagee, but I believe both of them can say what they want because our Constitution and laws say they can - even if it’s the biggest load of hogswallop I’ve ever heard.

But, I’m not OK with John Freshwater, a Mount Vernon, Ohio “science” teacher under fire for teaching creationism. It’s not even the creationism that bothers me. I think it’s a wagon load of crap, but it might be usefully taught as one of many cultural concepts in a world studies, religion, or philosophical program - anything but science. Creationism aside though, Freshwater also showed bad judgment for failing to remove religious materials from his class - an infraction that had already cost his school system a lawsuit.

But the thing I’m REALLY not OK with is this idjit of enlightenment burning crosses onto his students’ arms. Let me emphasize this, Freshwater is a dangerous bigot much worse than Jim Piculas, the Toothpick Wizard. Freshwater used a “high-frequency generator” to burn his students, an act disturbingly close to other “religious” practices like genital mutilation and stoning unmarried pregnant women. To make matters worse, he tried to weasel-speak it away as an “X” instead of a cross. Some performance for an acolyte of a benevolent God, eh?

Some, including some of his students, are now defending Freshwater as a First Amendment patriot. They support his violation of classroom rules by keeping the religious paraphernalia on display and his crosses - which are no longer “X”s now that he has the soapbox - burned into another’s flesh.

I’m sure Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly will disagree, but here’s a newsflash - courts have already made many decisions on what’s allowable in the classroom and I don’t believe using kids as life-size wood burning kits has been approved. Further, court rulings already support the concept that religious paraphernalia isn’t allowed. You may say it violates your First Amendment rights, but the Supreme Court of your country begs to differ. You can prattle on about how you believe the decision should be something else, but we’re not living in a theocracy, we’re living in a democracy where the law of the land isn’t the King James, but the Constitution.

Many of the most conservatively religious people have absolutely no trouble condemning Muslim suicide bombers while defending this type of behavior as somehow superior. Those actions are what makes atheists and those of less-popular faiths cringe. The Freshwater’s of the world believe they live under a “higher” law than the Constitution. I’m tempted to recommend they leave for other, similarly intolerant theocracies or that simply firing Freshwater isn’t enough. But I won’t. I’ll charitably take a familiar page from their Bible instead.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

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Let’s just hold on half-a-mo before we get our panties in a bunch over President Pickledick’s Nazi appeasement shtick. After all, politicians since the 1930s have trotted out the same lame line over and over to not much success. This fidelity to stupid ideas proves politicians aren’t exactly the quickest learners on the planet (which, by the way, paper-waving Neville Chamberlain demonstrated in spades).

Incurious George may have chosen a wildly inappropriate venue for his smear and his propensity for such shenanigans is well-known. However, seriously charging most modern politicians of appeasement is clearly a Close Encounter of the Hyperbolic Kind that lessens the impact of the truly barbaric things Nazis did in real life. But the sad truth is that both sides are equally guilty of similar hyperbole and both sides are equally indignant when it happens. That’s not to say the charge is OK or that the utterance wasn’t clearly a big, fresh steak thrown to the Israelis and the more rabid members of Carniveorge’s party. The fishing-with-dynamite tinge of the story is both wrong and stupid, but also nothing to get all riled up about. Bullies only attack when they get a rise out of the victim - and George is a bully if he’s nothing else

The Bushies did their ever-dependable poor job with their homework before heaving this stinking turd of a charge on the world stage. The administration has already talked to terrorists - sometimes successfully. One of the few bright spots in Bush’s piss-poor foreign relations policy resulted in Libya’s Khadafi kicking his terrorist lifestyle to the curb. Bush and the Pootiehead Cabal already talks freely with several state sponsors of terrorism - Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and arguably Israel come to mind. His own Secretary of State and several of the top generals he famously devotes rapt attention to have repeatedly counseled him to talk to these rogue regimes.

Like most snark-ass charges, appeasement holds a small grain of truth and a lot of Stretch Armstronginess. Talking with the most belligerent of these unsavory types isn’t likely to result in a large or sustained change in their behavior, but he’s also demonstrated that whacking Iran, et al with his corked Louisville Slugger isn’t working out so great either.

It boils down to this: if you’re talking, you’re not fighting. This tactic is called containment - something wholly different than appeasement. Containment uses talk, coupled with incentives or sometimes downright sabre-rattling, to lead a recalcitrant asshat to the table. Appeasement is talking incessantly and never backing up tough words with action. Even St. Ronnie of Reagan used containment as a very successful tool. Pulling on the ‘ol presidential Tony Lama’s and kicking the shit out of an Iranian crackpot who only has marginal sway over his own country doesn’t solve a thing.

So remember, George’s half-baked appeasement charge isn’t even worth dignifying with a response. The best course of action is not to appease him, but to ignore him like a blood-sucking mosquito biting the ass of an elephant. We already have him more or less contained, ignore him so he doesn’t get the bullyish emotional goose for which he pushes so hard. Just repeat, “I’m paper and you’re glue. Whatever bounces off me sticks to you.”

That’s probably the most mature thing any of us can say.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!