He won by hanging nicknames like millstones around the necks of his opponents.
He called this fellow “Lyin’ Ted”.
And he berated her as “Crooked Hillary”
Insults, nicknames, and politics seem to work better together than anything else when you are trying to win over the fat, lazy white folks with too much money who gather at the Cracker Barrel in Lewisville, Texas to decide who will be President of the U. S. After all, they are the only ones whose voice still counts in politics. Voter I.D. laws, gerrymandering of voting districts, and vilification of Muslims has pretty much seen to that.
But I have always felt that insulting your opponent in a debate was not only uncivil, but actually cheating. I would much prefer to see ideas and policies and political positions be ridiculed. Still, that is not the way the world works now that the semi-stupid people have taken control. Vicious and personal is the preferred way of the modern day.
It was certainly awkward, stupid, and bad the way a certain Texas Grandpa Munster look-alike exploited his own children during his GOP nomination campaign. But that paled in comparison with how the Great Orange Face accused his father of killing J.F.K. and called his wife ugly in comparison to the plastic Barbie doll that Pumpkinhead currently keeps on leash number three for himself. Grampy Munster was right, when he said family should be off limits.
If you must vilify the un-TrusTED One, and we certainly must, it should be for the selfish, stupid policies and agendas that he would enact if he wins the golden ticket.
And how do we know what he would do if the “Ultimate Power of Castle Grayskull” actually became his? Well, he did spend a lot of time telling us what he would do. His message was not all Green Eggs and Ham. Though there was a lot of leftover ham even after the Dr. Seuss Filibuster.
So what is the proper way to talk about the Orangutan King we made the mistake of electing?
He has gone to considerable effort to place doubt in everyone’s mind about the truth in every reported story from the media.
Although, he seems to really like Fox News.
He has hammered it into the brains of his true believers that anything CNN says about the Russian hacking scandal is absolutely “WRONG!” Though I am inclined to believe that everything that comes out of his mouth truly means that the opposite of what he says is true.
And I think we all have to work a little harder to deny him control over what is defined as “True” and what he can be allowed to call “Fake.”
So, even though I realize I have a certain talent for insulting others myself, and have used it generously here, I do not think insults are the right way to go. You should talk about the ideas and the prejudices, and how those things lead to evil befalling us. Insults are a waste of time. But did you notice? While composing this piece, the cartoonists whose work I am sharing with you may have labeled them with names, I never once in my own writing named any of the ones I was insulting by name.
And I’ll bet you knew who I meant anyway.
If you are going to entertain a completely absurd notion like, “Shakespeare wasn’t really written by Shakespeare”, then you have to have some knowledge of the times and the context within which such a profoundly counter-intuitive thing could possibly be true. And it also helps to understand more precisely what the “writing of Shakespeare” actually means. Now, I know it is not particularly fair to confuse you, dear reader, right before I try to dazzle you with my complicated and over-thunk lackwit conspiracy theory, but that is, after all, what obfuscation actually means.
Making Fun
So I made a funny picture of the Keebler elf we put in charge of the Attorney General’s Office of the United States. This is my homage to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the elf who invented the best-selling cookie in the South, the Keebler Kluxie Cookie. But, of course, if I call the man a racist, angry Trumpkins are going to immediately tell me that I am the real racist. I admit it, though, I am prejudiced against people who hate others based on skin color, religion, or other factors that allow them to feel they are inherently better than the group that they hate. And I don’t apologize for making fun of the people I am prejudiced against. I have, after all, a good reason for making fun. I am a cartoonist at heart, if not a professional. And making fun of the things that I hate and fear makes me fear them less. I feel it is a much better response than to build more bombs and give the police more freedom to murder those I hate and fear. Laughing at the darkness is, I think, better than filling my own heart with the darkness and allowing it to snuff out my light.
For example, here is a vicious real-life Boris Badenov who really scares me. He is a very angry man who wants to punish people for being immigrants. He also hates Jewish people and is on record blaming them for the world’s troubles in a way that sounds frustratingly retro-Nazi-fascist in tone.
This is, of course, the same kind of fun-making that Jay Ward unleashed on the Russian threat that had American school children learning how to “duck and cover” in response to fears of imminent nuclear first-strikes back in the 60’s when I was a small boy. Rocky and Bullwinkle made us laugh and made it better. In this picture I have stolen you see Steve Bannon using a cane to threaten the All-American Moose. And you know that however dastardly the plan, there is every reason to believe the Moose will magically survive and we will get a good laugh at the bad guy’s expense.
And making fun of these cartoon villains (there is no member of Trump’s basket of villains who is not a human cartoon character) is not a matter of actually hating the people. I don’t personally hate any of these individuals. I make fun of them because it makes me feel better. It may also make some of you who I share these things with feel better too. I do hate many of the things they have said and done. And I feel I have a right to make fun of these things and thus make fun of the cartoon villains who said and did them.
I identify as a liberal for these reasons, and do not apologize for it, so make cartoons of me too if you feel the need.
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