I’ve asked before if Obama really understands how he comes across a lot of the time. With his administration defined by trying to achieve some Grand Bipartisan Bargain, I get the feeling he’s at least a little naive about what people think about him.

Not about everything. At the Correspondent’s Dinner this past weekend he joked about being a Muslim socialist, so he at least understands the most ridiculous views about him. But for over four years he’s been holding out a hand to the Republicans and had it swatted aside, again and again thinking they’ll agree to work with him this time.

But with the idea of closing Guantanamo Bay in the news again, I wonder if he doesn’t have at at least some skill manipulating perception. Check out this blog post talking about House Republicans calling for three dozens votes on Obamacare, knowing full well there’s no way the bill will get repealed, but because they can go back to their constituents and say “While in office I tried to get Obamacare repealed.”

Does Obama have the same motivation when it comes to closing Gitmo? He’s not committed to letting the innocent prisoners go, he just wants to move the whole damn thing and keep the offensively broken system in place.

But by bringing it up again he can say “I tried to close Gitmo,” which his supporters will eat up even if the details aren’t so cut and dry. And without reelection as a motivation, what is he aiming at? How his legacy is shaped?

thatwasfunwhileitlasted:

secotm:

“People who don’t like the idea of poor people having medical insurance. You know, Christians.”

(And I wonder what took so long for Asay to dress Obama up as a Redcoat. Unless I’ve missed some earlier cartoons that did that.)

Chuck Asay concedes that Republicans, having failed to win elections or affect their preferred policy, have nothing left to do but hide in the shadows and snipe—idiomatically or literally—at Barack Obama and Democrats. A good cartoon.

Isn’t that what they’ve always been doing?

“People who don’t like the idea of poor people having medical insurance. You know, Christians.”

(And I wonder what took so long for Asay to dress Obama up as a Redcoat. Unless I’ve missed some earlier cartoons that did that.)

When conservatives talk about “religious freedom” what they usually mean is maintaining the idea that America is an explicitly Christian nation whose government and public institutions are to give deference and preferential treatment to their view of Christian orthodoxy.

In other words, when they decry attacks on religious freedom you can be assured they most likely mean “People are allowed to do stuff we don’t like, waaah!”

The entertainment value of movies can be charted as a valley. At one end you have the legitimately good movies, the ones you can enjoy unironically. At the other end are the ‘so bad they’re good’ movies. The Room, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Foodfight! The ones that are so baffling and fail on so many levels in so many ways they become hilarious. They’re not good by any metric, but they are entertaining. And then at the low point of the valley are the just plain boring. Movies that aren’t good or bad, or are just kinda good but they’re forgettable. The majority of movies are way down in the valley.

Political cartoons are like that. There’s the handful of good ones (check my posts from yesterday for a few), there’s a ton of bland, uninteresting ones, and then there’s ones like this. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this The Room of editorial cartoons, but it’s so hilariously misconceived that I have to admit it made me chuckle. Just not for the reason Branco may have been intending.

Why is Obama’s nose growing? Why is he littering with a piece of paper that says ‘character’? Why is the cartoon titled ‘Kink Nightmare’? And why is he using Martin Luther King Jr. to attack Obamacare, considering that King spoke out against the inequality of the health care system?

I know the answer to that last one: conservatives have spent years trying to co-opt Dr. King as their own, regardless of how insane that is to anyone with the slightest knowledge of history.

But the rest of the cartoon is just silly. So very, very silly.

Health care reform will prove so popular it will wipe out the dinosaur that is the GOP and usher in a new age.

A good cartoon.

Uh… wait, what? People are being arrested by the IRS?

I know there’s exaggeration and hyperbole for the purposes of satire in service of making a point, but Chuck Asay always seems to be exaggerating. It’s hard to tell if what’s he’s presenting in a cartoon is satire or what he really believes is reality.

I swear, we’re about a week away from Chuck Asay talking about FEMA concentration camps.

Oh look, Ramirez has doubled down on the “he didn’t call it terrorism” lie. And he seems to be trying to make hay out of oil production under Obama. Because that will decide the election.

And I have to ask: don’t editors get tired of cartoonists turning in two cartoons with the same idea? It doesn’t happen often enough for me to call it out, but it does happen. Don’t editors want, you know, original content?

deadcityscrolls:

agoodcartoon:

secotm:

Conservatives live in a fantasy land where things they fear are literal monsters they can get rid of with mindless violence.

A good cartoon.

Also,

Romney wants to destroy the very same creature he created. Either he was wrong then or he is wrong now, and so perhaps the decision of whether or not to destroy it should be left to those with clearer judgement on this. A good cartoon.

- Submitted by wellthereitisthen

I myself would add, “When they have nothing better to respond with, Republicans always pull out their Raygun and start blasting away. AGC.”

Here’s an apolitical point of craft: why draw a blob with OBAMACARE written on it and a spaceman with ROMNEY written on him when you could draw like, a monstrous Obama in a doctor outfit eating old people and ripping out wallstreet bank vaults and throwing the money at heroin addicts, and make the spaceman actually look like Romney?  Anything to avoid having to put giant labels on the subjects of your cartoons.  I know there’s a tradition of labeling things in political cartoons, but be honest, that is a tradition of terribleness.

Because that sounds like actual work.

Conservatives live in a fantasy land where things they fear are literal monsters they can get rid of with mindless violence.

A good cartoon.