Satire, Sarcasm and Parody — oh my!
The New Yorker cover continues to goad the public — there are tit/tat reads below; the last link, by Daryl Cagle, includes ‘toons.
An interesting article on comedy in the Times has Bill Maher quoted: “If you can’t do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?” Yes — I get it; but I can’t help but think some caption as a qualifier on that cover might have prevented it from being ripped off and posted on a wall somewhere in a nice, conservative home … next to the gun rack.
On Friday night, John McLaughlin — moderator of the group I call “The Cranky People” — intimated to his PBS lineup that Obama was an Oreo; I turned to a friend and said, “Crusty old white people should just shut up.” Evidently I wasn’t the only one to think so [article below.]
All this business has me remembering the Ted Danson/Whoopie Goldberg black face fallout; we’re still too close to the bone on the topic of racism to allow the wounds to heal, I guess — the lyrics to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” still play in our heads, summoning not-funny-at-all images.
You can laugh at wickedness after it has safely passed by … not before.
Here are more-interesting-than-usual reads and links on this topic, since what makes us laugh is still a mystery, eluding analysis. The final piece by Juan Cole ponders what makes John McSame laugh … and frets his sadistic tendencies and echos of frat boy humor.
A word on the economy – with headlines like this:
WHOLESALE INFLATION WORST IN 27 YEARS…
… there is obvious anxiety in the air. Lines at various banks will only make it worse; but how to stop it? There’s no Jimmy Stewart waiting inside Pottersville Savings and Loan to talk us down from the ledge. As close as we’ll come is Krugman, who says that the Fannie/Freddie mess isn’t as bad as we think.
Try to remember … all day, every day … there is ENOUGH! for everybody.
Jude
Want Obama in a Punch Line? First, Find a Joke
BILL CARTER, NYT
July 15, 2008
What’s so funny about Barack Obama? Apparently not very much, at least not yet.
On Monday, The New Yorker magazine tried dipping its toe into broad satire involving Senator Obama with a cover image depicting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife, Michelle, as fist-bumping, flag-burning, bin Laden-loving terrorists in the Oval Office. The response from both Democrats and Republicans was explosive.
Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.
But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.
“We’re doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for Mr. O’Brien on “Late Night.” The jokes will come, representatives of the late-night shows said, when Mr. Obama does or says something that defines him — in comedy terms.
“We’re carrion birds,” said Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central channel. “We’re sitting up there saying ‘Does he seem weak? Is he dehydrated yet? Let’s attack.’ ”
But so far, no true punch lines have landed.
Why? The reason cited by most of those involved in the shows is that a fundamental factor is so far missing in Mr. Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic persona.
“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.
Jokes have been made about what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton really thought about Mr. Obama during the primaries, and about the vulgar comments the Rev. Jesse Jackson made about him last week. But anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat.
When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”
Despite audience resistance, Mr. Stewart contended, his show had been able to develop a distinctive angle on Mr. Obama.
Noting that the senator seems to emphasize the historic nature of his quest, Mr. Stewart said, “So far, our take is that he’s positioning himself to be on a coin.”
There is no doubt, several representatives of the late-night shows said, that so far their audiences (and at least some of the shows’ writers) seem to be favorably disposed toward Mr. Obama, to a degree that perhaps leaves them more resistant to jokes about him than those about most previous candidates.
“A lot of people are excited about his candidacy,” Mr. Sweeney said. “It’s almost like: ‘Hey, don’t go after this guy. He’s a fresh face; cut him some slack.’ ”
Justin Stangel, who is a head writer for “Late Show With David Letterman,” disputed that, saying, “We always have to make jokes about everybody. We’re not trying to lay off the new guy.”
But Mr. Barry said, “I think some of us were maybe too quick to caricature Al Gore and John Kerry and there’s maybe some reluctance to do the same thing to him.”
Of course, the question of race is also mentioned as one reason Mr. Obama has proved to be so elusive a target for satire.
“Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh,” said Rob Burnett, an executive producer for Mr. Letterman. “The audience is not going to allow anyone to do that.”
The New Yorker faced a different kind of hostility with its cover this week, which the Obama campaign criticized harshly. A campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement that “most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive — and we agree.”
Asked about the cover at a news conference Monday, Mr. McCain said he thought it was “totally inappropriate, and frankly I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive.”
The cover was drawn by Barry Blitt, who also contributes illustrations to The New York Times’s Op-Ed page. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an e-mail message, “The cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are.
“It’s a lot like the spirit of what Stephen Colbert does — by exaggerating and mocking something, he shows its absurdity, and that is what satire is all about,” Mr. Remnick continued.
Mr. Colbert said in a telephone interview that a running joke on his show has been that Mr. Obama is a “secret Muslim”; the New Yorker cover, he said, was consistent with that. “It’s a completely valid satirical point to make — and it’s perfectly valid for Obama not to like it,” he said.
Mr. Colbert said he had been freer to poke fun at Mr. Obama than other late-night hosts because “my character on the show doesn’t like him. I’m expected to be hostile to him.”
Mr. Stewart, who is also an executive producer of “The Colbert Report,” said the Obama campaign’s reaction to the New Yorker cover seemed part of what is now almost a pro forma cycle in political campaigns. “Nothing can occur without the candidate responding,” he said.
Bill Maher, who is host of a politically oriented late-night show on HBO, said, “If you can’t do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?”
One issue that clearly has some impact on writing jokes about Mr. Obama is a consistency among the big late-night shows. Not only are all the hosts white, the vast majority of their audiences are white. “I think white audiences get a little self-conscious if race comes up,” Mr. Sweeney of Mr. O’Brien’s show said.
Things might be somewhat different if even one late-night host was black. Black comics are not having any trouble joking about Mr. Obama, said David Alan Grier, a comedian who, starting in October, will have a satirical news magazine show on Comedy Central, “Chocolate News.”
“I tell jokes on stage about him,” Mr. Grier said, reciting a few that would not ever get onto a network late-night show (nor into this newspaper).
But he said of the late-night hosts, “Those guys really can’t go there. It’s just like the gay comic can do gay material. It comes with the territory.” Still, he said, he has no sympathy for the hosts. “No way. They’ve had 200 years of presidential jokes. It’s our time.”
Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” said of Mr. Obama, “There’s a weird reverse racism going on. You can’t joke about him because he’s half-white. It’s silly. I think it’s more a problem because he’s so polished, he doesn’t seem to have any flaws.”
Mr. Maher said that being sensitive to Mr. Obama was in no way interfering with his commentary, though on HBO he has more freedom about content than other comedians. “There’s been this question about whether he’s black enough,” Mr. Maher said. “I have this joke: What does he have to do? Dunk? He bowled a 37 — to me, that’s black enough.”
Mr. Kimmel said, “His ears should be the focus of the jokes.”
Mostly the late-night shows seem to be in a similar position.
Mr. Burnett of the Letterman show said, “We can’t manufacture a perception. If the perception isn’t true, no one will laugh at it.”
Mr. Sweeney said, “We’re hoping he picks an idiot as vice president.” ++
Richard Pérez-Peña and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.
Barack Obama magazine flap shows an irony deficiency
The New Yorker’s cover illustration has sparked a flurry of outrage among the Democrat’s supporters. Hey, people, it’s a joke!
JAMES RAINEY, Los Angeles Times
July 15, 2008
We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor too?
That seems to be the fondest wish of a few commentators and legions of Internet blatherers, who spent much of Monday vilifying New Yorker magazine for this week’s cover, which depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as a couple of gun-toting, flag-burning, America-hating terrorists.
It seemed fairly obvious to me, my 8-year-old and, likely, the majority of readers of one of America’s finest magazines that the cover drawing by Barry Blitt was a parody. In other words (for those still struggling with the concept), the joke was not on the Obamas but on the knuckle-walkers who would do them harm by trying to turn a couple of fresh-scrubbed Harvard Law grads into something foreign and scary.
Yet online discussion boards from coast to coast overflowed with anger and despair that the image of the golden young senator from Illinois had somehow been taken in vain.
A grass-roots organizer in Chicago named Mark S. Allen made his complaint to one of the Chicago Tribune’s blogs.
“I will NEVER purchase or read The New Yorker Magazine again!!” mewled Allen. “I found your current cover on the Obamas extremely insulting, hurtful, racist and not worthy of the reward of my continuing to purchase The New Yorker.”
That was mild compared to the shame that Chuck-in-Wichita heaped on the New Yorker via his comment to the Los Angeles Times’ politics blog, Top of the Ticket. Chuck failed “to see the humor in that rag they call a magazine.” Not content to merely boycott the magazine, he pledged “to never even visit New York, let alone live there.”
But it was not only the general public that fumed. Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, running for L.A. County supervisor, woofed on cable TV about the outrage of it all.
Chicago Tribune columnist/blogger Eric Zorn gave notice that he is waiting for the magazine to launch an equal-ink takedown depicting John McCain as “about 150 years old and spouting demented non-sequiturs in the middle of a violent temper tantrum while, in the corner, his wife is passed out next to a bottle of pills.”
Actually, someone who has maintained a little more perspective already obliged. David Horsey, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, riffed on the Blitt illustration with a McCain portrait of his own.
Horsey’s image shows a drooling, wheelchair-bound McCain, singing “Bomb bomb bomb — bomb bomb Iran,” as wife Cindy pours dozens of pills from a vial and implores her husband, “Take some of my meds to get through the inaugural parade!”
Playing off the New Yorker cartoon, in which an Osama bin Laden portrait adorns the Oval Office, an American flag aflame in the fireplace, Horsey poses the McCains in front of a Dick Cheney portrait, their fire burning a copy of the Constitution.
Lest anyone miss the point, the cartoonist dedicates the piece to all those “irony-challenged literalists who were upset by the New Yorker’s Obama-as-a-Muslim magazine cover.”
That’s coming from a self-described progressive who has put a world of hurt on President Bush but who said in an interview that he sees a disturbing “lack of irony or sense of humor” among some Obama supporters.
Jon Stewart regularly rides roughshod over candidates of both parties but hears nary a whimper. That’s as it should be. The “Daily Show” host is, after all, lampooning a system overflowing with absurdity and irony.
Audiences understand those broadsides as satire but fret like kindergarten teachers when it comes to one image on a printed page. “It’s like they need a flashing light saying, ‘It’s a joke,’ or they lose the capacity to judge,” Horsey said.
And speaking of judgment, how is it that Obamites, who are justifiably furious over threats to civil liberties under the current administration, suddenly want to play censor when the 1st Amendment puts their man even remotely on the hot seat?
If Barry Blitt is anything, it’s brilliantly provocative. The New Yorker artist sent up the furor over gays in the military by playing off a famous end-of-World-War-II photo: Instead of a sailor and a pretty girl in amorous embrace, he drew two male sailors doubled over in a lip-lock.
A few years back, Blitt spoofed the idea of President Bush as a maid — complete with apron and feather duster — to the shadow president, a scowling, cigar-smoking Cheney.
In March, no one seemed to mind when Blitt had Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama in the same bed (maybe there is progress?), both in their pajamas and lunging to be the one to answer that proverbial 3 a.m. phone call on some global crisis.
Obama’s supporters are desperately afraid, and not without cause, that his image and record will be distorted.
The Huffington Post’s Rachel Sklar took the New Yorker to task for providing an image that plays into all the reactionary stereotypes of “anyone who’s tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who’s tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism.”
But those who are going to fantasize about the Obamas as jihadists or un-American won’t rely on a simple drawing. They’ll recycle old pictures of the senator in African robes, or rely on some creative YouTube splicing.
The Obama campaign felt it had to reject the New Yorker cartoon as “tasteless and offensive.” The McCain camp quickly reached the same verdict.
Obama was the one man capable of putting the “furor” in its proper context. But he didn’t.
Instead of his terse no comment, he should have played one of his strongest cards — his cool — responding something like: “Hey, I thought Michelle looked pretty good in camouflage.” ++
How About a New Yorker Cover with the Editor’s Head Up His Ass?
Mark Karlin, BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
Tue, 07/15/2008
I tried my mightiest not to write about the appalling and inexcusable New Yorker cover that provides a racist, right-wing stereotyping caricature of the Obamas.
From our view, knowing a thing or two about public relations, the decision of The New Yorker editor to run the cover probably included the likelihood of massive free publicity: mission accomplished. So I didn’t want to help them out.
But I got a call yesterday from a long-time reader (since 2000) who occasionally e-mails us tips and with whom we have grown close in that Internet sort of way. (I won’t reveal his name because he is in the media business in Manhattan and his feeding of information to BuzzFlash could cause his professional life a setback, to say the least.) He was distressed by the cover, in fact in pain. He was concerned that, given that there was no context to the so-called parody (The New Yorker could have had Rush Limbaugh popping pills and hallucinating the image of the Obamas with a contented druggy smile on his face, but the Conde Nast empire and its owners, the Newhouse family, probably doesn’t want to offend Rush and his backers), and that a display of bigoted images on newsstands around the country (without any indication except inside the heads of the cartoonist and New Yorker editor that they were meant as “parody”) could help further incite racism and a fear of Obama.
More stunts like The New Yorker pulled off could lead to setting off an assassination attempt.
The New Yorker is one of the best publications in America in terms of political writers and content. It, unlike The New York Times news section, regularly blows big wide holes through the lies of the Bush Administration and the status quo in D.C. It has a stable of some of the finest, most conscientious political-government journalists in the United States, including the incomparable Seymour Hersh. Today, July 15th, a book that blows the lid off Bush Administration war crimes in relation to torture is being released. It is by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer.
So what happened?
We can only speculate that a combination of a desire to get free publicity (The New Yorker has nearly a million subscribers — more in California than New York by the way — and is actually growing), New York insular smugness, arrogance, insensitivity, and a horribly misguided concept came together to cause a Frankenstein cover, in a magazine that has been known for its droll artwork.
It’s inexcusable, and instead of apologizing or promising that McCain and his wife will get the same treatment, the editor of The New Yorker has indicated, with dripping disdain for critics, that they may or may not do something similar with the McCains (which is not really going to undo the original wrong, just compound it equally.)
If the Obama cover were not so radically devastating in fanning the flames of racial and political stereotyping, it would be something to move on from. But the cover of the July 21st New Yorker (weekly magazines dateline themselves a week ahead so that they appear timely on the newsstands) will be seen at bookstores, magazine stands, airports, doctors’ lounges, etc., for quite sometime. This is not short-term damage to civility, but a contributing factor to the inflaming of the crackpots in our nation and the nurturing of the lies behind the caricatures. In short, the images on the cover don’t debunk or sneer; they promote the lies themselves.
As one blog that a reader posted on BuzzFlash.net suggested: “Well, The New Yorker has published some of the great cartoons of our age. Here’s an idea for a new one: a cartoon about a cartoonist penning a cartoon, and editors approving it, all with their heads up their …”
Sometimes the insularity of Manhattan can be as confining as small town prejudices. Living and working in the world’s most self-important city doesn’t give one the right to act irresponsibly.
It just may mean that your head is stuck up your ass — and you can cause great harm due to your smugness and a desire for some free publicity by creating a gaper’s block that can harm the basic civility of our nation. ++
New Yorker Funny? Someone Want To Explain What’s So Funny About Satire
Steve Young, HuffPo
07.15.2008
New Yorker, What Were You Thinking?
Trey Ellis, HuffPo
07.14.2008
New Yorker Cover Falls Short Of Satire
Jason Linkins, HuffPo
07.14.2008
A Fist-Bump for the New Yorker
John McQuaid, HuffPo
07.14.2008
Fear of Fun
Paul Krassner, HuffPo
07.14.2008
The New Yorker Strives For Pretension
Jon Faulkner, SmirkingChimp
July 14, 2008
Why The New Yorker’s Obama Cover is a Lousy Cartoon
Daryl Cagle
McLaughlin: Obama “fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo — a black on the outside, a white on the inside”
Media Matters for America
7/13/08
Summary: On The McLaughlin Group, John McLaughlin said: “Question: Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo — a black on the outside, a white on the inside — that an Oreo should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for?”
On the edition of the syndicated program The McLaughlin Group that aired the weekend of July 11-13, while discussing recent comments made by the Rev. Jesse Jackson about Sen. Barack Obama, host John McLaughlin said: “Question: Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo — a black on the outside, a white on the inside — that an Oreo should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for?”
Responding to McLaughlin’s question, panelist and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Peter Beinart said: “Who knows what Jesse Jackson is thinking? But that’s a completely unfair depiction of Barack Obama.” Later in the discussion, Michelle Bernard, president of the Independent Women’s Forum, said: “I want to go back to the point you made about whether or not Obama is an Oreo, because if Barack Obama is an Oreo, then every member of this generation of African-Americans is an Oreo, because we stand on the shoulders of the people who fought for our rights, and all of us say that you cannot blame ‘the man’ or white racism for everything that ails the black community.”
From the July 11-13 edition of The McLaughlin Group:
McLAUGHLIN: OK, let’s nail this thing down, and here’s a sample of what Jackson apparently sees as Obama disparaging the black community.
OBAMA [video clip]: If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are also missing. Too many fathers are MIA. Too many fathers are AWOL. Missing from too many lives and too many homes. They’ve abandoned their responsibilities. They’re acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our family have suffered because of it. You and I know this is true everywhere, but nowhere is it more true than in the African-American community.
McLAUGHLIN: Question: Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo — a black on the outside, a white on the inside — that an Oreo should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for? Peter Beinart.
BEINART: Who knows what Jesse Jackson is thinking? But that’s a completely unfair depiction of Barack Obama, who — the genius of Barack Obama is that he moves seamlessly between the African-American world and the white world in a way that even Bill Clinton couldn’t possibly match. And the tragedy of this experience is that you know who’s spoken very eloquently for many, many years about personal responsibility in the black community? Jesse Jackson. He of all people should recognize, in fact, that what Barack Obama is saying is not contrary to the message of the civil rights movement, it is keeping with that message.
McLAUGHLIN: Now, let’s nail it down a little bit more, for the sake of Jackson. The question is this: Jackson’s point of contention is this — this is the exit question. The point of contention is that instead of Obama solely lecturing African-Americans on parental duty, particularly fathers, he should also give equal attention to the large, and many believe prejudicial, incarceration rate for blacks, their lack of economic opportunities, and other public policy issues that limit choices for black males. Why doesn’t Obama hit that as hard as he hits individual parental responsibility? That’s what Jackson is complaining about.
BEINART: Barack Obama doesn’t talk about jobs and health care? He talks about it all the time. If you wanted to talk about the fact there were too many people in prison, then you’re asking him to do something that would lose him the election.
McLAUGHLIN: Oh. Oh. Oh.
BEINART: That is politically — that no serious political strategist — he’s a man trying to win the presidency, John.
McLAUGHLIN: He’s exactly what Jeremiah Wright says he is: He will do whatever is necessary to win.
BEINART: He’s a practical politician –
ELEANOR CLIFT (Newsweek contributing editor): This is a generational shift. Jesse Jackson Jr. put out a statement basically saying, “Dad, time to leave the stage.” There is a disconnect in terms of style and tactics from the older civil rights generation to the generation that Obama is from and that he’s trying to attract.
McLAUGHLIN: Does Jackson have a legitimate point?
PAT BUCHANAN (MSNBC political analyst): No, he doesn’t.
McLAUGHLIN: Why?
BUCHANAN: I’ll tell you why, John — here’s why. What Barack Obama is saying is a message that needs to be heard. It’s the Bill Cosby message. It is, look, this is our responsibility, these are our families. The white society is not responsible for our kids dropping out of schools or using drugs or going on welfare. We are. What Jesse Jackson says is the white community’s responsible and they’ve got to solve our problems.
McLAUGHLIN: Isn’t this — isn’t this the oddity of the century where Barack Obama is a conservative and Jesse Jackson is a liberal? Isn’t that an oddity?
BUCHANAN: Well, Jesse Jackson used to talk conservatively –
BERNARD: It is an oddity, but I want to go back to the point you made about whether or not Obama is an Oreo, because if Barack Obama is an Oreo, then every member of this generation of African-Americans is an Oreo, because we stand on the shoulders of the people who fought for our rights, and all of us say that you cannot blame “the man” or white racism for everything that ails the black community.
McLAUGHLIN: But what about changing public policy where it needs to be changed?
BUCHANAN: Public policy isn’t the problem.
[crosstalk]
BERNARD: If I can finish my point. What Jesse Jackson came out and said when he gave his quote-unquote apology the next day was, Barack Obama should be demanding more government programs for African-Americans, and that’s wrong.
CLIFT: As Jack White, a former Time magazine writer, says, that it’s disorienting for the black community when “the man” might be the guy in the Oval Office. And so everybody is making some adjustments here. But Barack Obama is handling his role beautifully, and that is to relate to America as a broad population. ++
Does John McCain’s sick sense of humor matter?
Juan Cole, InformedComment
Monday, July 14, 2008
First, he sang ‘bomb, bomb, bomb/ bomb, bomb Iran’ to the tune of the Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann.’
Now, on being told that Iran has increased its importation of American cigarettes, he quipped “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.”
Let us review the things wrong with this statement as a joke.
First of all, it is a standard sentiment that in the United States, we do not wish the people of any country ill, whatever our relations with their government. McCain was hoping Iranians would drop dead from smoking American cigarettes, not the Iranian regime. Coming on top of his ditty about bombing them, I come away with an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach that the man is a sadist who enjoys the idea of killing people.
By the way, for all the propaganda to the contrary, neither Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei nor President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has talked about killing Israelis as opposed to causing the regime in Jerusalem to collapse. Can you imagine the outcry if they joked about doing it?
I think the current crew in the White House has the same sadistic tendencies, so I’d be very sorry to see that sort of thing continue.
Second, McCain has led the charge in the Senate to get anti-tobacco legislation, so he is well aware that tobacco really does kill a lot of people.
Here is what the American Lung Association says:
“Smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 438,000 American lives each year, including those affected indirectly, such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal smoking and victims of “secondhand” exposure to tobacco’s carcinogens.”
About 16,000 Americans are murdered each year, each of which causes a police investigation to be opened. Nearly 30 times that many are murdered by tobacco, but that doesn’t cause any homocide investigations.
So would not a presidential gesture be to include exports in his plans for a tobacco ban? Does he only care if Americans are devastated by this health scourge?
I remember a story about Camel cigarettes in Thailand getting ads on the back of school children’s school notebooks. The Thai government noticed and stopped the ads. Then as I remember (I don’t have time to look it up) Jesse Helms attacked Thailand for unfair trade practices.
McCain seems also to be all for the US exporting painful and early death to other people.
Finally, another thing that is wrong with the joke.
People being killed is not funny.
Couldn’t we have like a constitutional amendment or something to the effect that no one with clear sadistic tendencies may ever be Commander in Chief? ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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