Cowboy Confessional

Doonesbury is doomed.

In my obstreperous youth I encountered a book on student activism. This tome taught me a few valuable lessons in artfully annoying academic administrations while seeking to unshackle their seemingly arbitrary and capricious rules. Of course in my advancing years those same rules make perfect sense, and had I children of my own I would inflict those very rules on them. But when you are young and convinced of the self-evident enfeebled condition of everyone older than 25, rhetorically kicking their shins is great sport.

One lesson the book provided was simply that the put on is mightier than the put down. Insults are easy as any observer of the current election cycle can attest. Ragging on the opposition with grace and humor takes intelligence. When humor is lost, so is one’s advantage.

This is why Garry Trudeau is sunk.

A pair of Sunday comics paints such a stark contrast between political observation and humor that it shows why old comics should fade away (click on either thumbnail to see the cartoons in question). On this day both Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) and Chris Muir (Day by Day) opined on current issues and on Joe the Plumber. Muir showed finesse while Trudeau showed contempt (elitism might be a more accurate description but that word has been so overused of late that it has started to irritate like a burr under a saddle).

Now Joe is … well… an average Joe. Most Americans are of modest means and more likely to associate themselves with Joe than Trudeau. Joe the Plumber is the every man. Joe is guilty of nothing aside from asking Obama a simple question for which Barack is guilty of providing an honest answer. Thus taking a swipe at Joe would be mean spirited on top of being foolish, the same kind of meanness that caused America to kill John Kerry’s campaign four years ago.

In today’s strip Muir pokes fun at the main stream media (MSM) of whom Garry Trudeau is a dues paying member in good standing (if good is the appropriate adjective). Muir uses symbolism in correctly painting the MSM as a sinking ship. In the final panel Muir notes how Joe the Plumber might have been the MSM’s salvation had they recognized what Joe represented — the audience that the MSM is rapidly losing.

Trudeau’s toon however has no humor, which is an odd stylistic choice for a comic strip (note to Trudeau - comic derives from the same root as comedy). In six panels Trudeau paints a plumber as being dishonest, inept and uneducated but certain of his own “common sense”. Trudeau thus associates the working class and the concept of common sense with three horrible traits. Garry stereotyped every man (i.e., you) as contemptible.

In tomorrow’s strip Trudeau will undoubtedly proclaim that all blacks are lazy and all Mexican steal.

Herein irony rules. Muir finds humor in reality. Across the country television news program ratings are tanking, newspaper circulation is dwindling and every man audiences are turning to the so called alternate media — talk radio and the Internet. Yet the MSM mistakenly believes that they are still in control of the national conversation. Thus every time someone like Joe the Plumber demonstrates otherwise, members of the MSM lose their composure and attack.

Like Trudeau.

Hilariously the MSM also fails to learn that such attacks are tracked in the alternate media as well. Thus a Trudeau tantrum is echoed outside of MSM’s control and accurately portrays them as elitist, which Webster defines as “consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group.” Such disconnections from the populace in turn distances the MSM from their audience, driving ratings and circulation lower still.

Doonesbury is doomed and its days are numbered. I can’t say it will be missed.

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Follow-up: I received a message from TheManagement@doonesbury.com. The message maintained that Doonesbury strips are (a) submitted several weeks in advance and that (b) the Sunday strip in question was not about Joe the Plumber.

I decided to page a cartoonist friend who confirmed that many syndicated cartoonist file strips ahead of schedule. However, cartoons of a political nature have much shorter lead times in order to remain current and any single strip can be yanks and replaced in as little as 24 hours (perhaps longer for Sunday editions).

I am unconvinced by the denial. Doonesbury’s disclaimer is vague and non-specific to this particular instance. Even if the strip had been filed in advance, fifteen days lapsed between the infamous interchange between Barack and Joe. Trudeau at best is guilty of not recognizing that a staged strip would be perceived as critical of Joe and Every Man and create a substitute. But for a political cartoonist fifteen days is more than ample to compose, draw and submit a strip to their syndicate.

Thus the timing of this is too coincidental for coincidence.

More damning perhaps is what a certain Cowboy Confessional reader observed. This is not the first time Trudeau has shown his elitist persuasion. I was forwarded Doonesbury strips that dressed-down the new media and hostilely held academia as superior to common sense. Trudeau’s most recent strip then is one of a continuing series that paints Every Man as inferior and as such meets the dictionary definition of elitism.

The good news is that Joe is not suffering from any fallout. In less than 20 days Joe has acquired more than 20,000 Google news entries and has his own Wikipedia entry. He is a regular on talk shows and the media — in a rare more of sobriety — seeks him out for plain spoken political insight.

Every Man has his day and his say.

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Follow-up #2: Well, this saga continues with fresh indictments of Dooesbury.

The response I received from Doonesbury management included a link to their explanation of the strip. In it they claim “… the syndication schedule requires that Sunday strips go into production six weeks before they appear in the paper.”

Perhaps there is a difference in Sunday strips and dailies, but six weeks significantly differers from what Doonesbury’s syndicate says about lead time in general. Commenting in response to news that Trudeau has submitted a November 5th strip proclaiming Obama the winner of this election, Kathie Kerr, assistant VP/communications for Universal Press Syndicate said that Trudeau typically runs close to the deadline to keep his strip topical and fresh. She notes the November 5th strip was submitted about two weeks before the publication date.

Two weeks, eh? That is almost exactly the same time span between Joe the Plumber’s appearance on the world stage and Trudeau’s hit piece. I’m not a big believer in coincidence and thus I disbelieve Doonesbury, Trudeau and David Stanford, the “Duty Officer” at Doonesbury Town Hall.

Microsoft has managed to annoy millions of Chinese, something the U.S. government was unable to do for the last 60 years.

As the single party state of China approaches its 60th anniversary, and as it grows to become interwoven into global society, some cultural cracks and crackpots are beginning to show. Nowhere is this more evident that the intersection of intellectual property and a society robbed of all private property in 1949 when Mao and his minions man-slaughtered their way into power.

As Mao meant to say, progressiveness comes from the barrel of a gun.

Walk the back streets of any Chinese metropolis and your will find knock-off market places, stalls brimming with name brand goods not intentionally made by brand name manufactures. Often assembled in the same factories using secret third-shift workers, these counterfeit products flood the Asian market with China being the well hole of manufactured theft.

Gucci has no idea how popular their handbags really are.

When someone steels your freedom and property for sixty years, theft becomes a legitimized way of life. Hence the Chinese retail underworld that operates completely aboveboard. Take the worst aspects of capitalism and communism, mix in a batter of desperation and you have modern Chinese business ethics, which make American business ethics saintly in contrast.

Enchanted with the Internet (the tool that will eventually bring down the PRC government) China’s wired population greedily consumes PCs and software. Since most of the world’s end-user software runs on Microsoft Windows, inappropriate and entirely illegal copies of XP and Vista are a bountiful as Mao caps once were. Any Beijing street vendor can pull out bogus copies of Windows and let them go for twice the duplication costs, which was nearly nothing. Faced with a full retail price for Windows or a clumsy clone of the same software for a fraction of the price, no semi-starving Chinese person would choose the real thing.

Facing lost sales to 1.3 billion people, Microsoft took action … and the reaction is precious.

Starting with XP, Microsoft launched their “Genuine Advantage” program which provides a genuine advantage only to Microsoft. It enables Microsoft to clobber a computer with illegally copied instances of Windows. Microsoft didn’t actively disable computers until recently, firing something of a digital warning shot over China’s user base.

Chinese digital addicts are pissed. Not in the pleasant, happy, inebriated U.K. use of the word. No, Chinese PC users are pissed in the boiling mad, American redneck mode.

“Why is Microsoft automatically connected with my computer? The computer is mine! Microsoft has no right to control my hardware without my agreement.” This blogger missed the salient point that his hardware is working exactly as it is designed to work when no operating system installed.

A master stroke of anti-genius came when the same fellow said “If the price of genuine software was lower than the fake one, who would buy the fake one?” I can’t even create a joke in response to his absurdly obvious analysis of micro economics. I suspect if this fellow took a long sip of tea and contemplated his own words, the glow of lucidity would lift him into a rapturous high. If not the same vendor who sold him his pirated copy of Windows could likely sell him some low grade hash to complete his intellectual transformation.

A Chinese lawyer opined that Microsoft was the “biggest hacker in China with its intrusion into users’ computer systems without their agreement or any judicial authority,” Now American lawyers are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, this being evidenced by the ones elected to Congress. Evidentially Chinese lawyers have IQ’s slightly lower than your average fence post. This Shanghai shyster bemoans a lack of agreement to Microsoft disabling their own software without noting that Microsoft never agreed to allow pirated copies of their products to be installed in the first place.

Next, Chinese lawyers will litigate against God for failing to deliver milk and honey per scriptural contract.

To my friends in China I say welcome to capitalism. Free markets are built on trust and enforcement, and theft is not tolerated. If you want to be capitalists on a global scale, you have to play by the rules.

I’d rather be writing songs than writing about health care, but some days duty calls.

I was politely challenged by a Democrat and left-leaning to the point of toppling over friend on my assertion that Barack Obama’s proposals, aside from being socialist and thus by definition un-American, were a series of slow motion train wrecks. My alleged friend allowed me to monologue on any single topic. Given that I’m sick of this long presidential race, healthcare seemed like an appropriate subject.

Obama’s proposals (shifting as they do like the sands of the Sahara) are semi-permanently documented on his campaign web site. Ignoring for the moment that there is nearly zero Constitutional authority for any of his schemes (which is odd considering he once taught constitutional law) we see the following logical and economic disasters in waiting (note that the proposals are directly copied/pasted from Obama’s site):

Proposal: Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions so all Americans regardless of their health status or history can get comprehensive benefits at fair and stable premiums.

This proposal requires two elements of force: First, it requires insurance companies to cover people with known risks. The modern parallel is the subprime mortgage mess where government required banks to lend to people with known risks (low income, spotty credit histories, etc.) The natural response for any businessman would be to raise prices to cover these risks, but Obama promises “comprehensive benefits” (i.e., everything is covered) at “fair and stable prices” which would require price fixing. So Obama will raise insurance company risk while restricting their revenues which will lead to bankruptcies and people losing their coverage.

Great plan Barry. But Barry was dumb enough to snort coke so his risk assessment skills are pretty low.

Proposal: Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.

Rephrased, Obama will restrict insurance companies from charging the rates they need to survive the onslaught of ambulance chasers. This squeeze will result in companies getting out of the malpractice insurance business. Unable to find malpractice insurance will cause doctors to go out of business and be forced to practice in HMOs … and we all know how popular HMOs are.

Proposal: Make employer contributions more fair by requiring large employers that do not offer coverage or make a meaningful contribution to the cost of quality health coverage for their employees to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the costs of their employees health care.

In other words if you do not provide your employees health insurance then we will force you to provide it anyway, and to provide as much as we tell you to. This could result in employers dropping more than insurance coverage — they’ll drop employees. I’d rather have a job and buy my own insurance than have no job and no insurance to boot.

Proposal: Establish a National Health Insurance Exchange with a range of private insurance options as well as a new public plan based on benefits available to members of Congress that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage.

Barack foresees a government run exchange (as opposed to the existing public exchanges) with the addition of a set of taxpayer subsidized insurance plans that compete with private plans. This will drive private insurance into the grave because private insurers do not receive subsidies from the taxpayers. This will insure “universal health care” because soon there will be no alternatives to government coverage.

Proposal: Lower drug costs by allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, increasing the use of generic drugs in public programs and taking on drug companies that block cheaper generic medicines from the market

The problem is that the drug prices in other countries for American designed drugs are lower because foreign countries set the price below market value. To compensate and make back the billions of dollars they spend on R&D, the drug companies raise U.S. prices. If Obama has his way U.S. drug companies will not be able to make back their R&D money and thus will quit inventing new drugs, effectively killing the American pharmaceutical industry and a few Americans in the process.

Proposal: Reform the insurance market to increase competition by taking on anticompetitive activity that drives up prices without improving quality of care.

Problem here is that the government created an anticompetitive insurance industry at the request of … the insurance industry (I’d love to not have competition too). You are not allowed to buy insurance from the state or country of your choice, and states (with Congressional support) mandate the services you must pay for, even if you don’t use them. For example my gay friend David bitches that he has to pay his insurance company for contraceptives and in vitro fertilization service that he obviously will never use.

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If all this sounds good to you, then you need socialized medicine and need your head examined.

What are they putting in the water in Charlotte County, Florida? Given the serial sexual antics of their elected representatives there is now a movement afoot to rename that turf to Harlot County.

Congress swung Democrat in 2006 due to the perversions of former 16th District Republican Mark Foley. Don’t take my word for the damage Foley wrought during that election cycle. According to Election projection, whose results are spooky accurate, the House and Senate were still in Republican control until the Foley scandal broke, their lead dropping nearly 20 points shortly thereafter.

Foley had a thing for teenage boys, and in his quest for twinkies had the bad judgment to leave electronic trails of his seductions via email and text messages. Foley’s attempt to mate with underage men ran somewhat counter the GOP’s family values manta.

Now his successor has been implicated in serial affairs.

Enter stage left Tim Mahoney, a Democrat who dashed into Foley’s former job on a campaign promising to return morals and family values to Washington. You have to give Mahoney credit for taking on a task that would make Sisyphus flinch. Evidentially Harlot County morals include not only seducing teenage boys but also committing serial infidelity.

Mahoney’s hardship now lay in his damaged brand. When your actions are contrary to your brand, people respond with rejection. A brand is a promise, and since trust is the foundation of all relationships, when one violates their personal brand they violate trust. Foley broke his “family values” brand and was chased out of office. Now Mahoney has broken his “morals” brand.

Naturally the Republicans are dancing down every Charlotte County street today, sensing an opportunity to reclaim what Foley threw away.

What neither my Republican nor Democrat friends will admit is that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between their candidates. Politicians are in the game for power. People who crave power are by nature corrupt or corruptible. We should be thankful that their sexual appetites keep them too busy to steal even more money from us.

I best contact the Charlotte County water management district. I have a sibling who lives near by and I want to make sure she isn’t suddenly desiring to run for office.

Much has been said about Barack Obama’s association with William Ayers, a certified terrorist who in the 1960’s sought to blow up offices and employees of the U.S. government. Most speculation has been about Obama and his views on Ayers.

Obama claims he knew nothing about Ayers unsavory past despite having sat on boards of directors together and Ayers having made his own living room available to launch Obama’s initial campaign into politics. It is conceivable (though barely) that Obama was ignorant of Ayers’ violent past and revolutionary disgust for the U.S. Obama’s assertion is greatly diminished by the fact that there are no strangers in Chicago politics. Everyone advances through connections. A Chicago candidate doesn’t stand a Chinaman’s Chance of winning an office without connections.

What pundits and politicos have failed to articulate is that it is Ayers’ view of Obama that is important. Ayers gave his time, money and home to insert Obama into the political mainstream. Ayers wanted Obama to succeed. This says much about Obama because Ayers would not risk his Chicago political credibility on someone that wasn’t going to push Ayers’ agenda.

Ayers hates America, tried to violently overthrow it, and from all reports has not materially changed his attitude in 40 years. This means Ayers’ believes Obama will help achieve what Ayers and the Weathermen were unable to do with explosives.

Obama might not know Ayers … but Ayers knows Obama. Now we know the game in play.