Welcome to a Very Special
Post-Debate edition of p3's
Sunday morning toon review.
So it's come to this:
America is the
Argument Clinic customer and last night we were shut up in a room
with Mr. Vibrating. The host – it's silly at this point to use the
term “moderator,” let alone “judge;” probably “ringmaster”
is nearest the mark – has promised no penalty for making stuff up.
(Unlike the establishment media, I have no problem pointing out that
Trump is a liar; if I sometimes avoid the word, it's because actually
lying is only one of the weapons in his arsenal: along with
self-contradiction, there's subject-changing, free-form delusion, as
well as the
standard tools of the craft.) The Republican candidate has
promised – by his extensive track record of mendacity and by his
opposition even to the flimsy and inadequate practice of
“fact-checking” – that he's going to be making stuff up. And
now the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates has said that
she believes it's good enough simply to have Candidate Clinton use
her own response time to fact-check Trump. (Has this person watched
even a minute of television in the last fifteen months?)
So if you were hoping for to
see a connected series of statements intended to establish a
proposition last night, you should probably have looked elsewhere
than the first round of presidential whatever.
Any political cartoonist who
tried to capture last week the full magnitude and horror of what we
were going to get last night would be laughed out of court, so
cartoons prior to Monday night that dealt with the debates were
forced to go for the evergreens, picturing Hillary surrounded by
books, legal pads, pencils, etc., while Trump is admiring himself in
the mirror, practicing insults, etc. Or fact-checking. Or the low
bar. Among the best in this difficult catgegory: Clay
Jones, Jack Ohman,
Joel Pett,
Gary Varvel,
Some of the more interesting
work came from artists who were sketching in real time, including Ann
Telnaes and Matt Davies.
Although
a few got out there quickly with images that seemed to reflect the
(un)reality of the evening, including Clay
Bennett, Jen
Sorenson, Tom
Toles,
Deadlines drove some
cartoonists last night. R.
J. Matson posted this on Facebook today, and admitted he wasn't
quite satisfied with it:
”I drew this before the debate started last night to meet Roll Call's publication deadline for today's paper. It's not entirely off target, considering what transpired on stage and in spin rooms everywhere, but it could be sharper. Back to the drawing board today...”
(If
I were going to quibble – and regular readers (all five of 'em) know that's so
not me – I'd say cartoon's problem is not so much
about sharpness as that Trump is shown clearing
his much-lower bar, but a lot of post-debate commentary, focus
groups, etc., suggest he didn't even manage that.)
One last thought on last
night's debate (and the campaign in general): When Trump says not
paying taxes “makes me smart,” when he brags about having made
money off the Great Recession and insists that doing so is simply
“called business,” when he muses on the equivalent of strategic
bankruptcy for the federal government, when he says he'd tear up
existing international treaties (the equivalent in his mind of
business contracts?) – those are all morally sketchy but currently
acceptable business tactics that have helped bring him whatever
wealth he has. In a smarter world than ours, this would put to death
forever the foolish idea that America is a business and should be run
as a business by a CEO in Chief.
Meanwhile, it's still 2016
in America, so every cartoonist has many opportunities to sharpen his
or her cartoons about police shooting black citizens. Since there are
only so many ways you can depict police standing over a dead civilian
or black parents having The Talk with their children, kudos to Mike
Luckovich for finding in the particulars of the Terence Crutcher
killing something on which to base some novel but admittedly
ultragrim humor.
Today's toons were selected
from the week's offerings at McClatchy
DC, Cartoon Movement,
Go Comics, Politico's
Cartoon Gallery, Daryl
Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com,
The Nib, and other fine sources of
cartoon goodness.
The regular p3
toon review will be back Sunday-ish.
No comments:
Post a Comment