When Batton Lash and I decided to take on the Obama Administration with our strip 16 months ago, few people were willing to mock the president. Yet we both saw that this president was at times foolish, mendacious, clueless and vain. Perfect fodder for a political cartoon.
Batton and I are not so much conservatives as libertarians. We’re believers in small government because, as I outline in my political thesis, it’s the only workable form. President Obama is very much a big government fan. He has tripled the debt and deficits in his first year in office. His new budget would add another three trillion. These are things we don’t like about him. We also don’t like the lies. Which seem to be second nature to the man.
So last Sunday we turned in what we thought was a very mild cartoon mocking the first lady’s over reach of her powers. And I decided to show her eating hamburgers like Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons to mock the fact that she tends to scold other people’s eating habits, yet every time we read about what they’re eating at the White House, it’s extreme. And to throw in a gag we used before, the President is shown eating hardly anything. Because, let’s face it, she is bigger than he is. Her arms are thicker than his legs. But no one was suggesting she was fat. No one was commenting on her race. It’s merely funny to show them in contrast to one another.
The cartoon did not get a lot of comments at first. I figured it was rather mild. I would try to be funnier next time. Little did I expect the firestorm that followed a few days later.
The propaganda wing of the Democrat party known as Media Matters for America, who is out to destroy all critics of this administration, ran an article saying the cartoon attacked the first lady’s weight and gave out our emails, encouraging people to send us hate mail. Like pigs to the trough the mainstream press jumped on the story. Yesterday morning I got up and saw it mentioned on several websites like Salon. The NY Daily News wanted to interview us. And it was on the local TV news. We started getting inundated with hate mail. But the worst was yet to come.
The Daily News article came out and basically said we were mocking her weight, which wasn’t true at all. We posted our full response on the Big Sites and my blog. Most of the emails and comments we received during the day were about us allegedly mocking her weight. And I had to set people straight over and over again. Some of them accused us of racism. Which is just the left’s way of telling you to shut up. One e-mailer suggested our cartoon was going to inspire teen suicides because we were supposedly mocking body issues.
But then they died down. As evening came, I got a message that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was taking us to task, calling us mentally disturbed racists. He showed our pictures. He gave out where we lived. Told people to go after us. Even mentioned Batton’s wife who had nothing to do with the cartoon. I had to wait for the video clip to be uploaded and what I saw was jaw dropping. Aside from the patently absurd characterization of the strip where he calls it “racist” and claims (without showing the art) that it depicts the president as a half-human, half animal creature, it was the most hysterical, over-the-top tirade since, well, since Keith Olbermann did his nightly carny act.
Frankly, I was surprised that Lawrence O’Donnell made such an epic fool of himself, that he would open himself and his company to such legal liability. Not only did he lie about what we were doing, he told people where we lived and to attack us! Is this a professional show? Is he a professional news commentator? Not hardly. He should be fired. What he did was tantamount to a call for violence.
Aside from being a shill for the worst administration in American history, his actions were blatantly fascist. Calling for the heads of two critics of the administration. It’s a bit like the Muslim’s reaction to that Everyone Draw Mohammed Day cartoon that Molly Norris did. The Muslim fanatics called for her death, despite the cartoon being utterly tame. So now we have fanatical followers of MSNBC (all 1000 of them) sending one death threat after another. They were coming in every other second.
“you are a racist and you you should be shot.” “Will hope you get what’s coming.” “I hope black people kill your ass.” “You are gong to die, fatso!” “FUCK YOU BITCH!!DIE SOON!HEART FAILURE!!” etc.
Half of them were from emails that bounced back.
Lefty friends of ours on Facebook came to our defense, which we’re thankful for. Yes, Batton and I have plenty of friends on the left. We are not haters or ideologues. Nor are we racists. We’re merely critics of this administration. I call myself a classical liberal because that’s what I am. And liberals should question everything. Why should this administration get a pass? Because he’s black? Isn’t that racist?
To all the people who called this strip racist, I say the same thing. You are seeing what you want to see. If you see her as fat in the cartoon, that’s in your mind. So is the racism. It says a lot more about the critics, like O’Donnell, than it does about the cartoon when they see something that isn’t there. There’s a name for people who see race in everything. They’re called racists.
Neither Batton nor I care what race the first couple is. We care about their competence. We care about their over reach of power. We feel like condemning those things we don’t agree with or like. And we don’t appreciate being called Racist just because we disagree with the administration’s policies.
The left keeps saying we need more civility. Is this how they show it? I got news for you people, this nonsense only makes me want to push back 10 times harder. All you did was give us free promotion and made us more famous. If this little cartoon was as boring and untalented as you said, no one would have cared. Instead, it drove some of you mad.
We exposed your dark sides. We got you to reveal to the world what kind of hate festers in your souls. You see racism where there is none. Calling white people racist without evidence is racist. You attacked me because of my weight, which reveals your own bigotry. Projection is all you’ve got. Attacking someone you don’t even know and calling them something with no evidence is what fanatics and lunatics do.
You’re the monsters you scream about. It’s time you started acting like liberals and question the people who’ve lied to you.
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