Or is the correct term, "Frist"?

He hugged some people at the site of the tornado wreckage.

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut’s comment on the anti-Vietnam-War protests, This Modern World has approximately the same impact as a banana-cream pie dropped from a six-foot ladder. Although I enjoy being reminded each week (and in much the same way each week) of the lunacy of those in power and the viral effect of their propaganda, I do not now expect, nor have I ever expected, that any weekly cartoon, brilliant every time or otherwise, would change the world. Whether the strip breaks new ground each week or not, it’s comforting to spend fifteen seconds with a like-minded intelligence. Just that minuscule comfort alone can refresh me enough to encourage me to spend a little more time getting informed about the powerful and their minions in the media, and, yes, sometimes even to take action. Which has approximately the same impact as a banana-cream pie dropped from a six-foot ladder.

If anyone is to criticize the cartoonist (any cartoonist, any cartoon) on matters of form or originality, it’s really not possible to read the critic's remarks as being serious, educated, and (most importantly) unbiased without his or her presenting detailed credentials as a respected critic of cartoons as an art medium. It’s a reasonable supposition that if there's a bias, it would be political. If you know how the P.R. industry really operates, it doesn’t much stretch the imagination to suppose that someone is being paid to try to dominate this ‘letters’ section, pretending to agree with ‘Tom Tomorrow’s’ politics (since they can’t openly disparage his reasoning) but really trying to encourage people to think of him as a less-than-first-rate editorial cartoonist only in the hope that some will therefore abandon the cartoon and thereafter be that much less exposed to the kind of thinking it represents. It’s what I would do if I were them. No mechanism for protecting their interests escapes their notice.

In any case, the Alpha bonehead who weekly dominates this letters section is not going to go away. The thing is: there’s no shortage of freelance and unpaid personal-damage cases out there to assert themselves by stirring up whatever pot comes to their attention, and that being the case, anything is possible. But in a capitalist world, there’s no so-called ‘human’ question so complicated that you can’t at least wonder where the money might be involved. This one isn't especially complicated. I can’t prove a thing. Just saying, you know?

Uh... I suppose. Although someone could be funding your backhanded Perkins praise. Or is it only our evil opponents who have the resources at hand for such an underhanded (and banana cream pie-like) act? Can I sign up for this? Can mean ol' Rupert Murdoch really cut me a check every time I post a semi-anonymous comment on an open forum about a comic that's posted in hundreds of publications every week?

Sometimes I feel like calling out Perkins about his shtick (if the Austin American-Statesman's Ben Sargent were half as redundant or narrow-focused, I'd be dashing off the occasional letter), but then I head for "Tom the Dancing Bug" instead. We're talking about, after all, a damn comic. Neither deriding nor exalting it is a huge statement. Neither tack adequately exposes your political allegience.

You worry too fucking much.

And you read, but you can't comprehend at all.

On more than one occasion I have plainly spelled out: I am a Liberal, typing from home, who happens to think this comic has passed it's halcyon days and has sunk into recycled gags...and the gags are just the same, lame logical fallacies we on the Left despise when the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Counters on the right spew the same name-calling, immature drivel. I'm guessing Right-wing assholes find it knee-slapping funny when Counter calls Edwards a faggot. We on the Left scratch our heads and say, "Honestly, they can't see through that meaness?" Well, when week after week Dan Perkins draws a caricatured Right-winger saying something stupid just to make an agitprop-level point...pot, meet kettle.

I enjoy tossing in this tiny, meaningless bomb week after week because it proves my point: we on the Left can be just as idol-worshipping, just as blinded by our own ideology, just as fucking humorless in our critiques as anyone in any onther political party. We are just as good as name-calling, just as good at implying someone is gay or retarded or in your case, a secretly-funded troll/shill (conspiracy theorist). Yeah, good one...you might want to replace the tin foil on that hat.

So I toss in a little bomb every Sunday and stand back and watch the same people--whom I've let in on the joke--continue to prove how small-minded and slavishly devoted they are to...a comic strip.

It's a hobby. Thanks for playing.

Get a real life.

To steal a phrase from an old National Lampoon cartoon. “The world we live in is no joke”.

While this weeks "This Modern World" is not very funny except in the sense of schadenfreude, it does make a point we on the left should learn. That is we should learn how to use the twisted logic of the right to our advantage.

It used to be that the right wingers would shout “socialist!” whenever the debate started to move in the “wrong” direction thus forcing the speaker to defend themselves as not being a socialist. Well we learned to stop that by replying with “fascist!” ( It always works to fight a lie with the truth)

Sparky’s dilemma in this weeks cartoon is the same dilemma we face as a country. How do we extricate ourselves from a war conceived and lost by idiots, while still providing both moral and material support to our military personnel? At the same time we need to learn how to use the same sort of twisted logic used by the right to frame the debate.

Why can’t we have a real discussion about the mess in Iraq? Because whenever we try to look at the situation in a rational realistic manner, the right begins using its’ twisted logic to move the debate away from how to solve the problem to an irrelevant topic. This is why the right is increasingly irrelevant. The have become more interested in winning the argument than solving the problems we face. Market based solutions have proven to not work, trickle down is only viable among the insane and delusional, yet for some reason there is a complete unwillingness to let go of these increasingly ridiculous philosophies. Just as there is a complete unwillingness to look for a *realistic* solution in Iraq.