Can we throw the Tennessee Republican Party off the boat with the tea? Because this “protest” they’re organizing tomorrow is simply laughable. Not a peep out of these people about White House economic policy for the last eight years and now they find their voices?

“This is not about political parties or partisanship,” said TN GOP spokesperson Bill Hobbs, winner of the 2008 Liberadio(!) Jive Turkey Award. Not about partisanship? Really? So where was your organized protest when:

  • President George W. Bush was spending like a drunken sailor?
  • When our government’s discretionary spending – fueled by President Bush’s refusal to veto a spending bill, any spending bill – was increasing in 2001-2007 at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent?
  • When President Bush lied about his nasty little discretionary spending habits?
  • When a Republican-controlled congress enacted, and George Bush signed, a 2002 farm bill that caused agriculture spending to double its 1990s levels
  • When the same congress and president rammed through a $295 billion “porkulus” 2005 highway bill?
  • When Peggy Noonan wrote, “George W Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?”
  • When we found out about the pallets of cash?
  • When we found we were about to cross that “bridge to nowhere?”
  • When it became clear that Governor Bush’s campaign promise that income tax cuts would be “especially focused on low and moderate income families,” actually played out like this: the wealthiest Americans received an average tax cut of $123,000, the bottom one-fifth of households received an average tax cut of $27, the one-fifth of households received an average tax cut of $647.
  • When President Bush said he was “pleased with” the $170 billion economic stimulus package that he signed into law on February of 2008.
  • When we realized that George Bush’s “war, wealth, and oil” spending was, at its core, a crony capitalist’s redistribution of wealth?

So the question to Hobbs, Robin Smith, and the TNGOP is, wasn’t it “our money” from 2001-2008, too? Didn’t the government have their “hands in our pockets” when George W. Bush was president?

Excuse me, dude, but your partisan hackery is showing.

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No, the response to it isn’t an overreaction – bonus! there’s something in Mr. Delonas’ work to offend almost everyone! – it’s the action of the police in the cartoon itself that is excessive.

"What's the virtue of the Proportional Response?"

What's the virtue of the Proportional Response?

There’s a West Wing episode (Season 1, Episode 3), in which my one-time happy place president (he’s been recently replaced), Jed Bartlett, must respond to an attack on an American plane. He’s pissed and wants to respond with the full might of our military strength but is urged towards a more “proportional response” by Leo as well as his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So in the context of this cartoon, is shooting the person who wrote the economic stimulus package a “proportional response” to disagreeing with it? No, it’s not – or at least it shouldn’t be. Which makes the violence of the thing more frightening than funny (and no, there’s not a hint of satire anywhere to be found). But in light of recent events as well as what our new president represents, the horror of the smoking gun and the bullet-ridden body is much more troublesome than the monkey imagery (which is clearly a riff on the recent rampaging chimp shot by police news story).

Besides, it’s not the first time a president has been compared to a chimp. Just run “chimp” and “George Bush” through an ol’ Google image search.

And to answer Kleinheider’s question, “Is it racist to use the expected knee-jerk reactions of some in order to stoke controversy or just bad taste?,” it’s both. And if you re-write the question this way, “Is it racist to use the empathetic reactions of some in order to stoke controversy,” then it’s evil too. We have to start having serious conversations about race in this country, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently pointed out, and we must move beyond having them only when an Imus-like controversy pops up.

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