Everything Is Bad

  By the Comics Curmudgeon  
The economy's in the crapper! Tim Geithner cannot and will not save us! The stimulus is not stimulating enough, or is too stimulating, or something! Judd Gregg and Barack Obama are getting a divorce! It is absolutely true that everything in the world is worse than it ever has been before at any time in history, or ever will be again. Can we find solace in funny cartoons? Sadly, we cannot, because they are also bad. Come, let us endure the unendurable, together.

 Click on the terrible cartoons to make them easier to see, if for some reason you want to. 

Look, I admit it: I make a lot of cheap jokes about furries in this column. It's hard to avoid, because so many political cartoons involve allegorical anthropomorphized animals in "hilarious" and vaguely sexual situations. However, the lovable human-animal perverts are generally depicted, as is the rule for most furry art, as being magical creatures that somehow combine the best (and hotttest) elements of man and beast. Isn't that the whole point of art -- to serve as an escape from dull, quotidian reality?

Thus, I was profoundly unsettled by this cartoon, in which Rush Limbaugh is depicted not as some sort of whimsical part-elephant creature, but as his literal, human self, only half-wearing an actual elephant fursuit -- presumably one that that emits an overpowering aroma of stale cigars and perspiration. This is sad and disturbing because it's like coming backstage atSesame Streetand seeing that your favorite characters are just inanimate fabric operated technicians, with the added non-bonus of it being fucking Rush Limbaugh in a fucking elephant fursuit. As a result, I hereby swear to keep away from furry jokes forever, or at least until a really good opportunity presents itself.

Say, here is a terrible joke about the stimulus! Uncle Sam is depicted as wrinkled, wizened old man, who, we are led to believe, is unable to achieve or maintain an erection. He's looking at a pill bottle labeled "Stimulus," and thinking "Starts to work in 2 years?" The punchline is "If the government made Viagra."GET IT?This is in marked contrast to the Viagra-for-anthropomorphized-national-symbols that private industry makes, which causes an immediate, intense erection that leads you to try to copulate with everything in sight for the next four hours, at the end of which you die of a massive heart attack.

These terrible bankers/boner pills salesmen are of course actual, literal terrorists, who would like nothing better than to blow us all to bits with classic, old-school dynamite. Even more unsettling is the obscene wattle jiggling repulsively around our terror-banker's neck. Presumably this is the sort of feature your body begins to develop when you cash your bonus check (the one you get for screwing up everything forever) and can eat sandwiches made entirely out of the delicate fat from baby ducks for three meals a day, every day.

The monstrous murdering terror-bankers knew that they would have to find someone -- orsomething-- to distract from their iniquity. That's why they gathered in their blood-stained ritual chamber hundreds of feet beneath the New York Stock Exchange to chant awful pleas to their Elder God masters in languages that no human tongue can speak, and summoned up horrible, shapeless wraith-demons from the bowels of Hell. These foul-smelling specters were then voted into the CEO positions of various banking houses by their boards of directors, where they took the brunt of popular discontent, eventually being removed by exorcism.

In the ensuing economic chaos, Americans gave their ugliest impulses free rein. Attempting to placate the widespread anger at any company even vaguely associated with the American financial system, President Obama ordered that the Peanuts gang be rounded up and confined an to "internment camp" as a result of their shameless shilling for Met Life. In later generations,Van Pelt v. United States,the Supreme Court decision that validated this executive order, would be seen as a stain on American jurisprudence, though Michelle Malkin would attempt to defend it in her bookVery Good Grief: The Case For Locking Up That Lucy Bitch And Throwing Away The Key.

But then President Obama gave everybody puppies! Lots and lots of puppies! And everyone loved their puppies and played with them and threw balls for them to fetch and rolled around on the ground with them and scratched their heads and said "WHO'S A GOOD DOG? WHO? WHO?" And everything was finally perfect, until the puppies grew up into an enormous pack of feral dogs who turned on us when we ran out of food.

Hey look, it's two grossly obese furries arguing! It's the perfect metaphor for our political system!

Oh, wait, didn't I say I wasn't going to -- aw, crap.