Boehners Today, Boehners Forever!

 
   By the Comics Curmudgeon  
Hello, everybody! Your Comics Curmudgeon has been lying low for a bit, because of the election madness, fearful that Speaker of the House John Boehner will be sending out his goon squads to round up the inadequately orange and put them into tanning booth camps. But then it turns out that he's not going to seize control of the less-organized half of the legislative branch for another couple of months! Thus, it is still legal to print cartoons about him that do not feature his unbearably beautiful blue eyes emitting power-beams that heal lepers. FOR NOW.

Ha ha, Nancy Pelosi, remember her? She was "2006's John Boehner," if you can believe that. Anyway, she will spend the last sad days of the her speakership clinging to the back of the angry, bucking bronco that is the Democratic Party, which seems to be wasting a lot of energy being all angry and bucking-y now, when it can't help anybody. Your Comics Curmudgeon spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at the small of Nancy's back in this cartoon, trying to figure out if the line work there was supposed to represent her ass-crack, but then thought, "Wait, am I really trying to figure out if Nancy Pelosi is topless in a rodeo-themed Glen McCoy cartoon? Is this what I'm doing with my life?" So then I stopped! If you find yourself compelled to fixate on something here, why not contemplate the semiotics behind the depiction of the Republican elephant as a rodeo clown in the background?

Oh, I'm sorry, do whimsical clown-elephants bore you? Are you looking for terrifying surrealist imagery that will haunt your dreams for weeks? Here: Take a look at this cartoon, in which Nancy Pelosi pushes her face, frozen into an awful death-mask, mere inches away from a mirror. Why can't she see her reflection? Why does the mirror's surface ripple like a pool of water, in defiance of the physical laws that normally govern our reality? The skin on her face is frozen so tightly that she can't even speak or scream as the surface of the mirror liquid parts to reveal an terrifying orange countenance, appearing from the murky depths of some hell-dimension. "John Boehner," it says gnomically. That is all it can say. "John Boehner. John Boehner."

Psych! John Boehner is not the disembodied face of a terrifying demon-spectre. He's an important American political leader, and he ought to be treated with respect. Get with the program, political cartoonists! The first step is to depict his distinctive orange hue as being more or less uniform across his visible flesh. Under no circumstances should you portray him as he appears here, which is to say, "as if a can of spray tanner had abruptly exploded in his face." Also, do not color his hair to resemble that of the Oompa-Loompas in the 1971 Willy Wonka movie. John Boehner has managed to conquer his "Oompa-Loompa hair problem" with the help of his lord and savior Jesus Christ and copious amounts of Just For Men hair coloring, as his chief of staff will let you know at great length via email if you happen to imply otherwise.

It's totally OK to make fun of his name, though! Ha ha, because "Boehner" looks like it should be pronounced like "boner" even though it's not, really. And you can use it to build funny compound words, like "Boehnercare," which implies that it's about taking care of boners -- specifically, the boners sprouted by Boehner's lobbyist friends, when he ensures that they and their clients will have plenty of money, forever. Whee! Boehners!

Meanwhile, while all this hot Boehner action was going on, crafty Mitch McConnell was sneaking up on Barack Obama and cutting off his hand. Wait, there's a political cartoonist who knows who Mitch McConnell is? NERD.