By the Comics Curmudgeon
It’s absolutely true that politicians are, by and large, hideously ugly. So, if you’re going to get into the political cartooning game, you’re going to have to learn to enjoy inking the minute details of the sagging face-flesh, the terrible combovers, the faces ravaged by decades-old acne scars, the paunches ill-contained by aspirationally sized pants. Yet once cartoonists go down this road, they might find themselves actually enjoying it, like a professional dominatrix who got into the biz for money and finds herself unable to put down the whip in her off hours. (This sometimes happens! I saw it in, uh, a movie.) Anyway, drawing Karl Rove’s second chin no longer has any appeal for these depraved freak-loving artists! In this week’s Cartoon Violence, you’ll see what lies at the end of this very dark path. MORE »

Hooker-using diaper fetishist Senator David Vitter freaked out at Dulles airport after he missed his flight back to New Orleans. He arrived at his gate to discover that doors had closed and he could not board his flight. A normal person would say, “Oh well, can you try to get me on the next flight then?” but Senator Vitter yelled about how he was a senator and therefore endowed with special powers of douchebaggery. Then he opened the security door, which set off an alarm, and the airline employee he’d been chewing out was all Hey man that is really not cool, and David Vitter ran off like a pussy while the employee looked for a security guard. What an awful human. [Raw Story]

Oh look at you, you people sitting in that plane on the runway. You think you’re so special and important. Ooh, you want a leather chandelier and a pet tiger along with your fancy “fresh air” and your decadent “glass of water” and your “place to pee that is not in your pants”? Just keep working on your sudoku, you fat idiots, and be glad you don’t have to share your plane with ten dozen crates of chickens and a leper, they way they do in SOME COUNTRIES. [AP]

Wonkette salutes an unidentified 64 year-old German man who had it up to here with the stupid rules about carrying liquids on airplanes. The poor soul was just trying to make his was home to Dresden from Egypt when airport security in Nuremburg told him he’d either have to pay to check his liter bottle of vodka or throw it away. In protest, the gentleman chugged the entire bottle while security watched. He didn’t make his flight to Dresden, but that’ll teach those young whippersnappers. [Yahoo News]

The agencies in charge of our fabulous air travel system (FAA and TSA) as well as the airlines are celebrating not being the world’s most incompetent aviation system today. They may lose your bags, let you on with illegal liquids, strand you on runways for hours and have near-misses on runways but, unlike the Indonesian authorities, they didn’t find part of an airplane wing on a runway yesterday and have difficulty identifying its source. The FAA promptly downgraded Indonesia’s safety rating and continued to go back to screwing over the unionized air traffic controllers and scheduling yet more flights in and out of O’Hare. [Boston.com]

Air travel’s been fucked up for a while and the government is part of the problem. From refusing to let us in with contact lens solution (did anybody else try finding a bottle of 3 oz or less right after the ban and have to try more than 3 stores?) to making us remove our shoes on rainy days to dicking around with the air traffic controllers to having a variety of stupid regs that contribute to full airplanes sitting on runways for hours without food, the government is not helping us. But, now they’re going to try! They promise!

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It was apparently the airlines’ fault that Rep. Bob Filner went nuts and assaulted some baggage handlers. [WP]