Tom Toles for December 11, 2009

Ah, Tom Toles always draws a thrilling comic.

Watch as the triangle headed man… doesn’t react at all! Chill as the tiny man spouts irrelevancies! Is the second panel just a copy of the first? It’s honestly hard to tell!

We have met the enemy…..and he is us.

Man, if you’re going to quote Walt Kelly, at least do it on a better comic.

Ahhhh, Pogo!

Don’t worry, the relativist-Media and Libs will make it mean something.

Watched the Daily Show’s similar take on this. Frigging funny.

Good one Mr Toles!

Harley: Your latest posts are becoming more incoherent. Are you OK?

Toles is a great cartoonist. You have to accept his style, and then you can see how good he is at it. Part of what he’s up to is to see how little you can draw and still make it absolutely clear what you’re drawing. This is not easy.

Yeah, the two panels are almost identical, but that’s done all the time – if you change too much you distract attention from the punch line.

And in his message, he has something of the same technique – how can you cook the message down and still make it clear what you mean. I suppose most cartoonist do that (except for Asay), but the danger is oversimplification (or downright distortion). I’m sure that judgment here partly or largely depends on which side you’re on, but for my money, Toles rarely distorts. Here he is making a big point about the need for some kind of ability to see situations not just from one point of view. There’s a complex intellectual argument behind this, but he has captured the essence in just a few words.

Well done. It’s a pleasure to watch a good artist at work.

If it’s not happening on Fox, it’s not happening right Scott? It’s really kind of amusing to watch your delusions in operation. keep up the good work.

Scott believes that the Democrats want the “total enslavement of billions”.

Any questions?

Church, I can’t believe you’re missing the point of the cartoon by such a wide margin. It’s not offering any such support to the Americans who went over there.

It’s just offering a simple analogy.

Why is anyone offended? It is not really a political statement just irony.

Mostly I just wanted to say what a good cartoonist Toles is. I didn’t want to get into a big political debate, because I think this is a poor forum for these. However –

I see the point that these two situations are not symmetrical. However, there have been some situations where the US was pretty clearly engaged in very shady behavior. How do we judge these? And do our judgments in these cases match our general judgments?

To take an instance from a few decades ago – so the hot anger of the moment is perhaps cooled off – in the early 1980s the US mined harbors in Nicaragua. When Barry Goldwater found out about it, he was furious, and he wrote a scathing letter to Bill Casey about it. The Nicaraguan government took the US to court – the International Court of Justice – and the court ruled against the US and awarded reparations. The US refused to grant the authority of the Court and never paid reparations.

Goldwater, in his letter to Casey, said that mining the harbors was an act of war. It’s hard to see it otherwise. Here’s the question – would the government of Nicaragua been within its rights to invade the US in response to this act of war by the US government? (Of course they would not have been able to, that’s not the question. The question is about principles, not possibilities.)

Goldwater’s letter, by the way, was printed in the Washington Post, April 11 1984, page A17, and it has been reprinted elsewhere from time to time.

The Taliban in Afghanistan had firm enough control over their country that they were able to nearly eradicate the opium trade. They offered to hand over Bin Laden if the U.S. went through the proper legal procedures. Bush refused.

One can certainly make a case that the Taliban were awful (particularly in their treatment of women), and deserved to be removed from power. However, whether that is the appropriate role for US military is a different question.

“Implemented in 2000-2001, the Taliban’s drug eradication program led to a 94 percent decline in opium cultivation. In 2001, according to UN figures, opium production had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately following the October 2001 US led invasion, production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels.

The Vienna based UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the 2006 harvest will be of the order of 6,100 tonnes, 33 times its production levels in 2001 under the Taliban government (3200 % increase in 5 years).

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3294

Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bush-rejects-taliban-offer-to-surrender-bin-laden-631436.html

Holding up a mirror for OUR behavior is the role of a political cartoonist.

Metaphor and comparisons are important tools for brain tweaking…a metaphor is by nature, not a literal comparison of apples to oranges…..it’s a whack on the side of the head to think outside the box - outside the file cabinet where we store all our assumptions.

Good cartoon, Toles.

churchill, I think you should not minimize the Nicaraguan issue. Ronald Reagan chose to mine Nicaragua Harbor as part of his campaign against the duly elected but leftist government. We also funded the right-wing rebels known as the Contras. (Remember “the Contras are like the Founding Fathers?” Yeah, if the Founding Fathers raped and killed nuns). Whether or not Nicaragua could do a thing to stop us, we basically exerted a naked act of aggression without approval by Congress to start a war. Reagan was condemned by the World Court for this act, and to my mind rightly. All you have to do is reverse the situation, and ask how you would feel about it: suppose Russia (to take a more equal opponent) decided they didn’t like our activities in Alaska and mined Anchorage Inlet? Or, making a proper comparison, New York Harbor? There’s a reason South Americans have been a bit testy towards us, and it’s called history.

scott, what is reasonable about mining the harbor of a country that can’t do squat to us?

Scott, it’s a valid point to ask whether the Taliban would have kept their agreement. However, it would have been simple enough to find out. Stop bombing their country, and present the indictments of Bin Laden that went back into the 1990s, plus all the available evidence of his involvement in 9/11. (There was enough evidence for an August memo to BushII titled something like, “Bin Laden planning attack on US soil.”…so how hard would it have been to present this evidence to the Taliban.)

Give them 30 days to turn him over. They don’t. Bombing starts up again.

I recommend reading some middle eastern history. Some of the earliest and largest empires in the world were governed from middle eastern countries. They have long traditions of fairplay, justice, individual rights, and respect for the religions of others. Iran, in particular, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire was renown for assimilating the cultures it conquered, rather than attempting to destroy them.

Aww… Scott… you were doing so well today.

New meds wear off?

I’d remembered the several articles about Taliban offering up binLaden, IF they could find him, we’ve done so well at it! Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, yep, we’ve done a pretty good job of protecting some right wing dictators, and basically screwing things up.

Sadly, we’ve done a poor job of cleaning up our own act. It is that very “clean up” that will make this nation better, stronger, and more aptly to declare itself the true purveyor of democracy- but we need to look at who holds the power base HERE first, and make some further changes. Yes, the PEOPLE need to wise up, and chose their course toward a republic, and not a feudal system.

When the police build a case against gangs or mobsters in our communities, how do they present their case without giving potential mobsters a blueprint to how the FBI/police investigate and prosecute cases?

If you follow your logic out, we could never prosecute anyone for any crime because then future criminals would know what to do to avoid getting caught.

Surely we could present a criminal case (even using the 1997? grand jury indictment) without truly compromising our security operations. After all, is it really such a big secret that we listen in and infiltrate the enemy? (Bin Laden was a guest of the Taliban, not their leader)

RE: “GOVERNMENT” I would argue that government is developmental. There has to be a strong presence assuring basic security before the infrastructure of justice, public institutions, democratic forms of decision-making can flower. The Taliban had assured the security with an overly firm grip. There were other available paths to help them move toward a more prosperous and equitable society, besides raining another gazillion bombs on the country.

I lived in Iran for seven years, in addition to studying their history. My understanding of the nature of the people is neither from just booklearning, nor ‘centuries old.’ (Watch Rick Steves visit to Iran last year for a view of today’s Iran..http://www.ricksteves.com/iran/iran_menu.htm )

Islam is no more monolithic than Christianity. There are differences in how it is practiced and it does no one justice to make broad generalizations about how either Christians or Muslims practice their religions. We do not extrapolate a generalization about modern Christians from believers like Timothy McVeigh. Neither should we extrapolate a generalization about modern Muslims from the suicide bombers and terrorists. There are about 1.5 Billion Muslims in the world. To most of them ‘jihad’ means the battle one has with one’s lesser nature as one strives to find the peace of God in one’s life.

And, yes, Thank you. I appreciate not having to stumble over the misspelling of Obama’s name…it is a silly hindrance to intelligent conversation.

Scott, you do not deserve the attention you get. Your ramblings are not based on experience, education nor information from educated persons. Are you planning on becoming Secretary of State for Ms. Palin if she runs and gets the presidency?

VHammon: Cheers for the links you’ve been providing here & elsewhere, hopefully others are following them too.

I have too. thanks Vhammon, omQR, fennec, ahab, justice, dtroutma, lonecat, kylop for not letting the whackos totally take over this site.

Good toon, with a comment that is intended to make one think, at least for those who retain the ability to think.

I have a number of Muslim friends, and they are not violent fanatics. I also have a number of Christian friends, and they are not violent fanatics. I also have a number of leftist friends. They are not “moral relativists”. I also have a number of conservative friends, and they are not ignorant fundamentalists. People come in all sorts.

I would think, by the way, that it would be moral relativism to say that when other people waterboard, that’s torture, but when we waterboard, that’s just enhanced interrogation.

Well put, lonecat.

Good cartoon. What if other countries treated us as we have treated them?

Brought a tear to my eye. :-| What can one do, everything handed to us on a plate, we’re simply just ungrateful, born ungrateful I’d say. Nothing at all one can do, nothing at all, tch. I blame our parents.

Lonecat offers wise words, as did vhammon- the old advantage of picking friends as opposed to family works best when our friends come from varied experience, backgrounds, and viewpoints- it allows us to learn from them, and share.

It is sad that those with minds most closed, so often take refuge in the greatest arrogance.