THIS MODERN WORLD

The Christmas ornaments were pretty last-minute this year. We’re hoping to give ourselves much more lead time for the next holiday season. Right now, the ornaments under consideration are Sparky and Blinky with full bodies (not just heads) — Blinky with a scarf, and Sparky with or without a Santa suit. And a third, more limited ornament, for those of you who remember Wilbur the Talking Stomach and his untimely demise — a glittery Wilbur angel, complete with wings. (If we actually produce that one, I might as well retire, because it’s hard to imagine that I will ever achieve anything stranger.)

Anyway, we’re still in the planning stages, so I’m open to requests. What TMW chotchkes and/or ornaments would you be likely to purchase in large quantities and proudly display? (One thing I’m pushing for is a child-safe plush doll, largely because a 19-month old of my acquaintance is quite taken with Sparky.)

…And before some tedious stick-in-the-mud starts whining about “selling out” — the Christmas ornaments this year represented about .00000002% of my 2004 income. I’m working on this stuff because it genuinely amuses me, not because it’s making me rich, ha ha, rich beyond dreams of avarice. Though as I’ve stated before, that’s certainly one of my main goals in life. And I think I’ve clearly chosen the most obvious career path toward that objective. (Astonishingly, I do occasionally get email from readers who berate me for not presenting a conservative or moderate/right point of view — my motivation for this omission, apparently, being the extreme marketability of left-wing cartoons. One thing you learn, doing work in public, is that — well, that this cartoon was not far off the mark.)

In last week’s cartoon, I suggest, in my usual over-the-top satirical way, that conservatives will soon be using the tsunami to push their Social Security agenda (“Speaking of tsunami relief — this tragedy clearly highlights the need to reform the Social Security system — before IT is wiped out — by a FINANCIAL TSUNAMI!”)

The typical reader, upon encountering this panel, undoubtedly set the newspaper down, took a sip of coffee, and mused, “Amusing, yes, but in an overstated kind of way. No actual conservative would really be so blatant and thoughtless!”

And I would have agreed, until I received the following email:

On the ABC News program “This Week,” Dr. Frist said that a “huge demographic tidal wave” would hit the program in 2008, when the first baby boomers reach the age of 62 and can obtain benefits, reduced for early retirement.

Nice job, but please try to improve your performance – I’d like two know what the right-wing nutjobs are saying TWO weeks in advance.

I’ve said this many times, but it’s really hard to stay ahead as a satirist these days. I did a cartoon awhile back for the American Prospect in which a psychotic right winger is shouting at a timid liberal (I know, hard concept to visualize, but just go with it). I was looking back through my TAP files to see if there were any evergreens I could resize and keep in my backup folder, to use for my weekly strip in case I’m ever laid up some week — and I noticed that in this wacky satire, written a couple of years back, I have my outrageous conservative saying, “I suppose YOU want to CODDLE the terrorists, DON’T YOU? Well, I think we should STRAP THEM DOWN and TORTURE THEM!” (Or something close to that — I’m paraphrasing from memory.) This was written before the Abu Ghraib revelations. It was meant as over-the-top satire, a ludicrous exaggeration. Once again, reality outpaced satire. What once seemed unthinkable is now commonplace.

Why isn’t there a computer on the desk in the Oval Office?

Do presidents still do everything with quill pen and an ink bottle?

(I know Bush thinks the internet is plural — but this was true of Clinton, as well…)(he didn’t have a computer on his desk either, I mean…)

…and other wastes of time: trying to set the record straight on the Trent Lott thing. The conventional wisdom, from a Philly Inquirer review of Hugh Hewitt’s book:

Hewitt notes that while it was left-of-center bloggers Atrios (Philadelphian Duncan Black) and Joshua Micah Marshall who got the anti-Lott swarm buzzing, it was conservative bloggers – notably the chameleonic Andrew Sullivan, whose coloration at the time was deemed conservative, and Republican law professor Daniel Drezner – who brought it to critical mass.

This is all true, as far as it goes, but it leaves out one significant detail: this site’s small but crucial role in the whole matter. As some of you may recall, the balance was apparently tipped when footage surfaced of Trent Lott making the same comments about Strom Thurmond a third time. And the reason that footage became public was that a reader of this site had caught it on C-Span several years prior, grasped the significance, and saved the tape. He emailed me and I put the information up on my site, where it was ignored by pretty much everyone. I then called up a producer I knew at MSNBC, which ran with the scoop, albeit without acknowledging the source. Soon it was all over the networks and Fox pundits were speculating that the DNC must have had an army of interns poring over old footage.

Short story: the Lott thing is not quite the Triumph of the Blogs tale that myth has made it. The story gained momentum because of the blogs. And if I hadn’t been blogging, the reader who had the tape might never have contacted me. But what finally brought down Trent Lott was primarily a guy, I believe in the Midwest, with an old videotape and a long memory, and secondarily, the fact that I had a friend working at MSNBC. (Since I called him on the phone, you could just as easily credit the telecommunications network as the blogs…)

Relevant entries here, here, and here.

…just so we’re clear, I’m not that worried about getting “credit” here — I was really little more than a conduit. I’m just tired of seeing this triumphalist myth repeated over and over, when I know for a fact that the blogs were only part of the story…

Here. I especially like the “Where is your ribbon?” ribbon.