I consider myself a pretty politically with it guy. I read Klein and Yglesias, The Plank and Obsidian Wings, The American Scene and Dreher, The Corner and Larison. I even read my local newspaper. But I honestly had no idea what the hell this series of Prickly City comics was supposed to be about until it finally dawned on me a few minutes after today's installment that it's based on the outdated (or so I thought) talking point that Obama can't speak without a TelePrompTer. It's just like all those times Doonesbury made fun of George Bush for speechifying with all the eloquence of a Keane child.Except for two things. First, while I wasn't a big fan of them, Trudeau's jabs at least had some basis in reality. Bush really wasn't a great orator. Sure, there's something to be said for the way he was able to reduce complex issues to simplistic, easy to digest sound bites. This wasn't necessarily a good thing in terms of intelligent discourse, but it was nonetheless a very effective rhetorical tactic. That said, he had a distinctive and repeatedly demonstrated tendency to mangle language. The Obama-TelePrompTer thing, on the other hand, originated from a single Weekly Standard writer recounting an apparently not so great speech and really picked up steam with a report regarding an incident in Ireland. That Ireland report has since been convincingly debunked. And in the meantime Obama has spoken just fine without a TelePrompTer many times.
Second, even if that report hadn't been debunked, it would nevertheless remain a story that happened a long time ago that only gets talked about, and only really ever got talked about, in the far-right echo chamber. Making it somewhat obscure--far more obscure than Bushisms, which were omnipresent in the popular culture.
Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with obscurity. People generally use obscure references as markers to identify themselves as part of a group of like-minded individuals. In my Twitter feed this morning, for example, I referenced The Dirty Projectors, which is a band that, while not exceedingly unknown (such as, say, The Indelicates), is also not exceedingly well-known. By doing so, I indicated that I was a member of a certain crowd of folks who like the sort of music The Dirty Projectors make.
Likewise, Prickly City's reference to this far-right talking point acts as a marker identifying itself as a cartoon for the segment of the population that actually cares about this talking point. Which is fine, if that's what the cartoonist actually meant for his cartoon to convey. I'm not actually sure Scott Stantis meant to do that, though. While Stantis clearly prides himself on writing a conservative-leaning comic strip, I assume that he's also trying to write for the audience at large. If so, confusing the fuck out of everybody not a part of the Michelle Malkin fan club is probably not the way to do it.
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