Git’r done!

Hey, you need that 400 horsepower to conquer that three degree incline in the mall parking lot…

Which explains the initial reason: men with small dicks needing trucks.

However, once those behemoths got out on the roads, women (and other more secure men) needed to keep up in order not to risk death in a crash.

What kills me (figuratively) is how SUV drivers seem to believe the laws of physics do not apply to them, just because they drive a honking huge truck.

Ice? No problem. Just go faster.

Except during an emergency maneuver. Then they’d leave the pavement in a big upside-down hurry.

December 3, 2008 at 17:18

http://www.rubbercat.net/artduck/03.html is the only conservative comic needed
[/quote]
I think the strip that you linked to perfectly sums up the republican’t mind.

All this talk of art, I started a pic last night that I call “Lincoln emancipates Bush…from his teeth.” If I finish it I might post it somewhere.

Format error: dragstrips have exactly ONE Christmas tree.

Republican dragstrips don’t, and who says the lights have to turn green simultaneously. Level playing fields are for the proles.

Right?

Exactly, g. Because those CEOs were responsible for overseeing the health of the entire company, while those silly old union workers merely made cars for people to buy. After all, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, right? And it’s hard work making sure the company thrives, because the CEOs have their whole careers on the line: if the company goes belly-up, they have to commit ritual suicide in the boardroom.

OneMan: why yes. Yes I am. I’m just yammering in sympathy, partly because we only recently got rid of John Sodding Buggery Howard, who lost no opportunity to wail about how awful unionists were, and how they were responsible for the downfall of western civilisation.

The only thing wrong with American industry is that American workers expect paychecks and benefits.

Me too – I was wondering if there’s any discussion going on about it in those terms. All I keep hearing was that the automakers were helpless in the face of demand from The Market and had no choice but to pump out SUVs.

I’m guessing there’s no discussion about the role advertising played in the whole thing anywhere on TV.

Marketing, baby.

All those commercials showing some giant SUV crossing the river through the desert and up & over the tundra…I get new chest hairs just thinking about it. Big thick curly ones.

Combine the uber-testosterone level of sitting high with 4WD and the “safety” of a luxurious ride that sits high and is percieved as, well, safe and what do you get? 12 MPG beasts that never leave the pavement, mostly driven by soccer moms but that Dad isn’t ashamed to drive either. Beats a minivan.

I saw it over and over.

In such a churchyard, a wanderer will one day espy a dark and austere headstone, and will thereupon ask her companion, “Who indeed was this, who did provoke the epitaph, ‘Beware The Howling Stupid Which Is Beyond Death?’”

And her companion will shudder and sing to her some version or another of the Ballad of Old John Henraker, at least one collected incidence of which features the line, “Rackin’ his hind in a trailer-home quarter, a dragster front-rocketing from’t,”…

Nicely done. This is almost as creepy as that one Lovecraft short story where at the end the narrator finds out that the crazy artist’s shrieking harpy paintings were made with a live model.

That, plus the savings in avoiding any and all product R&D, does explain the manufacturers’ enthusiasm for SUVs, but how to explain the fact that people bought them?

I’ve seen some wingnuts and free-market fundies insist that SUV advertising had absolutely nothing to do with it, and a discussion I heard on the radio (NPR) also framed the whole thing as “the market demanded SUVs, the automakers delivered them.” Is anyone taking the pimping side of the SUV plague seriously at all?

/does not read enough quasar blogs.

Well, it’ll probably be nothing more than a bunch of Commie propaganda, but go ahead…

Someone in Obama’s camp…maybe it was someone in Congress, I can’t find the reference…last week floated a trial balloon (you might have missed it, it was purposely done to coincide with the rush to TG) that in exchange for a handout, GM would be asked to undergo a divestiture not unlike some past break-ups, like AT&T or Standard Oil.

It didn’t float very high. On the other hand, it didn’t get shot down, either.

More here: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/12/02/mean-street-why-gm-is-doomed/

Point.

It was the only thing “hybrid” about them.

But going after the Big Three on the grounds that if they’re too big to fail, they’re too big to exist, and that they’ve successfully monopolised new competition (that isn’t backed by a multibillion-dollar-plus transnational) out of the market, would be making really thick steaks out of the sacred elephant in the room…