In A Minneapolis Churchyard
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,” which will puzzle future ethnographers no further since apparently they have just found the stack of printed-out posts that we left wrapped in plastic under a certain equestrian statue (hello!)
Michael Ramirez neatly sums up the disadvantage American automakers face in trying to keep up with their more nimble competition; click to enlarge:
A bailout will only feed the beast for a few more years. The only solution, I think is bankruptcy, which Nancy Pelosi says is out of the question. But that is because her concern is the UAW and its constituency of retirees, not the automakers and not present and future workers in the auto industry.
Because, okay, let’s leave our old people on an ice floe; but also, imagine being a conservative and being like, “Hey, that red dragster is certainly lean and mean with its nationalized health care, high wages and benefits, and comprehensive tax-fueled Eurosocialist-style welfare state, not to mention pervasive unionism and up to seven weeks of legally guaranteed paid vacation, growling powerfully from its exhaust headers. But gasp! look at those UAW contracts* the America-colored dragster is towing!”
While you’re imagining yourself trying to think such a thing, imagine the room that you’re in collapsing with a horrible furniture-sucking roar, a hot, wallpaper-stripping howl, into a lightless vacuole the size of a Crenshaw melon. That object is Hinderaker’s head. And while we can take heart in knowing that somewhere, perhaps lighting some great and dark vastness between stars, is an equivalent quasar streaming supercompacted, quantum-shredded smartness back into the universe, it is also the case that that quasar doesn’t have a blog.
* Cf.
Ramirez can always be counted on to bring pure uncut stupid in cartoon form.
I thought conservatives had learned their lesson about inter-generational warfare after the Social Security privatization debacle. But, yet again, they have proven unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to learn from past mistakes. Maybe Assrocket is the type to send his mother up the river for the price of a double espresso, but most of us won’t turn on our parents and grandparents just because some schmuck tells us that the old fogeys are costing us money. Notwithstanding that our “more nimble competition” comes mostly from Germany and Japan, those bastions of laissez-faire capitalism. I wonder if the Hinder even realizes that he’s basically saying “Why oh why can’t we be more like Europe?” Socialist.
But…but…but….the red dragster is so much cooler, and definitely more macho, than the other, so that must be the better one. So what if some old people starve to death, if they don’t freeze first, that is. They had their chance, and they blew it by getting old. If they want, they can go work and survive like the rest of us. They can enlist! We need more bullet shields anyway, and fighting the good fight requires real men, real warriors, who can blog about their support for the war instead of fighting it, so we need these old people to fight! But no, they want to “retire” and enjoy the money they thought they had saved up! It’s not theirs anymore – the losers! Damn corpses-in-waiting want to take our money! Next, they’ll want to take our jobs! Our Women! Our Beer! Our Nascar! They…..
Ugh. Channeling the Tard just takes too much out of me. I must clean my brain.
Michaels Ramirez’ illustrative style always makes me imagine that he’s on a meth run & just has to make everything absolutely perfect & extra-detailed.
Ramirez can always be counted on to bring pure uncut stupid in cartoon form.
Especially when Ramirez is trying to make ann rand ideology funny. however the bar for conservative comics is sooo low they dont have to worry about the ecconomic downturn, there’s no jobs left for fluffers or street car window washers anyway, so they may as well keep scrawling.
Y’know, what gripes me most about these tossbags isn’t that they say dumb stuff, although that does gripe me quite a bit. No, what really yanks my chain is the way they COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FAIL TO OBSERVE REALITY IN THE SLIGHTEST WAY.
Ahem, sorry. I didn’t mean to let go like that. I just get so annoyed that they fail to notice obvious stuff like, oh, I don’t know, maybe the Japanese car industry is doing A LOT BETTER THAN THE US?
Sorry. I’m so embarrassed. Where can I put my face?
Fucking fuckety fuckfuckfuck dickheads. Jesus Murphy.
Sorry.
As an artist I admire Ramirez’s artistic style, I learn from other illustrators by studying their style and I rather like his attention to detail, as a progressive I realize that his head is full of rocks. The best place to experience his work is here;
http://blueherald.com/category/rightwing-cartoon-watch/
Along with many other wingnut cartoonists, all thats missing in my opinion is Mallard Fillmore and Prickly City.
They all sum up the neoCon reality perfectly, it’s in cartoon form and is only 2-dementional.
What I should have said is that they fail to notice all the many and varied ways in which Planet Real, where the rest of us live, puts the lie to their stupid assertions. Never mind that. Must all be the fault of the unions, eh?
If they tried that over here, say in a pub, they’d find themselves given the royal flush and then duffed up by half a dozen burly union blokes. Actually, maybe they’d like to try it at a union meeting, or in front of the GM plant. Yeah, sure, that’s a great idea. They could put on a show!
The red dragster also has electronic toilets that warm your bum.
Imagine being a conservative who so loves his party that he’s willing to completely forget about all that country first stuff in order to export his party’s ideas to our socialist neighbors.
He may not have Harper much longer either.
A bailout will only feed the beast for a few more years
That sound good! Me hungry now, and tired of eels.
In keeping with what I posted above, check out this site;
http://duckcover.blogspot.com/index.html
It deals with the aformentioned duck, I have yet to find a similar page for Prickly city however.
I enjoy the fact that not only can the guy who draws Mallard Fillmore not consistently remember what color feathers his character that he’s been drawing for lord knows how many years had; it’s that he sometimes forgets it in the middle of a strip.
Or simply doesn’t care that the printers just shoot the color at his work with a shotgun, and call it a day.
Quality you can believe in.
Let’s see if I follow.
(1) Suggest increased immigration or regularising the status of migrants in the country illegally…
NO NO THEY WILL STEAL OUR JOBS AND UNDERCUT OUR CONDITIONS
(2) Suggest that US employers be bound by the wages and conditions they negotiated with their workers…
NO NO THEY SHOULD LOSE THEIR JOBS AND CONDITIONS.
Yeah, things have reached a pretty pass when even Soviet Canuckistan is threatening to go socialist.
Yeah, this is a popular attack on the right. I follow right-wing cartoons in a series, and Eric Allie shilled this one too not long ago.
Shorter Gavin M. in 20 years: “Mr. Hsieng, will you be having coffee or tea with your breakfast, sir?”
Pssht.
Everyone knows us leftists would join the party in a snap. It’s you conservative twats who’d be serving us and Mister Hu mint julips on the veranda. And then get to work on collectivizing the Midwest corn fields.
Yah! Yah, mule!
So the current Republican strategy is, after successfully losing the youth vote, the middle class vote, the minority vote, the middle age vote, alienate the retiree vote?!?! What could go wrong with that? It’s permanent majority time for the GOP!
You know what else would make American companies more flexible and competitive? If the government had the authority to jail union organizers or anyone who seemed like they might be, and if the American people would give up all their fat food and their fat houses and their fat benefits and be willing to work for pennies an hour.
But, it’s like, noooooo, oh, ‘we don’t want to work 100 hours a week in a textile mill’, and ‘gosh I don’t want hookworm’ and ‘la la la my 6 year old shouldn’t have to work and should go to school’.
Also, if the corporations themselves had the authority to develop their own laws, and were totally capable of arresting or even executing union organizers and their families.
Yes, extraterritoriality would make American businesses highly competitive.
Big Daddy Garlits called. He wants that one with the trailer for his Museum of Drag.
Of course it’s the Union’s fault. They should have gone on strike demanding more fuel efficient cars. Or better customer service. Or just a better quality product in general.
Seriously.
But El Cid, if you ask for all those “special” conditions, the benevolent, hard-working and extremely better-than-you moneyed interests will go all John Galt and then you won’t even have a job for your 6yr old to go to! After all, we America’s are terrible at entrepreneurship and solving problems so we could never replace them. Shh. Your liberal fascism is making it harder on the rest of us to be willing supplicants.
Maybe I’m dense…are not the “UAW”, “automakers” and “present and future workers in the auto industry” all one in the same?
But, yet again, they have proven unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to learn from past mistakes.
Christ, these are the people who, as kids, kept on sticking the fork into the socket over and over figuring that one of these times they wouldn’t get knocked on their ass.
“Well, maybe if I sneak up on it… BZAM! Maybe the power went off when I wasn’t looking! BZAM! Have Mom and Dad paid the electic bill lately? BZAM! AHA- if I hold the fork upside down…. BZAM!”
Oh there’s a pun there, but I’m not good enough to figure it out.
Oh there’s a pun there, but I’m not good enough to figure it out.
It’s all WordPress’ fault, I swear.
Stupid UAW. If only their members had refused to make the sucktastic gas guzzling pieces of shit the auto industry told them to make then they could have been fired and lost their pensions!
Gee. What about the multimillion-dollar payouts to American CEOs, multiples of the executive/average worker ratio that Japanese CEOs are paid, or the billions in bonuses, golden parachutes, titanium enemas and platinum humjobs bestowed on America’s shittiest executives by themselves, etc. ad infinitum? How come these aren’t a drain on our ability to compete? Oh wait. These are the real Americans Hinderaker is talking about whenever he uses the word.
What about the multimillion-dollar payouts to American CEOs, multiples of the executive/average worker ratio that Japanese CEOs are paid, or the billions in bonuses, golden parachutes, titanium enemas and platinum humjobs bestowed on America’s shittiest executives by themselves, etc. ad infinitum?
Why, they deserve it ’cause they work so hard!
As opposed to, you know, the folks who actually make stuff to sell.
So drag racers are now “nimble”? Call me a metaphor nazi, but a car designed to drive only in a straight line… yeah whatever, it’s planet wingut where the ham-fisted sketch out images to amuse the reality-impaired.
Why, they deserve it ’cause they work so hard!
Well, the McArdle Principle holds that CEOs get paid so well because they are so unimportant. You see, they need to live lives of obscene opulence and unthinking consumption and waste to encourage the workers to work extra hard so that they can lead the same lives.
Because all CEOs start off on the factory floor.
This is why we make fun of the woman.
Damn, this ice floe is cold! I think my butt’s stuck to it! I hope the polar bears come along soon and eat me and put me out of my misery. Oh wait …
I liked how Ramirez’ Obama caricature grew more and more grotesque as the election wore on. You could almost see the hate bubble out of his (admittedly talented) pen.
Michaels Ramirez’ illustrative style always makes me imagine that he’s on a meth run & just has to make everything absolutely perfect & extra-detailed.
Craft is a conservative virtue. Art, sadly, is not.
The beauty of his argument is that Europe and Japan are next. Note the same guy rails against all that National Boscialism in Euroland as well. He wants their workers to make pennies per hour with no benefits, too. AND wants them and us to make quality cars.
It all boils down to one thing. Selfish Greed. I want my 6-figure Ivory Tower position (which, of course is worth every red cent) while everyone around me makes pennies and things cost accordingly. Selfish Greed is also why he adamantly refuses to even contemplate the suckitude of his argument.
Those Muslim socialist union contracts didn’t stop the Americans from making money hand over fist during the $1.50 gas/SUV era.
The pinheads at Ford, GM, and Chrysler, being pinheads, thought that golden age would never end. The non-pinheads (balloonheads?) at Honda and Toyota knew better and continued engineering gas-efficient cars for the American market, even when the almighty market was indifferent to them, because they knew gas wouldn’t be $1.50 forever. (Remember when it took tax credits to get people to buy Priuses?) And now they’re surviving, even thriving a little.
I guess that’s hard to draw a one-panel cartoon about. Yeah, better to blame it all on the unions.
Shorter my previous comment: The trailer should have “lack of foresight” written on it instead.
So let me see if I get this straight. Union workers’ pay, health benefits, retirement benefits = bad. CEO’s pay, perks, golden parachutes, private jets, health benefits retirement benefits = good.
Right?
http://www.rubbercat.net/artduck/03.html is the only conservative comic needed
I knew Ramirez a little when he worked here in memphis, and when he got his pulitzer. I would see him stting at a bar somewhere drawing on a napkin to attract women. Actually it was a pretty good schtick, but most of the time he gave them the napkin, they left and he started another. Not that I was batting a higher average myself. But it was funny that none of his friends that I met were particularly conservative. Some were very liberal. He tried very hard to be liked and didn’t push the political joke stuff much unless he thought that was what you wanted to hear.
Of the Power Line goons, Hinderaker seems to be the most famous and respected. I don’t understand this at all. Scott Johnson is a supercilious dolt not worth taking seriously, but Paul Mirengoff, despite being a mendacious twerp, is probably the smartest of the three and easily the best writer. Hinderaker, on the other hand, is so confident in his ideology that his ideology is self-affirming.
Hinderaker doesn’t like unions. Ford, Chrysler, and GM are in financial trouble. Ford, Chrysler, and GM have unions. Ergo unions are bad, just like Hinderaker thought!
The UAW and the Big 3 negotiated new contracts in 2007 that make the wage structure in Detroit to be less burdensome than that in the foreign-owned nonunion Southern plants by 2010. The same contract made the pension plan the onus of the UAW, not of the Big 3; as I recall, the contract took something like $500 million completely off of management’s books.
Does Hinderaker even know this? I might assume that he does and is just not mentioning it because it makes his presentation more difficult. But it fits his usual pattern of not thinking things through, ignoring inconvenient facts, and making pronouncements of unqualified certainty. I’m inclined to think that he really does live in a bubble.
Anyway, I watched that documentary about blogs and the 2006 Connecticut senate race. Having seen Hinderaker, I nominate him to go to the GM plant and tell some 60 year olds guys who’ve been installing engine blocks for thity-five years why they don’t deserve to retire comfortably after all. I think he should wear his Dartmouth sweatshirt.
Y’know, it’s funny…you’d think these “free
mouseketeersmarketeers” would GLADLY support national health care and a national retirement plan of the kind that have allowed European carmakers…remember them?…to make money even in tough times… but, nooooooooooooooooo!!!!!Maybe if the trailer said “Brain Dead Management” or “Pathetic Lack of Quality and Creativity” the cartoon would be correct. Of course that would be critical of the uberclass and we can’t have that.
I was thinking ‘Fucking Conservative Assholes’ for the trailer legend, myself. Although perhaps that should really be written on a millstone around the neck of a bald eagle or Uncle Sam.
I’m always surprised at the level of unmitigated stupid required to believe that taking people’s retirement benefits away during a major recession is a good idea. Even if a person hates unions, if he weren’t a moronic idealogue with an inability to form thoughts more coherent than “Rush told me unions suck!”, he could probably figure out that the economy will suffer more if we take away people’s benefits. These people love to shoot themelves in the foot. They’d rather starve than think that someone who worked hard their whole life is entitled to health care and a pension.
I think that the Pulitzer became officially meaningless at the precise moment that Ramirez won one.
So…off topic here but Just Allison: don’t you live in Australia? Why aren’t you smirking quietly to yourself, what with your nationalized healthcare, your soon-to-be-own-again (I expect) Holden and your Peter Garrett in the Cabinet?
Not that I don’t appreciate your outrage on us stupid Americans’ behalf but if our roles were reversed I don’t know that I’d be too concerned about the coming demise of the Big Three.
Not being critical at all; just curious.
Companies with low production costs build inexpensive cars because that is their advantage. Companies with higher production costs build higher quality car with more features to add value and increase profit per vehicle. Their advantage is the ability to get and train a higher skilled work force. Which leads one to ask what the fukc did GM and Ford do to get and advantage? Seriously, what do they think they do better to justify what they build?
GM and Ford SUV’s are basically a new, suburbanite-friendly topper slapped on a truck axle, but they could charge more for them and so they did. When reality (gas prices) hit, they didn’t want to stop making this easy, most development expenses long ago paid for, high profit item. It doesn’t help that we’re stupid out here too; someone had to buy this crap. I heard an NPR story last week at how the current low gas prices are a blessing to GM and Ford dealerships because they are once again able to get people to buy these behemoths, whereas they weren’t selling at all when gas prices were more like what the rest of the world pays.
And Mark f is correct; management offloaded the union health care costs when they paid an endowment to the union, who then agreed to be responsible for making that money magically turn into enough to pay the health care costs of retirees. I’ll bet that’s not such a fun thing right now given the stock market, so the retirees might be screwed either way now – thanks, free market!
Seriously, the unions had better start countering this crap with some information campaigns, hired spokesmen, etc or they are about to be propagandized out of existence. I suppose they don’t want to bring up the fact that every other country they are competing against has national health care, since some of the rethug-leaning bubba’s in their ranks will go apeshit over that.
I think my three-paneled cartoon would go like this:
Panel #1 Man in suit and recognized as big three USA auto company pulls out his credit card to pay for his Christmas shopping at a fancy shopping mall.
Panel #2 Clerk at checkout counter informs Mr. Big Three that credit cards do not work any more because no one is lending money for credit and, therefore, his Christmas purchases will have to be made with cash.
Panel #3 Mr. Big Three turns to face reader bawling like a baby, mouth open, tears flying out of his eyes, and yells “You just killed Christmas.”
Mako,
A lot of the low end cars are Japanese and Korean. And to the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a successful Chinese-, Indian-, or Latin American-made car on the international market to date. The last truly low labor cost car was the Yugo. Here the issue is that if the quality is really low enough that very low skilled workers make it, it can’t be sold internationally since little things like safety and environmental laws will keep it from being sold.
The Big Three always seem to want to split the difference by making cars of noticeably poorer quality (even than other lower end cars such as Toyotas, Hyundais, Citroens, Volkswagens, or Vauxhalls) without making them inexpensive enough to justify their crappy quality. Oh and they make really, really big cars.
Seriously. That is the only production line that any of them seem to take seriously at all. And they’ve been flogging them since the 1950s.
And to the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a successful Chinese-, Indian-, or Latin American-made car on the international market to date.
Tata of India? Granted, it doesn’t have the reach that GM, Ford, Toyota, et al have, but it’s pretty extensive.
Too, China and India have a hard enough time keeping up with their home billion-person markets.
Mako, histro,
I think it’s not that GM & Ford did anything wrong, well I mean, clearly they did, but I mean way back.
It’s just that Japan and Europe caught up with how to mass produce quality cars at reasonable prices, and once they figured out how to do that, their lower labor costs (because they didn’t have to pay health insurance in many cases) helped propel them to discount deeply in America.
Have you ever bought a new Toyota v. a new, say, Chevy? You buy a Chevy and you were practically given a chance to make a custom ride, from colour to engine to type of ashtray.
If you bought a Toyota or Volkswagen or what have you, you got option packages.
Custom building a car costs a lot of money. It’s labor intensive. Packages don’t cost nearly as much.
By the time GM & Ford figured that out, the SUV had become popular, and so they were free to abandon making a cheap quality car in favor of slapping this shitty truck body and engine on a car axle and calling it a car.
I maintained back in the 90s that we could get both energy independence and a better line of American cars if we just called SUVs and pick-ups what they are: trucks.
And taxed, insured and regulated them as such.
What I think is really insane about this is that all those foreign companies like Toyota and Volkswagen are (gasp) UNIONIZED! (at least in their home countries) I mean, that sort of blows a hole in the whole theory right?
it is also the case that that quasar doesn’t have a blog.
For this alone you should receive some kind of medal.
“I maintained back in the 90s that we could get both energy independence and a better line of American cars if we just called SUVs and pick-ups what they are: trucks.”
Well of course one of the reasons SUVs took off is that they are regulated in some ways as trucks and thus able to avoid CAFE standards, emissions and safety regs. So they could be flogged as luxury vehicles but could be built relatively cheaply and thus the profit per vehicle was like $10K. Who wouldn’t want to belly up to that trough?
Too bad they didn’t reinvest some of that money into, y’know, actual product development.
I was in R&D for one of the Big Three for years.
If anybody is interested in hearing about the real cause of car companies’ problems, let me know. I have plenty of missives to missivize about.
Pretty easy to turn Hinderaker’s own “Greed Is Good” paradigm against him here.
Guess which of these will benefit America more? Retirement benefits: tend to go directly into the local economy. CEO lolly: tends to go into numbered Swiss bank-accounts.
Well, at least his pooch won’t need a pregnancy test.
Yeah, I was struck by that too … a funny kind of “drag” that saves companies at least half a billion spondulix … & to be technically accurate, the artist would’ve had to put another trailer behind the “Competition” dragster labelled “Stricter Environmental Controls” – at least for cars sold in Europe & Japan … but I’m guessing that’s when he conveniently ran out of ink.
Ahh, so THAT’s what Mallard Fillmore looks like – the poor beast. I found myself checking prior strips to see if they were all that stupid. Sigh. Consistency is not always a good thing.
There’s also this small detail that the Big Three are in many ways antithetical to the very free market the right-wingers claim to idolise. They’ve got a lot of nerve blaming unions for the Big Three’s inefficiencies, when there’s a far more compelling case to be made that monopolistic tendencies, monopsonistic tendencies (gotta love that vertical integration!), serial antitrust violations and other racketeering, are actually responsible.
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…
Well of course one of the reasons SUVs took off is that they are regulated in some ways as trucks and thus able to avoid CAFE standards, emissions and safety regs.
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…
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/
If anybody is interested in hearing about the real cause of car companies’ problems, let me know. I have plenty of missives to missivize about.
Well, it’ll probably be nothing more than a bunch of Commie propaganda, but go ahead…
Man, that sucks. I’ll bet that quasar could write like a motherfucker.
/does not read enough quasar blogs.
Well of course one of the reasons SUVs took off is that they are regulated in some ways as trucks and thus able to avoid CAFE standards, emissions and safety regs. So they could be flogged as luxury vehicles but could be built relatively cheaply and thus the profit per vehicle was like $10K.
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?
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.
“how to explain the fact that people bought them?”
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.
I saw it over and over.
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.
Shorter Right Wing Fruitcakes:
The only thing wrong with American industry is that American workers expect paychecks and benefits.
So let me see if I get this straight. Union workers’ pay, health benefits, retirement benefits = bad. CEO’s pay, perks, golden parachutes, private jets, health benefits retirement benefits = good.
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.
This cartoon only demonstrates how conservatives are out of touch with down-to-earth Real Americans; Ramirez can’t even even be bothered to visit an actual dragstrip to count how many Christmas trees there are at the starting line (hint: 0).
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.
War on Christmas Trees.
[quote]Anthony said,
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.
12 MPG beasts that never leave the pavement…
Except during an emergency maneuver. Then they’d leave the pavement in a big upside-down hurry.
Marketing, baby.
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.
12 MPG beasts that never leave the pavement…
Hey, you need that 400 horsepower to conquer that three degree incline in the mall parking lot…
Well easy peasey. Universal health care and a big part of the auto industry’s problems are solved.
Git’r done!