Newest comic - "A word from Disgrace's promotional department"

This week's strip is a unique one; it's actually the strip I just sent over to Mike Amon, the editor of NYU's Washington Square News during my Freshman year- basically the guy who made the call to print XQUZYPHYR & Overboard for the first time. Odds are if I got shot down that first year, I would have just looked for something else to do and you'd have never seen any of the over 100 comics I've done since.

I sent it to Mike for the demo issue of Disgrace, a new magazine he's starting up along with a bunch of other former WSN editors and staffers. I know over half the people on the magazine's staff page.

The magazine's website is just starting up, but I think its mission statement makes the case- this is going to be a magazine that defies previous descriptions. Not just humor, not just opinion. I've worked with most of the guys on this magazine for years during my time at NYU, and because of that I really believe the 80's-movie-cliche of "old friends get together and make a business doing what they love" is actually going to work this time.

Oh yeah, and buy some crap, dammit.

Popin' aint easy

Pope John Paul II signals his bitches to raise the roof up in this here hizzouse. Having taken recent flak for the Vatican's recent outburst of misogyny the Pontiff responded "shit, yo, I'm just keepin' it real." In a statement on behalf of His Holiness, Vatican spokesmen suggested that offended women should just take a cue from the women J.P. be showin' his love for in his crew and let a player play. He then retreated to his crib in the Vatican, confirmed on a recent episode of MTV's Cribs as "the flashiest bling bling in Italy outside of Sean John's new threads during fashion week." Word.

Huh?

I'm trying to figure out where this concept of the right-wingers about Kerry's "10-15 point bounce" came from.

Is there a historical trend here? Maybe I'm mistaken, but following the 2000 conventions I don't recally Bush beating Gore 55-40, or Gore leading Bush 50-37 in any kind of national contest. To the best of my knowledge, the furthest either candiate pulled ahead of the other in a head-to-head matchup in 2000 was when Al Gore had 8 points over Bush for a few days between the convention and the first debate.

It's kind of an example-within-an-example on Oliver's site, where he poses a very accurate point about the right wing's drift toward irrational explanations for the support of a Bush candidacy. As in many of these arguments, the whole "why isn't Kerry doing better, huh?" line seems to be the first thing thrown out.

I'm sure part of it is the whole defense mechanism thing- after all, a bunch of warbloggers who have shaped the entire fiber of their relevance around convincing themselves that absolutely nothing is going wrong in Iraq- are likely a bit puzzled as to why Bush isn't, you know, leading Kerry by over ten points in national polls. Or for that matter, leading Kerry by the margin of error. Or leading Kerry at all.

But clearly the main goal is the time-honored tradition of straw men: according to the right-wingers, Kerry is "supposed" to have a 10-15 point lead over Bush now following the convention. But he doesn't, a victim of that pesky cretter known as complete lack of any historical precedent, and the response from the right-wingers gets to be "Kerry flopped!"

To, to correlate with Oliver, yes. The hate does make you crazy. Unfortunately, it also makes you clever, and the whole line about Kerry not having some outrageous bounce he was never going to get is an example. Crazy, in comparison, is the stuff Oliver talks about that stems from the bloggers who have crafted their security blankets around the belief that George W. Bush is the only thing protecting them from terrorism. The real crazy will be when Kerry wins the election in November, at which point I think I'm going to stay away from the home cities of a lot of these bloggers for fear that they've snapped and gone looking for clock towers.

Berger cleared

Wow. I didn't expect this at all. I had just assumed that everything Matt Drudge, Glenn Reynolds, and the rest of the right-wing smear all-stars were saying was completely accurate and backed by evidence.

What are these people who know the facts thinking? Don't they know Berger is a master criminal? The webloggers do!

Clean slate

"There is nothing more pessimistic than saying America can't do better."

After Obama, Edwards, hell, even parts of Sharpton, the conventional (no pun intended) wisdom was that Kerry was pulling a Dubya with his speech- in other words, letting the media forecast that Kerry would utterly fail to meet the standards of everyone else specifically to make even a turd look good by expectations by simply delivering it coherently.

We were given the more clever strategy of the speech actually being good.

Now, look. I'm not 100% in agreement with everything Kerry says. In fact, I don't even believe 100% of what he said twenty minutes ago. But the entire speech, including the buildup with the veterans, firemen, and Max Cleland, was staged to near-perfection to utterly crush most of the Bush anti-Kerry campaign.

There can, and will, be legitimate (and a lot of ridiculous) discussion about the foreign policy issue. As I said a few posts ago, there are Libertarian and Right-wing pundits and warbloggers who have structured their basis for supporting the GOP on the fragile belief that George W. Bush is the only thing protecting them from nuclear annihilation. Their problem with the argument is the slow and steady revealing to the world of how fragile that argument is. Tonight, Kerry shattered it.

Tax cuts good, tax cuts bad, okay. Beliefs in abortion, yadda yadda yadda. But the last six months of "Kerry's not really a leader" and "Kerry's not a true war hero" garbage is just dead. The image of Kerry being a "extreme liberal" and "against defending the country" doesn't even have much of an argument after Kerry laid it out. It's just wrong. And everyone knows it.

Deep down, conservatives saw this speech and realized that spin is going to become much more complcated. To depict Kerry as a weakling, they are going to have to lie. Because Kerry just spent 45 minutes explaining the truth about the Kerry campaign.

Whether you agree with it, and how much of it you support, is irrelevant. It's there.

The crisis facing the Bush camp now is the truth of the differences between Kerry and Bush. It's not about Bush being a better candidate than Kerry anymore, because everyone now knows it's simply not true. This is no longer about saying that Bush is better than Kerry; it's about providing examples. And I think the Bush supporters are realizing they don't have a lot of that.

Good for him

Okay, I'm being snotty here, but come on, this is the actual headline:

AP: Kerry to Accept Presidential Nomination

Well holy crap, where'd they get a scoop like that?

Thus begins the New York hatefest

The Republican National Convention- scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks- will have its opening invocation given by the man who said 9/11 was punishment for homosexuality.

Remember, though: Ted Kennedy doesn't respect the gravity of 9/11.

Update: A collection of Falwell's greatest hits, courtesy of Jesus' General.