Never gonna give you up, Lord!

Barack Obama and John McCain’s bifurcated debate Saturday at the megachurch of doughy “The Purpose Driven Life” author Rick Warren put a spotlight on just how far two presidential candidates will go to hump a leg.

The Saddleback Civil Forum, as it was called, featured McCain and the O-bomb answering an hour’s worth of questions from mutual “friend” Warren, the founder of California’s Saddleback McChurch. Barack went first in a one-on-one with the pastor, after which McCain emerged from his “cone of silence” to contend with identical questions that were at turns negative, leading and arm-twisting: What is your greatest moral failure? Define marriage. When is a stem cell entitled to human rights? And the like.

Through questions like these, Warren played these potential presidents like string instruments. At best, his questions gave the candidates free reign to belch up their trustiest talking points. More frequently, however, this grilling had the effect of causing McCain and Obama to be seen as consenting to nothing less than a religious test for their right to hold office.

For example: at the 15 minute mark of the McCain half of the inquisition, Warren asked the Senator, “How does faith work in your life on a daily basis?” Now, if your impression of McCain doesn’t already tell you that this man does not spend a lot of time on his knees, or if you haven’t read Matt Taibbi’s excellent Rolling Stone article on how vulgar John McCain actually finds professions of faith to be, then McCain’s sigh and the look on his face as he answers says it all.

“It means I’m saved and forgiven.” McCain exhales, doing his best not to sound like a man for whom Christ is a guy you consult only when life hands you a shit sandwich, and not everyday like Google. You really feel for John here. Warren is Eli Sunday, slapping around a captive Daniel Plainview, asking him if he wants the blood. Perhaps this interrogation is what caused McCain to lead into a story about his captivity and torture in the Hanoi Hilton. To Warren, McCain’s tale of crumbs of mercy from an allegedly Christian Viet Cong was probably an inspiring tale of Christ’s small miracles. To anyone who recognized the contrast between grizzled warrior McCain and the coddled faith guru, the message couldn’t have been more plain: on the worst day of your life, the God you worship will still keep you tied to a chair with your biceps stretched to the tearing point. Ruminate on that in your next book, you fucking butter sculpture.

Obama’s responses to Warren’s questions were, as is his manner, a bit zestier and nuanced, as opposed to McCain’s wholesale, teeth-gritting sellout. Obama’s was a negotiation with an audience whose understanding of Chritianity, and therefor the importance of material wealth, runs an angstrom deep, and who thus would be easily spooked by an inappropriate response to Warren’s insistance that Obama define the word “rich” in the context of taxation. A bestselling author, celebrity and phony daring the next president of the United States to suggest that he’s not pulling his load? That is rich.

Obama, to his credit, zinged Warren about his book sales, but stopped well short of reminding the avarice-sympathetic audience that almost none of them will ever walk the marbled halls of the very well off, and that anyway their god wore sandals and probably had lice. Obama had to assure them that, under his plan, people making over $250,000 a year will pay only a “modest” tax increase. Unmentioned was how much blood is sucked from the masses every year by jes’ plain folks like the owners of Wal-Mart who cripple our manufacturing sector in order to achieve the sleight of hand that are their “everyday low prices”. These are the people who will feel the sting of Obama’s tax increases like a rhinoceros horn in the kidney, the brethren Warren is really batting for. But to point that out would have been too esoteric for people who attend a church rigged with lasers.

So instead, Obama parried with questions like, “Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?” as if this were somehow a sensible inquiry, a question that he himself might be presented with in a daily briefing one day. “Sir, satellite imagery shows a build-up of Evil in Eastern Buttfuckistan, and we believe Evil may be planning something big for the Rose Bowl!”

In an age of the War on Terror, before an assembled throng of people for whom religion requires the trappings of a dolphin ballet at Marineland, Obama actually had to tell his audience that evil does, in fact, exist, and that he will “confront it squarely,” but that we must “have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil.”

The issue? Is Obama planning to actually campaign on the subject? How far has statesmanship fallen that the potential leader of the free world would actually debase himself by humoring such an outrageously monkey-brained question at all, much less spin out the broad strokes of an actual agenda for combating evil by name??

When the red-staters complained of moral relativism, is this where they saw the argument going? Both political parties pandering to a kindergartner’s level of conversation about the very real challenges a nation faces in a complex world?

It says something about just how doofy politics has become that even this wasn’t simplistic enough for some right-wingers. In his column today, Bill Kristol commented of Obama’s response that, “Here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction [...] while Obama talked of confronting evil, McCain spoke of defeating it.”

So Obama is the rarified one when he speaks of evil as if it were an ectoplasm that could be offset by some manner of “evil credits”, whereas McCain is the realist when he pledges to vanquish evil, a feat we usually associate with hobbits? Would somebody please stop this motherfucking nation, because I really do need to get off.

I personally don’t know how Bill Kristol is going to make up his mind on Election Day.  It sounds like both the Republican and the Democrat are running for Bush’s third term.

If you don’t already hate life, this is guaranteed to push your disgust to it’s utmost threshold. Warning: Not for the easily sickened or those under a court-ordered suicide watch.

"And after the thousand years, Satan will be released from his prison… and he will come out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth." Revelations 20:7-20:8

I’ve added a new page to this site to promote my services as a gun for hire in the realm of commissioned comic artwork. Have you been waiting years for an affordable means to acquire a frame-able portrait of a near-nekkid woman with a big, scaly claw? Hop to my commissioned art page! And remember: at Crazy Jason’s, our prices are OFF THEIR MEDDDDDS!!

Thanks to all of you new visitors for adding comments in that “shout out” post. It’s nice to see so many fresh faces here at Whatissumthinsumthin.com. I’m especially glad to see the amount of crossover appeal Weapon Brown has with you Girls With Slingshot fans. I guess no matter where you go, everyone likes boobs. Make sure to visit Daniel’s site and read her funny strip about two babes and a cactus.

I have begun running ads for Weapon Brown on various websites using the Project Wonderful service. So far I’ve seen a lot of hits, but no comments that I know of from new visitors.

So, if one of my ads has led you to this dark corner of the Internet, don’t be afraid to add a comment and let me know!

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Here’s a bit of instant karmic irony for you: National Review Online has an editorial written by John G. West, a creationist with the Discovery Institute, trumpeting the passage in Louisiana of some academic sodomy bill that will allow teachers to start slipping creationist bullshit about panda thumbs into their science lessons. Read it here,  then go to the top of the second page where he starts talking about “scientific ‘facts’”, and look at the ad right below that paragraph to see just where creationists are getting their “facts” from (note: you may have to refresh the page).

That surly cyborg of mine returns today to begin the second chapter of Blockhead’s War. I hope there are lots and lots of you who are excited by this, or else my life has been a gigantic sham.

In fact, Weapon Brown will be occupying a significant portion of my time for the rest of the year, as I strive to complete Blockhead’s War and assemble it with the existing Weapon Brown material for my long-promised Weapon Brown graphic novel, due to hit stores in 2009. 

In order to pull that off, I am for the time being going to reduce the number of comic updates from three to two a week, those being Mondays and Wednesdays, so as to maintain a consistent schedule (Weapon Brown is a little more challenging to draw than Beepo and Roadkill. All those little gears in his arm take about 51 hours to render, and then I must run the art by some engineers at MIT I have hired to ensure plausibility).

To that end, Beepo, Roadkill and Squints will be taking a hiatus while I keep the Browniness flowing. They are by no means defunct, however! I am already drawing the next chapter of their adventures, which I assure you will take my lovable misanthropes into very, very uncharted waters. They will be back in full force around January, by which time I should have wrapped Chuck’s adventure up and slapped a bow on it.

In the meantime, I think you are going to genuinely dig the remainder of Blockhead’s War, which is going to be bigger, ballsier and more thrilling than anything you have seen so far as Chuck works his way up to the ultimate battle with a certain boy and his tiger.

So fasten your safety belts…then unfasten that shit! This trip ain’t gonna be for pussies.

I am beginning a series of E-Bay auctions to bring my glorious art to a wider audience. As usual, I hope that no one but my regular followers here at Whatisblahblahblah.com purchases the art, but I have recently gotten into this whole “democracy” trend, and so I cannot deny the winning bid to anyone based on race, creed or website affiliation. Once you see what I am offering, however, I am certain that at least one of you will snap it up like a Slim Jim!  

So here is this week’s enticement, the alluring Mystique! 


This artwork is 11 x 17, and rendered in pen&ink and marker on Bristol, and is a perfectly sensible outlet for your lingering adolescent  Smurfette fantasies. 

The auction is live now. Don’t be bashful! 

I also have a couple new pieces for sale here and here on my gallery page at Comic ArtFans.com that will soon go up for auction. (But why not snag them now? Why, I ask you?)

Tony Snow, war propagandist, Fox News truth mutilator and neo-con, dead at 53.  

Snow in 2007, with sons Bill (left) and Max (right)

To see the amount of attention CNN is devoting to the recently rescued FARC hostages, you would think that their reporters had been slashing through the Colombian jungle for five years on a crusade to rescue the captives. I don’t remember hearing about these men once on CNN during their five years of imprisonment.

Now they are getting more face time than Anderson Cooper! Everytime I’ve gone to CNN.com this past week there has been another top headline of one of the former hostages decrying their FARC captors as “terrorists with a capital ‘T’” who dress in jackal skins and sacrifice unbaptized children to Chalciuhtlicue.

Not that I am unhappy that Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes–the three snow-white mercs working for Northrop Gruman whose spy plane crashed into the pie-eating contest pavillion during 2003’s festive “FARC Daze”–are now safe and sound and drinking Anchor Steam again. I just think it’s a little tasteless for CNN to pretend that they were playing Peggy Say for these gentlemen the whole time.

I am returned from Chicago and posting again, as the final installment of “Not Safe for Work” will testify to.  Yes, my strip was delayed a bit while I sold my cancerous comics to the public, but I know that your patience is as elastic as a rubberband and that I could count on you being here when I returned. You’re all such sheep. 

The show was gangbusters and Deep Fried sold unusally briskly. While I try to figure out if that means I have finally found my audience, why not take a look at some of the interesting people I met there?

My brief enrollment with the Fundamentalist LDS Church (which I mentioned in the show’s program) caused many of the young girls at the show to arrive armed .

Worst Howard the Duck costume ever.

Go away! Aieeeee!!

This is “Venom Pimp” (seen here without his stable of Venom bitches).

My negotiations with Venom Pimp for some post-show entertainment in my hotel room fell apart when I commented that my hat was doper than his.

ARRGGGHHHHH!!!

There are often celebrities at the bigger comic conventions, but even I was surprised to see Dick Cheney show up!

There was alos a surprise waiting for me in my inbox when I returned. Apparently Deep Fried fan par excellance Benjamin Hayden has once again run out of things to do, and so created this alien mockery of Roadkill using Spore, a new video game that requires a blood sample every time you play it.



Well, I can see it a little around the eyes. Roadkill does blaze quite often. Go ahead and check out the video on my Refrigerator Art page and judge for yourself. 

(Ben went on to tear a rib from Roadkill and created a Boogie Bunnee as well.)