Saturday toons 21 JANUARY 12

The cartoonists have been very good recently because in my mind, the story of this election is the story of Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist—Gordon Gekko explaining to Bud Fox why he was wrecking Blue Star Airlines in spite of his promises not to, "Because it was wreckable."  Can it be possible that the citizens of the USA will vote for a corporate raider—someone who personally destroyed their lives and got extremely rich doing so?

What was so utterly loathsome about the raiders was how casually these sociopaths destroyed vital industries that took sometimes four generations to build.  So now the pirates are going to scream "If you are against seizing and destroying assets—you are against holy capitalism!"  And the papers and pundits will shuck and jive around this issue.  But facing the apologists for this crime spree is an irrefutable fact—there IS a difference between up and down, between building and destroying.  I am betting reality wins this one.

Of course, Romney is an example of another persistent scab on the face of the Republican Party—the idiot sons.  W. raised the bar but he has plenty of company.  George Romney (Mitt's father) made cars—cars so ugly and badly-made American Motors is out of business but at least he made something difficult.  Mitt gave us Staples—a big box office supply store—and wrecked a whole lot of other enterprise.  The slippage between George and Mitt Romney utterly trivializes the slippage between W. and dad.

So here's to Gordon Gekko—the face of the new Republican Party.  I wonder how well this gang of uber-thieves is going to get along with the fundies.












Veblen reminded us that whenever the Leisure Classes feel threatened, they invoke the horrors of bad manners.  It defines their in-group status and defines the outsiders as the hopeless rabble.  This is an especially well-done spoof on the tut-tutting over the latest "PR disaster" that is Afghanistan.