Helping Editorial Cartoonist's Find Something Funny About Obama

Consider it a public service and a help to my friends in the dead-tree, dying media who, gosh darnit, just can't find anything funny to draw about Obama.

Here's the gist:

After poking fun at George W. Bush for eight years — often drawing him with big ears and a severe overbite, or as a gung-ho Joe College type, or simply as a clueless doofus — political cartoonists are finding Barack Obama a more elusive target.

Bush's emotive facial expressions, easy-to-caricature physical features and, most of, all his deeply unpopular political decisions were fodder for liberal-leaning cartoonists. But the cool and detached Obama enters the White House at a time of considerable economic anxiety, bolstered by wishes of goodwill even from some political opponents.

"I had all my villains in place for eight years and they've been taken away," lamented Pulitzer Prize winner Pat Oliphant, one of the most widely syndicated cartoonists. "I don't know that I've ever had this experience before, of a president I maybe like. This is an antagonistic art. We're supposed to concentrate on finding things wrong. There's no point in drawing a cartoon that's favorable."

Oh Pat, don't kid yourself, you found Condi an easy target and didn't even give a damn you were being racist:

Now if Oliphant can conjure up that cartoon of an admirable former provost at Stanford who was the first African-American National Security Advisor and SecState, he sure as hell can come up with something about Obama.

Let's see what he can draw...how about we start with the dudes ears. He's got ears that would make Baby New Year laugh. Take a good look at these wind-catchers:


I mean come on, the guy can hear Nancy Pelosi's face cracking from Nepal with those otic receptacles.

Plus he smokes so that should make it easy. I imagine if Bush smoked, he'd have had a burner in every one of your smirking chimp cartoons.

Perhaps you can call Tony Auth, he can find a way to portray the Jews in a light that shows them as perpetrators of a new Holocaust, I'm sure he can give you some material to use drawing Obama, although he generally only deals in anti-Bush and anti-Semitic motifs. Plus, you can always go after Henry Waxman, if there's anybody who is right out of central casting for an editorial cartoonist, it's him:

So consider this a public service, Pat. You are part of a dying industry that just died a little more thanks to you.