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.

The Henry Waxman Coverup

The two biggest players in the mortgage meltdown--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--are getting some preferred treatment from California Democratic Representative Henry Waxman. A report into the mortgage collapse lays a great deal of responsibility at the feet of Freddie and Fannie:

But previously undisclosed internal documents that are now in Mr. Waxman's possession and that we've seen tell a different story. Memos and emails at the highest levels of Fannie and Freddie management in 2004 and 2005 paint a picture of two companies that saw their market share eroded by such products as option-ARMs and interest-only mortgages. The two companies were prepared to walk ever further out on the risk curve to maintain their market position.

The companies understood the risks they were running. But squeezed between the need to meet affordable-housing goals set by HUD and the desire to sustain their growth and profits, they took the leap anyway. As a result, by the middle of this year, the two companies were responsible for some $1.6 trillion worth of subprime credit of one form or another. The answer to Mr. Waxman's question about their role in the crisis, in other words, is that they were central players, if not the central players, in the creation of the housing boom and the credit bust. Mr. Waxman released some of these documents Tuesday but kept others under wraps.

In early 2004, Freddie's executive team was engaged in a heated debate over whether to start acquiring "stated income, stated assets" mortgages. And in April of that year, David Andrukonis, the head of risk management, wrote to his colleagues, "This is not an affordable product, as I understand it, but a product necessary to recapture [market] share. . . . In 1990 we called this product 'dangerous' and eliminated it from the marketplace." Freddie went ahead anyway.

And what is Waxman doing to help this bunch of liberals run wild? The single weirdest-looking dude in Congress is keeping the documents from the public and protecting not only men like Franklin Raines but his fellow members of Congress like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who are neck-deep in this. Congressional Democrats made it a goal to get people into housing not only because of their liberal ideology but because they knew it would help them politically through donations and in the case of Dodd, personally by getting reduced interest rate loans.