Joel Pett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist from the Lexington Herald-Leader and USA Today, wrote a pithy accompaniment to a sampling of political cartoons in today's
Los Angeles Times. The cartoons all depict Howard Dean offing himself by various methods and, presumably, taking the Democratic Party along with him:
Cartoonists from across the political spectrum greeted the new Democratic Party chairman as if he were Dr. Kevorkian, not Dr. Dean. They showed the former Vermont governor assisting Democrats in jumping off bridges and buildings, driving off cliffs, committing hara-kiri - and digging their own graves. He was even depicted serving his own head on a platter, a trick Dr. Death never mastered.
(There's more...)
What a difference a political year makes. Last spring Howard Dean was embraced for energizing the Party of Clinton, feted for his fundraising, extolled for expanding the party base. How did he go from Don Quixote (tilting at windbags) to Donkey-Killer (dying by the sword)? Maybe he was fatally sound-bitten, instantly demoted from primary-time-player to just plain primal.
Ya think?
The Republican knock on Dean was always that he was too wild, too left, with Vermont's gay-friendly laws serving to trump his sober-sided budget-balancing centrism. Have cartoonists, often derided as the most out-there of the Liberal Media, adopted the GOP spin doctors' caricature? Now that's a perverse marriage.
Further proof (if any is needed) that yes, in answer to that last question, the mainstream media continues to parrot Rovian talking points and right-wing meme's. We can only concluded that Repubs must be terribly worried, else why expend so much energy criticizing and deriding the Chairman of the opposition party? I, for one, hope Dr. Dean continues to "tilt at windbags". And I look forward to November 2006 when the Republicans wake up the day after Election Day with the worst kind of electoral hangover and with no idea what hit `em.
(Thanks in advance for your indulgence on this - it's my first attempt at a diary so I chose my favorite topics - Howard Dean, and the failure of most of the MSM to properly serve the public.)