Crocodile Tears

If you could harness the energy of mock outrage, perhaps by refining crocodile tears into gasoline; the web and especially the blogosphere could put OPEC out of business. A good recent example is the hysteria over a Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post. The toon depicts a man in a hospital bed with a bandage on his head and the stumps of his arms and legs in bandages. He clearly represents the Army. Dr. Rumsfeld pronounces the man's condition to be "battle hardened."

No reasonable person could construe the cartoon to be anything other than an attack the arrogant stupidity of Don Rusmfeld, who had recently contradicted two reports, one sponsored by the Pentagon, that said the military is being stretched by the occupation of Iraq.

Pronouncing it to be "disgraceful," professor Reyonolds linked to a contest to recaption the toon at Instapunk. Punk makes it clear that he is outraged on behalf of wounded Republicans, as opposed to wounded soldier, by stating that "You can Bush-bash if you want, but we'll throw your stuff away." That doesn't seem to be much of a problem for the entries, many of which are generic smears of liberals and Democrats and have nothing to do with the issue at hand. I copied a few below (I respect Toles' and the Post's copyright, but these are stolen goods). The one at the top would at least make sense if the patient was labeled "Washington Post" and the chart read "credibility," instead of the other way around. It took me a while to figure out that "P. Snick" on the second entry means "peacenik." Oooh, clever! The next two are cretinously stupid. What do Ted Kennedy or the Alito hearing have to do with the issue at hand?
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