Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Fillmore

What is it about right-wing pundits that makes them all so hypocritical? If you think I'm exaggerating, consider a talk-radio host who calls for drug abusers to be thrown into prison without rehabilitation while he himself is sending his housekeeper to score narcotics on the street for him. Or how about a loud-mouthed bully who has the audacity to subtitle his cable TV program "The No-Spin Zone" even while he shouts at invited guests to "shut up" and tells his producer to cut their microphones? I won't put Ann Coulter in the same ranks as her male colleagues, because her rants aren't as nuanced or convoluted as theirs; she's just a total freakin' nut-job.

In some ways, the most infuriating of the right-wing hypocrites is a cartoonist named Bruce Tinsley, who draws a piece of syndicated garbage with the pseudo-clever title of "Mallard Fillmore." Among Tinsley's favorite targets for undeserved ridicule are public school teachers and postal employees. I guess it's easy to denigrate poor working stiffs who educate our children or deliver our mail when you get paid handsomely just for scrawling a distinctly unamusing comic strip. Hell, Tinsley is so divorced from reality that he actually made George W. Bush - a man whose countenance clearly proves that mankind evolved from apes - appear better-looking than George Clooney!

Tinsley has even been know to stoop to insulting fellow cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who draws the award-winning "Doonesbury" - something that goes way beyond the bounds of "cartoon etiquette." But one thing that all right-wing hypocrites share is a complete lack of any sense of honor or decency, so we shouldn't be surprised at Tinsley's boorishness.

Today, Tinsley's "Fillmore" saw fit to heap a pile of insults on the United Nations. Laughably, Tinsley backs up his vitriol with quotes from the Washington Times, the "newspaper" owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. I can just imagine his glee when Bush thwarted the will of Congress and sent that abomination, John Bolton, to act as our UN ambassador by resorting to a recess appointment - something that the Constitution allows only in the case of a national emergency, which this certainly was not. Bolton, you may remember, was best known for his statements about wanting to dismantle the UN. What better way to spit in the face of the world's peacekeeping organization than to send as your representative a man sworn to its destruction?

But wait? Didn't Bush and the neocon murderers use old reports of Saddam's non-compliance with UN demands as a justification for invading Iraq? And didn't Tinsley point that out in his strips defending Bush's oil war? So you give lip-service to defending the UN when you need an excuse for starting an illegal war, but you still get to call the UN names when they make noise about your blatant military imperialism?

"Mallard Fillmore" is neither clever nor funny; it's just excrement. Bruce Tinsley is a pompous idiot who doesn't deserve space in respected journals to spread his hatred and distortions. Case closed.