Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 04, 2010

Joe, do you just get off on nitpicking people over the dumbest things? Two comics in a row I see you doing this.

This is how the president who wanted to bring us all together celebrates the 4th?

Ps. Some of those who reply below miss GT’s point. BHO is our leader, in the White House where he–more than either of his two immediate predecessors–belongs on our nation’s birthday.

Deo gratias.

Reminds me of an old joke. Q: Do they have Fourth of July in England? A: Of course, silly. They have July fourth everywhere they have July. Happy Independence Day Joe! Happy Fourth of July to the rest of you.

Of course, Joe, you know the Declaration was not signed on the Fourth of July, don’t you?

LOL, perfect analogy of how the American public views it’s President. Great job GB! Happy 4th to all my Yank homies!

Yeah. A fallible human being with a great family. Happy Independence Day, Mr. President.

To all our service people overseas, who might also be shaving under less than ideal circumstances, Happy 4th of July, May God bless you, and bring you home safely.

Thank you, Thirdguy. A truly awesome sentiment.

The time has come Said a young man to his bride The train waits outside And though I leave You know I’ll keep you by my side She holds on a final time Soldier’s gone to war Told her he’s comin’ home Soldier’s gone to war He’s gonna be a hero in his hometown, lord She stands alone On a platform lookin’ sad He waves through a pane of glass And though she hopes He will be comin’ home at last Her heart knows what’s gonna pass Soldier has gone to war Don’t know it, but he ain’t comin’ home no more Soldier has gone to war He’s gonna be known as a hero in his hometown, lord Soldier’s gone to war Told her he’s comin’ home Soldier has gone to war He’s gonna be known as a hero in his hometown, lord The paper falls to the floor from a trembling hand The words they burn to the soul And though she cries, she doesn’t really understand The world’s gone so cold Soldier went to war Told her he’d be comin’ home Soldier went to war Gonna be a big hero in his hometown, lord And the stories tell of bravery, yeah He was golden as the sun Well he fought for you and he fought for me, yeah And he died for everyone Stories of a hero Stories of a hero Well it seems as though the world ain’t changed It goes on and on for years When men must die to be called brave To earn respect among their peers Stories of a hero Stories of a hero

Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush

TIGGER Can’t help but agree and GT didn’t show half the broken promises.

JOE Happy Independence Day from one vet to another. May we all be grateful for the sacrifices freely given by those who never returned. You and me have the freedom to disagree. I guarantee we will.

Today is actually Malia’s 12th birthday - saw it in the paper today.

If I may, I believe the point is less that Pres. Obama himself has not fixed these things than that he and the Congress together have not fixed these things. He, after all, is not the federal government.

Happy Fourth, everyone!

(begin sarcasm) I know what we need and I don’t know why we never thought of it before.

We need a president that does everything he or she says she or he will do and do it immediately regardless of petty interference by powerless entities such as congress and the supreme court.

We need a president that will do what every single person in the U.S. wants a president to do. We need a president to overcome the silly fact that the country is divided against it self. We need a president that will make all our differences disappear overnight and not disappoint any of us.

I just don’t understand why such a simple solution hasn’t been applied sooner. (end sarcasm)

Horace_manoor.

I declare now and forever.

YOU DO NOT EXIST AND YOU NEVER DID!

There! That solves that problem!

Oh, and BTW, horace, I deeply admire your avatar, it fits you precisely.

And Joe. Happy Indeefourthance day.

Happy Fourth to all others.

He probably cut himself while shaving, and he already has gray hairs.

Let’s see: No previous mangerial/executive experience; a poor voting record as a U.S. Senator; He’s perfect for the job of POTUS!

Now, if we could have you provide us with copies of your long-form birth certificate, school records and travel records…

I’m surprised no nitpicker has yet pointed out that today is NOT Independence Day, but the anniversary of it.

let’s see –Obama inherited two wars, an economy ruined by the previous administration and Wall Street., a polarized electorate fanned by the just- say-no party that has refused to engage in even a modicum of cooperation, collaboration and decency, and btw it’s his fault that BP was criminally negligent and incompetent.

imo it is way past time that a certain moronic segment gets over the fact that a Democrat and a black man was elected president. let it go so we can get back to being “we the people…” and solving problems rather than obsessing about birth certificates.

So much to do and so little time…go for it anyway…if anyone can…you can at least try… But let’s get real and look at who did the damage that needs to be undone…Happy Fourth George! and I don’t mean Washington…

We need a president that will do what every single person in the U.S. wants a president to do. We need a president to overcome the silly fact that the country is divided against it self. We need a president that will make all our differences disappear overnight and not disappoint any of us

that is a nice thought IF everyone could agree on how to go about ACHIEVING it…

Hi Joe. Happy Independence Day to you and all American friends from Australia.

I wonder who used the ‘Francis’ avatar as a coward’s way of hiding their usual name on Gocomics. Their current name sums up how they must really feel about themselves. Flagged.

@fbjsr

Would you vote for someone who ran for president while admitting s/he was afraid problems might come up for which s/he had no answer?

You and the “angry electorate” sound like the president’s daughter, except that where she is shocked to see him bleed, you gloat over any sign of impotence.

But as Hugh B. notes above, Americans love to run down their president, even on the 4th of July. It’s our perennial return to adolescence and we get a thrill out of reaffirming our ungovernable INDEPENDENCE with fireworks, teabags, and amnesia.

From 2001 to 2008, whenever I bemoaned about the ditch our country was being driven into … my Republicans friends said “It’s Clinton’s fault. He was a sleeze bag.”

No pressure, though I noticed Obama has gotten a lot grayer since he took office a mere 18 months ago

My silly fictitious president is the president that the detractors are measuring Obama against. The constant RANT is that he’s not perfect, therefore he’s terrible.

I have inserted sarcasm marks in my first comment.

Thank you, cfimeiatpap, for the poetry. Beautiful and sad at the same time.

And I like the comic, regardless of my political party.

The 2000s economy:

The dot-com bubble was nobody’s fault politically. It represented the normal series of events for an infant industry - nobody’s done it before, a lot of people give it a try, only a few figure out how to do it right.

9/11 sent the economy reeling. The destruction of the WTC and the cost of the wars drove up deficits - which started to recede after 2004, but exploded in 2008.

The “blame Bush” kneejerk reaction assumes that the root causes of the mortgage and mortgage-backed securities collapse started during Bush’s administration. Two key causes go back further: to fuel a housing bubble, Greenspan lowered interests drastically and Democrats insanely expanded the availability of mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.

An overly inflated housing market requires lenders to seek new capital sources - thus a mortgage-backed securities bubble. The money for the bad mortgages had to come from somewhere.

When mortgages sank, the securities sank. The regulators weren’t sure how to value those securities in the first place - by default the they were valued way downward. Financial institutions sank because on they fell below their fractional reserves minimum - mark-to-market rules hit them with the equivalent of a margin call.

Everyone should have seen what was coming when the mortgage lenders were caving. As soon as Bear Sterns was threatened, Congress should have imposed emergency mark-to-market changes to keep institutions afloat while fixing the systemic problems. But no - they let the well go uncapped, and Bear Sterns disappeared.

Instead of addressing root causes, Bush and the Democrats and a few key GOP moderates threw borrowed money at the problem. The toxic assets still haven’t been cleaned up.

Like Sasha, you want to talk about the “stinky economy,” AKH–even though your metaphor of cleaning up toxic assets shows your mind is on Malia’s question about “the hole.”

Without metaphor, readers ought to understand that the bad mortgages have all been bought up (some $2-3 trillion) by our wonderful Fed, acting through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So the banks now have strong balance sheets again thanks to the suckers (us taxpayers) who took the nasty stuff from their hands.

The suckers include you and me, fbjsr. Much easier to demonize one party or another than to own up to our ultimate responsibility for the actions of Congress, which yet again has declined to reform the banking system.

I doubt that nobets/stebon (below)–who misreads GT’s strip–can name his congressman. He seems to be one of those pathetic rednecks made sick by the beauty of miscegeny.

Why do people call our beloved leader black? In a lot of states, they can prove) the mother but not the father. Therefore a child’s Race box matches his mother’s race.Can anyone prove his father? Oops, DNA testing wasn’t around when most of us were born,

http://tinyurl.com/26vwunx

Because Obama decided to call himself black on the census box, Lew. He could have ticked the “white” box too, and he repeatedly recalls his white grandfather Stanley Dunham. But he reveals in his books that his father’s character (not just his DNA) shaped his own, even though Obama last saw his father when he was only eleven.

Obama likes to call himself a “mutt”; that’s his way of mocking our racist categories, which must seem bizarre to our increasingly miscegenist population.

Ps. The Kos article is pretty good, SuperGriz, and it’s pertinent to July 4 if not to GT’s strip. The gun rights group aren’t usually historians, or they’d have discovered Machiavelli’s Discourses by now. And neither they nor Americans as a whole realize that our Bill of Rights was based on the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Now don’t anybody tell me that today’s strip isn’t bang-on! Everybody wants him to fix it all, right away! I love Trudeau’s sense of humour!

I’m sure I posted a comment, but it seems to have disappeared. Also, I flagged two comments, but they got unflagged. To flag them again, I had to do each one twice. What’s going on?

Maybe my politics are too left-wing for you all? Altho I shouldn’t use the word “left-wing”, because I’m using it in the sense it had thirty years ago, which has now completely changed.

Most activists aren’t historians, period. The gun rights folks seem to have enough of ‘em to register a lot of Google hits on “nra 1689 Bill of Rights.”

Re Discourses: - you must have this in mind:

“From this we plainly see the folly and imprudence of demanding a thing, and saying beforehand that it is intended to be used for evil; and that one should never show one’s intentions, but endeavor to obtain one’s desires anyhow. For it is enough to ask a man to give up his arms, without telling him that you intend killing him with them; after you have the arms in hand, then you can do your will with them.”

http://volokh.com/posts/1169860054.shtml

I think the gun rights folks understand the principle, even if they’re not familiar with Machiavelli’s translation of Livy. But making a sound bite of it is bad PR, however true it may be. “The gun grabbers are out to get us” is a tougher sell to an American audience than, say, the idea that disarming citizens makes them more vulnerable to private-sector criminals.

Name calling. Not gonna go there.

There is only one good(?) thing I can say about Obama. He ran on the promise of undefined change.

He certainly kept that promise.

Sadly the economy is un-fixable, for Obama or for anybody else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usnationaldebt

^Keep in mind that change is scary to many people.

Put the frog in the pot of cold water, and warm him up gradually, and the little guy will enjoy the jacuzzi until he goes to sleep and gets cooked.

Gradual change isn’t quite as scary, but getting some of these things fixed before too many of us die needs to be quicker. It’s a huge job, and the gray hair is one symptom of just how big it is.

AKHenderson , you’re review of the causes of the ‘great recession’ are generally accurate … but you forget to mention that from 1995-2006 the Republicans controlled both House and Senate, and from 2001-2008 the White House - and did nothing about the the housing bubble or Fannie Mae either.

There’s plenty of blame for everyone - from the Fed Chairman to unethical accountants to brokers and agents pushing, pushing loans … to the guy in the street who bought a house he knew he couldn’t afford.