Topic: NewsBusters
An April 16 NewsBusters post by Tim Graham takes "Doonesbury" to task for making the following observation about the 2008 presidential race: "On the GOP side, the three front-runners, Giuliani, McCain, and Gingrich have five divorces among them, four of them really messy, and all of them involving adultery. On the Democratic side, the three front-runners, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, have no divorces or infidelities." Graham's response:
Trudeau is here is playing around with facts. Start with the point that Newt Gingrich isn’t actually a declared candidate for president. In some polls, he places third, but not in others. Using Mitt Romney, for example, would ruin the "joke."
This all sounds like the kind of argument liberals used in the mid-1990s to deflect attention from Bill Clinton’s private life, mocking conservative leaders for having bad marriages.
It also sounds like Graham's eagerness to change the subject from Don Imus to Al Sharpton.
Graham goes on to complain, noting the Washington Post's placement of "Doonesbury" next to "Opus" on the Sunday comic page: "Trudeau isn't even attempting to be funny most of the time, since it gets in the way of the diatribes, and Opus man Berkeley Breathed is routinely funny, even when he mocks conservatives." We would posit that a writer for a blog that publishes "Gaggle" lacks some room to complain about the humor level of comics.
