DarylCagle.com
Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.
The big news this week was the fact we’re finally pulling our of Iraq, but the resurgence of the “flat tax” and crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protesters also sprinkled into the news cycle. GOP Presidential hi-jinks are always welcome news to cartoonists as well.
Catch up on it all by checking out our Week in Political Cartoons slideshow.
Today, President Obama proposed $1.5 trillion in new taxes aimed primarily at the wealthy as part of a deficit reduction plan. Predictibly, politicians on the right have labeled this “class warfare” and claim Obama wants to “punish success.”
What do cartoonists think about all this class warfare stuff? Check out our Class Warfare cartoon slideshow to find out.
So President Obama and Republicans finally came to an agreement on extending the debt ceiling. Too bad all their bickering created more problems then it solved…
Many liberals are mad at the President for essentially giving Republicans 98 percent of what they wanted. His posture certainly has changed since entering office…
The stock market plummeted after Standard and Poor’s reduced the country’s AAA rating for the first time in our history. Many have questioned S&P’s integrity, especially since the other two ratings agencies have reaffirmed our AAA rating, but that seems besides the point…
As the stock market plummets, our representatives in Washington scramble to blame each other instead of working together to fix the problem. So much for leadership…
Are members of the tea party extremists? Some pundits seem to think so, pointing to the last couple of months where they were successfully able to hold Congress and President Obama hostage in order to get their demands passed.
One thing’s for certain – tea party members have certainly shaken-up the corridors of power in Washington. Whether that’s a good thing for the country remains to be seen.
Cartoonists are never afraid to weigh in on the tough questions, and it’s no different with the tea party. Here are 10 political cartoons that explore the notion of the tea party, and whether or not we should think of them as extremists.
Bill Day notices some striking similarities between Muslim extremists and the tea party…
Monte Wolverton explores what the tea party is spewing…
Florida Today cartoonist Jeff Parker thinks the tea party has gone overboard on what they’ve thrown overboard…
Caricaturist Taylor Jones thinks Eric Cantor points the way forward for the tea party…
Buffalo News cartoonist Adam Zyglis thinks we should change the spelling of “tea”…
R.J. Matson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows the reaction the tea party has to the word “compromise”…
Dutch cartoonist Joep Bertrams thinks the tea party have performed a hold-up…
While Eric Allie thinks Democrats and the main stream media have misrepresented the tea party all together…
Some still point to race, as Brian Duffy does with his cartoon…
While Hartford Courant cartoonist Bob Englehart thinks they’re just out to wreck the country…
It’s Friday, when we post our big, glorious slideshow recapping the week’s best political cartoons. This is a good one, covering everything from budget cuts to a possible government shutdown, as well as some great cartoons about a Koran-burning nutcase and some guy named Glenn Beck who got booted from his Fox News show.
So stop tending to your farm on Facebook for a second and take the time to check out The Week in Political Cartoons.
Tonight, President Obama will be giving his State of the Union speech. As is tradition, the Republicans will counter with an official rebuttal, given this year by Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan.
But thanks to the tea party movement, there will be a third Republican response, given by tea party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).
Find a politician who hangs out on the fringe and says crazy things (like the founding fathers ended slavery), and you’ll often find a local political cartoonist making a living lampooning her.
Bachmann has the misfortune of sharing a state with the talented Steve Sack, the terrific cartoonist at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Steve has been a long-time contributor on Cagle.com, and we thought in light of Bachmann’s remarks tonight to share some of his funniest cartoons about the right’s second-favorite female politician.
My friend, editorial cartoonist Ed Stein, drew this very provocative cartoon about the Arizona shooting, pulling in the imagery and cross-hairs from the infamous Sarah Palin graphic.
Ed also wrote this on his terrific blog:
It now appears that Representative Gabrielle Giffords was the target of an assassination plot. The reasons are unknown, and it’s too early to claim categorically that the shooting of Ms. Giffords and the other victims was motivated by a political grievance. That said, it’s not hard to believe that the poisonous political climate of the last few years can move an unstable person to violence. Indeed, the past summer, featuring rage-filled shoutdowns at town hall meetings, gleefully promoted by Fox News and conservative talk show hosts, led to hundreds of threats against members of Congress. The poster symbol of the anger and intolerance may well be the map Sarah Palin posted on her website during the election, highlighting targeted Democratic congressional districts with crosshairs. Let me be clear that both parties have indulged all too often in language that debases the debate, but the preponderance of the anger and invective seems to come from the far right. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik got it exactly right when he said, “To try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week has impaqct on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.” He called for us all to do some soul-searching.
Now, of course, the same folks who gloried in the over-the-top rhetoric, who infused the political debate with violent imagery, are shocked at the bloodshed. I’d like to believe that this event will force us all to reconsider how we conduct the political discourse in this country, but I suspect that, after a brief pause, we will go on as before. Too many pundits make their living stoking the public rage, and too many politicians have learned to capitalize on that anger. The mainstream politicians all responded with appropriate horror and sadness (as well they should, given the danger they are all exposed to), as did many of the Tea Party leaders. Then there was Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, whose immediate response to the carnage was this: “The hard left is going to try and silence the Tea Party movement by blaming us”¦The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words.”
So much for soul-searching.
