This week’s (10/8 -10/13) Doonesbury features Mitt Romney in his Mormon missionary years in Paris.
Not a big deal. Except that we see Mitt. Young and shiny Mitt, but obviously Mitt, not a symbol.
Trudeau has famously never portrayed a president in his strip. The closest he ever came was with Ron Headroom for Reagan, but that was a surrogate and not intended to be the actual president.
Unless he’s breaking his decades’ long precedent, the only explanation I have is that he’s decided that Obama doesn’t have a chance of losing so he won’t have to deal with a Romney Presidency. Of course, even his notoriously short lead time would have required these strips to have been drawn before the debates.
Do you think he blew it? Is this something new? Is this a big deal after all? Should this be in Elections?
(And yes, Doonesbury hasn’t been funny for a) years, b) decades, c) ever. Go away.)
Does anyone really think Romney can win? It’s Clinton-Dole all over again.
As for Doonesbury, he’s funnier when he’s not being political. The personal lives of the characters are handled well. Pop-culture stuff is satirized well. But ever since the George W. Bush administration, he’s lost his ability to be funny about politics.
I’m not sure if I understand today’s strip. Trudeau is now a hawk? He has a problem with Romney getting deferments from the draft? Let me go and do some research about how he put down Clinton for it…
An interesting factoid from this election is none of the four candidates (Prez and Veep) have any military service, which is the first time since 1932.
It might have behooved Trudeau to remember that, in 1968, Mitt’s father George Romney was running for President on an ANTI-Viet Nam war platform.
George was roundly mocked for saying he’d been “brainwashed.” If he’d said what he probably MEANT to say (“The generals and the State Department sold me a bill of goods- they told me we were winning and the boys would be home in a few months”), he still probably couldn’t have won the GOP nomination, but he’d still be a respected figure today.
Trudeau wants to paint the Romneys as rich warmongers who kept their own kids safely out of war… but that’s not the case. George Romney was not a hawk on Viet Nam.
George Romney went to Nam in 1965 and supported it for the next two years. He didn’t come out against the war publicly until August 1967. You can’t say that he was anti-war in July 1966. We don’t know.
Romney’s deferment at the time shouldn’t be an issue for anyone. You can’t defend anyone who attacked Clinton for doing so. Or Cheney. Or anyone of their generation. People do attack them, but the ones on Cheney were only from those asking why he should be treated differently than Clinton.
The real issue is what Romney’s views were on Vietnam. And it’s clear that he was pro-war in 1966. His recent statements are also clear:
This appears to be the exact quote that Trudeau is referencing. It’s legitimate satire.
I’m pretty sure the strip is making fun of him being a flip-flopper. At first he says he longs to be in the war, then as soon as the other person says something negative about the war, Romney agrees and says that’s why he’s deferred twice.