New Yorker Cartoonist Targeted for Jihad

Political epiphanies are not always instantaneous. Or if they are, there may be a drawn out period of gestation before it springs upon you, like Venus from the half shell. Such it was with me. I was reading Mark Steyn on the lame and execrable New Yorker cover:


...depicting seven apparently white Republican men (although two of the seven are in fact Hispanic), while poor Hillary has to stand outside the clubhouse door looking in. The glaring absence of three Republican minority candidates, a black, a woman and an Indian-American, along with the inaccurate depiction of the two Hispanic candidates, suggests that reality did not fit the cartoonist's meme of "white male privilege", or the fact that Hillary had let herself into her own clubhouse, built, owned and operated by the Clinton Foundation through a series of dummy corporations and cut outs.

Suddenly it hit me: I was offended by this cartoon. No, I mean: I WAS OFFENDED BY THIS CARTOON! I had seen it several times before. In fact, over the years I have seen a number of cartoons that were offensive: cartoons of Condoleeza Rice as a Negro slave comes to mind. But as offensive as some of these cartoons was, I was never "offended". Not officially anyway.

So I thought back to all the lessons I had learned from similar offenses in the news recently. Certainly, this fellow Mark Ulriksen of the New Yorker has the 1st. Amendment right to draw it, but that does not trump my right to be offended by it. He was clearly doing it intentionally to provoke a controversy. "Punching down" in the Doonesbury vernacular.

How do rational people respond to such provocation? Obviously, it is to declare a fatwa upon him, hunt him down and kill him*.

Which brings me to my problem. Two men recently set the example by driving 1000 miles to carry out a similar jihad**. I live in California. Assuming this Mark Ulriksen actually does live in new York, that's closer to 3,000 miles. President Obama has impressed upon us that Anthropomorphic Global Warming is a bigger threat to the nation than terrorism. So, in order to keep my carbon footprint manageable, do any of you know Mark, who could maybe convince him to meet me half way? Failing that, is anyone else out there OFFENDED who would be interested in car pooling? (Going halfsies on ammunition would be appreciated, too, but not mandatory.)

If there were any middle ground, any at all, acceptable to men of reason, and peace and goodwill, I would obviously be open to that, but, the predominant view, worldwide, is that this is the preferable and most frequently used recourse.

If only there were another way!




*If you cannot fathom the concepts of hyperbole or satire, please stop reading now.

**Well, attempt one anyway!