Reader accuses Candorville of RAPE joke

It takes a certain kind of person to read today's Candorville strip and conclude I'm joking about rape. It takes the kind of person who can read Candorville for any length of time and still conclude that its author would find something like rape funny. It takes the kind of person who thinks the words "rape" and "pillage" are interchangeable (if they were, the usual phrase describing the horrors of war wouldn't be "rape AND pillage").

It takes this kind of person:

Hey.

Funny strip most the time. Racial commentary and all that.

But todays strip (12-20-07) appalled me. Unless I am reading that wrong, it seems to be a blatant and casual reference to rape. Who calls that humor? Rape is not something that should be include in anything labeled as “comic”.

I’m sure you are aware of racist issues. Try to be aware of sexist issues. They are not that far apart.


JW

I can't believe anyone who's read Candorville for any length of time would even entertain the notion that its author would find rape funny. If any other readers out there jumped to that same outlandishly offensive conclusion, please don't bother me with it. I spend hours each week going back and forth with irate or confused readers about the topics I raise in Candorville, and I do it gladly. I love that part of this job. But this misinterpretation is just way too insulting to comment on any further.

Friday Movie: The Jerk

Sometimes revelations that the President's been lying about WMD again and "can't recall" hearing about the CIA's torture-tape coverup make you want to write out a long, detailed, link-filled post. Other times, it can make you want to tune out and watch Steve Martin:

If we have universal healthcare, the terrorists win

I recently received an angry e-mail from a reader who was sure I'm a supporter of universal health coverage. He was right, but what struck me was his suggestion that this makes me a terrorist-hugging jihadist. I suspected the genius didn't come up with this brilliant notion on his own, and sure enough, a quick Google search turned up the likely culprit. It was no surprise...

"And now, for a moment of Zen"

Came across this on This Modern World. Thanks to the Internet, our most embarassing moments can now live on forever:

Senseless and Stupid

It didn't take the Oakland PD long to find Chauncey Bailey's assassin. If only Kennedy's real killer had been this stupid.

A suspect in the daylight ambush shooting death of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey was being formally booked today on suspicion of murder, authorities said.

Devaughndre Broussard, 19, was in the process of being booked at the Alameda County jail in downtown Oakland in connection with Thursday's slaying of Chauncey Bailey, 57, at 14th and Alice streets.

Broussard was a handyman at Your Black Muslim Bakery who confessed to police Friday night that he ambushed and killed Bailey with a shotgun because he was upset with the journalist's coverage of the group...
More...

Did Broussard think murdering the reporter was going to lead to better coverage of the group?

He couldn't have been more wrong.

More Conservapedia Wisdom: Marriage

Today's random bit of wisdom from Conservapedia:

Recently there has been a push by liberals for "same-sex marriage" however this supposed form of "marriage" has no basis in scripture, common law, the constitution, biology, or American social tradition. Then again, interracial marriage was considered to be taboo 40 years ago.

I didn't realize there was a basis for heterosexual marriage in biology. I suppose that would explain the abundance of "just married" signs on dog houses. It's "Rex" and "Daisy," not "Rex" and "Spot."

I also didn't realize there was a "basis" for heterosexual marriage in particular in the U.S. Constitution. I really need to learn to read that document between the lines, since that's where so many Americans seem to find support for their theories.

Tim Hardaway and the Senseless Crowd

Tim Hardaway can't stand gay people. Sensible people can't stand Tim Hardaway. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of senseless people in this world.

Look for cartoons on this next week here, or in your Candorville-carrying local paper.

Best way to ruin your astronaut career

Police said Nowak drove 900 miles, donned a disguise and was armed with a BB gun and pepper spray when she confronted a woman she believed was a competitor for the affections of Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein, an unmarried fellow astronaut.

Oefelein, 41, piloted the space shuttle Discovery in December. He and Nowak trained together but never flew a mission together.

Nowak told police that her relationship with Oefelein was "more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship," according to an arrest affidavit. Inside Nowak's vehicle, which was parked at a nearby motel, authorities found a pepper spray package, an unused BB-gun cartridge, latex gloves and e-mails between Oefelein and Colleen Shipman.

They also found a letter "that indicated how much Mrs. Nowak loved Mr. Oefelein" and Shipman's home address, the arrest affidavit said.

Police said Nowak told them that she only wanted to scare Shipman into talking to her about her relationship and didn't want to harm her.

"If you were just going to talk to someone, I don't know that you would need a wig, a trench coat, an air cartridge BB gun and pepper spray," Jones said.
More...

And that's not all.

Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers in the car so she wouldn't have to stop to go to the bathroom, authorities said.
More...

SF Mayor Proves He's Not Gay

Ever since Mayor Newsom bravely fought for civil rights when he allowed gay couples to marry in 2004, the country's knuckledragger population has been speculating he's gay. These are probably the same dimwits who assumed that if you doubted Hussein had WMD, it meant you were secretly the founder of the "I Want Saddam's Love-Child" club. Anyhow, Newsom seems to have chosen an odd way of dispelling the rumors. Next time, he might want to try using someone who's not married to a good friend.

Clinton on Faux: How could Roger Ailes be so confused?

There's been so much whine coming from the direction of the "Fair & Balanced" network that you'd think they were based in Napa. "Boo hoo, Bill Clinton raised his voice! Waaaah, Bill Clinton looked at me angry! Mommy! Mommy! Mommmmyyyyyy!" Today, Fox even tried to portray Clinton's forceful response to their interviewer as an attack upon all of journalism. Why Ailes confused Fox News with journalism, I have no idea.

To hear them tell it, Clinton ripped off his shirt, turned lime green and feasted on poor Chris Wallace's intestines before relieving himself on the First Amendment. That's not exactly how it happened.

Meanwhile Keith Olberman has a different take on it:

Reader mailbag - "But Lieberman IS 'moderate!' the Media says so!"

This is representative of the feedback to today's cartoon about Joe Lieberman and the mainstream media:

By candor do you mean your opinion?---no humor?

Most people do not want a time table to pull out of Iraq.The people who are against privitization of SS don't have an alternative solution.Most people don't want to raise taxes to supprt universal health care.I'm sure the people you surround yourself with don't think Lieberman is a moderate,but most Americans do,based on facts,not the"mass media".--Is your comic ever humorous?--it so one sided.

-Steve N.

...And my response...

1. As recently as last month, 57 percent of Americans supported a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
-source

2. The people who are against privatization of Social Security DO have an alternative solution: it's called Social Security. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A plurality of the country believed in 2005 that the system wasn't broken, and modest changes to the system, along the lines of the changes made in the '80s, would keep it solvent for generations.
-source

3. Most people do want universal health care, even if it meant raising taxes.
-source

In short, you're wrong on every count -- which leads me to believe that your assessment of the humor in Candorville is probably equally faulty. Thanks for taking the time to write!

Candorville on Israel

Israel is our ally, and rightly so. And any nation has a right to defend itself. Almost everyone agrees about those two precepts. I believe Israel has a right to exist, and just as with the U.S., I'm going to speak out when I think their tactics are either inhumane or counterproductive. The best way to ensure your nation's longevity is to avoid behaving in a way that costs you the support of the world and causes much of the Arab world, which increasingly held Hezbollah in disfavor, to change its mind. Today's Candorville questions the wisdom of Israel putting a rush order on cluster bombs that have a wide radius of destruction if what they were trying to do in the Lebanon War was be precise and avoid civilian casualties. One of my favorite newspaper editors received a phone call about that, and passed it on to me (I've removed the names):

Promised the reader I would pass this along.

Just received a telephone call from a reader regarding your strip today. (name redacted) called to request that you write an "equally hilarious strip about Palistinian suicide bombers" --

My response:

Hi (name redacted),

If you wouldn't mind, please suggest to the reader that he check out yesterday's equally-hilarious strip about an Iranian president who wants to wipe Israel off the map. I'm always intrigued at how people can completely ignore the strips they agree with but zero in on the one they find objectionable.

You might also tell him that responsible, rational governments such as Israel's should behave with more restraint and wisdom than a suicide bomber. We shouldn't excuse either our own actions or those of our allies by comparing them to the despicable actions of terrorists. Otherwise, what makes "us" better than "them"?