The Sorensen Monologues

This Week’s Cartoon: “The Latest Debt Ceiling Demands”

Ugh, what more can I say. This whole thing reminds me more and more of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine every day. Manufacture a crisis, use the ensuing sense of panic to impose draconian cuts to programs people desperately need, and voila! Utopia at last. Never mind that Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times, and Dubya 7, or that Clinton balanced the budget, or that the vast bulk of our current deficit was formed under Bush. The hypocrisy is simply astounding.

The m&m’s in the first panel are, of course, a reference to Van Halen’s infamous contract rider stipulating that the brown ones be removed. David Lee Roth has explained that the point was not to be a prima donna, but to test to see if stage crews had read the contract carefully. I love this quote:

I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean ‘What is this before me?”… you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”

I decided to make the m&m’s that Republicans object to the green ones, since, you know, they hate anything green.