The Mt. Rushmore one looks like racist Tea Party garbage to me.

Not just with the ridiculous size of the ears but the fact that Obama is thinking about his own glorification rather than the state of the country.

god! Screw that cartoonist. Very nasy and disconnected from the reality of both of them.

by the way they portray Michelle.

These jerks are so obvious.

his?, it sure looks to me that he is watching out for us...

Could also be seen as a characature. Michelle Obama looks kind of evil in it.

I remember in the 80s when the Republican started immediately talking about putting Reagan up on Rushmore. Then they couldn't wait for him to die so they could put him on the 5 dollar bill.

I have never heard a Democrat suggest putting any Democratic president up there--not Truman, not JFK, not Clinton, and certainly not a sitting president still just halfway through his term in office.

We might have heroes, but we don't engage in hero worship.

What a grand day!

I'm still hungover...(more 'grin' than gin)

Nicely drawn, too, imo.

You know, guys, this is what the terminally aggrieved DUers who are so anti-prayer and any form of public piety simply don't get. I strayed long ago, but all on my own in a non-religious family when I was still in grade school I read the King James Bible almost all the way through. (Okay, I got bogged down in the begats and Leviticus, but most people do.)

What stayed with me was not the tribal history and sometimes shocking events but what I think of as the good stuff. The poetry, including love poetry. The Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes. Old Testament exhortations to take care of the stranger in your land, the poor, the elderly.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister. Where do they think he got it from? He got the techniques and theory of non-violent civil disobedience from a Hindu, Mahatma Ghandi, but the ground of his being was the Old and New Testament. I can certainly see him telling President Obama that he had marked a few passages for him....

Hekate

you do not need the bible to tell you it's good to care for the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed, the elderly or to not be violent

But inasmuch as these formed the ground of his being and framework of his life and the culture he was born in.... and then a young African American minister learned from the Hindu Mahatma, and inasmuch as the Christian Bible formed the ground of his being and framework of his life and the culture he was born in.... These two men changed the world for the better.

Skittles, I am so sorry to be having these arguments here. I started out wanting to educate and explain, and ended up feeling like I was wading in a toxic swamp, and I don't mean with you. It has made me angry and despairing. Some vocal few of our people, and those who pretend to be our people, are capable of being as irrational, mean-spirited, and intolerant as any fire-breathing fundy ever to thump an unread Bible.

I am not ignorant of Western history: the long centuries of ignorance, intolerance, witch burnings, anti-Semitism, Crusades. The framers of our country's founding documents were steeped in the Enlightenment, the reaction to those bloody centuries. -- I railed here against Dubya's deliberate intrusions of fundamentalist Christianity into our government, seeing it then as I do now: a dangerous backsliding from our founding principles.

But the authors of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution knew very well what they meant by separation of church and state, and they never once said it meant exclusion of all religious expression from our public life.

We once had in our civic rituals ways to mention "God" as "Divine providence" and "the Father" and so on that were allusions to the most commonly held beliefs of the vast majority of the American people, Christian and Jewish. Allusions without specific reference to Jesus or the Bible, is what I'm saying. This wording works well for all the Abrahamic traditions (by which I mean our rising population of Muslims), vague references to Divinity used to work well for everyone in the original 13 States including those who thought God was a clockmaker who left the universe to tick along without direct interference, and worked well until the mid-20th Century resurgence of ignorant fundamentalism.

I quit. I'm kind of sorry I even tried, because no one whose mind is already made up is listening.

the meme that religion is needed to do the right thing.

I was actually raised in reaction to that very meme: my mother, the non-church-going ex-Catholic, thought out all the ways she could raise her children to be ethical beings without referencing the religion she had rejected. She also disdained the emotionalism and anti-intellectualism of fundamentalists and "holy rollers." She was not sure God existed, but she was very sure he/she/it had given us brains for a reason. As a consequence, funny as it may sound, I grew up hearing words like "ethics" and "social contract" instead of "morals" and "the Bible says." I was taught that in all religions the core message is the Golden Rule, but that no religion had a lock on the truth.

You are right: religion is not needed to do the right thing. A strong ethical core is what is needed.

But more people than not use religion as the framework for their lives, and as long as they find it comforting without insisting that the rest of us believe as they do, without insisting that we have a government based on their personal interpretation of their personal scriptures, as long as they don't transgress, in other words -- I see no harm in it.

"Gandhi was so fuckin' Christian he was Hindu"...

legalism is this heartwarming, open, loving pronouncement: "Be kind to the alien and the stranger, for you were once an alien in the Land of Egypt. I am The Lord your God."

... Jewish support for humane immigration reform. There's good stuff in there.

Hope I'm alive to see it. Hope Mt. Rushmore's still there and not destroyed through war or climate change.

The Reaganites have been campaigning to get him on there for decades. Obama makes much more sense now to diversify Rushmore.
The Republicans will never allow it though.

Nothing against Obama, obviously, but turning Rushmore into a political game of whose president gets up there would lead to a big mess. Moreover, the artist has finished his work. He picked his four and finished the art work. I'd no sooner support putting more leaders up on Mt Rushmore than I'd support putting arms on Venus de Milo.

arms...lol

meanwhile, they have Michelle looking bored.

LOL

I REALLY don't like how he portrayed The First Lady.

Everybody here and everybody I sent to this page to see this abomination felt the same way:

A lot of these are insulting!
Why did this person {you, n2doc} post these?

and entertainiing cartoon compilations. Who the fuck are YOU to start issuing ultimatums and demanding answers?

The Mt. Rushmore one bothers me a lot, but it's fairly subtle, depending on the audience.