A Tide box full of perch

This past Sunday the Kansas City Star featured a front page story about Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and to the surprise of (let me check the most current figures) absolutely nobody it turns out Josh Hawley is a Lying Weasel.

Josh Hawley lies so much and so often they had to subdivide his lies into categories, like:

Puffery:

A category of lie that would seem to indicate newspapers continue to be linguistically stuck somewhere in the 19th century where people still say things like puffery, poppycock and balderdash and the late, great political cartoonist Jeff MacNelly and I used to joke that when you became an editorial page writer they gave you a typewriter that would translate plain English into “Editorial-eze” so:

“That guy’s a jerk”

Would come out as:

“That scoundrel is an insufferable buffoon.”

And if you doubt Jeff and I knew what we were talking about, let me point out that between the two of us we won three Pulitzer Prizes which is a technically accurate and yet wildly misleading statement (just the kind of thing Josh Hawley wishes he could come up with) because Jeff won all three of them.

As a matter of fact, after his third Pulitzer I drew a cartoon depicting a telegram I sent to Jeff that said:

“Heard you won another Pulitzer…stop.”

A sentiment shared by pretty much every other living and partially-dead political cartoonist because Jeff was so much more talented than the rest of us we were afraid the Pulitzer Committee would eventually realize they ought to quit screwing around and give Jeff and Pat Oliphant all the Pulitzers and Pat would get them in the even years and Jeff would get them in the odd years and then in a Leap Year they could give one to somebody who over the course of his or her career proved they really, really deserved it like the also late, great Dwane Powell and the fact that Dwane never got one tells you the people who hand out Pulitzer Prizes couldn’t find their own asses with a flashlight, a compass and a troop of Boy Scouts.

(Hey, I’m not gonna get one anyway, so why keep kissing their hard-to-locate asses?)

Now here’s one of Dwane’s brilliant cartoons:

Barely-related Jeff MacNelly story alert

So we decide to vacation together in Nags Head, North Carolina and right before we arrive they had a big storm with big waves that collapsed some beach houses and being certified geniuses (hey, don’t forget we’d won three Pulitzers) we decide to go down to the beach and see the big waves because they’re still occasionally coming in…and guess what…get hit by a big wave.

So we’re completely soaked and we get back to the beach house and Jeff decides to dry out the contents of his wallet including the currency and he’s about to laugh right after I take this picture because I said:

“Dude, you’re actually laundering money.”

(Hey, Jeff and Dwane were better cartoonists than I ever hope to be, but I like my odds in a Straight-Up Steel Cage Smartass Remark Match no matter who’s in the ring with me.)

Other Josh Hawley lie categories

The other two Josh Hawley lie categories were “Attacks” and “The Big Lie” and I thought I was going to write more about them, but am now side-tracked into Jeff MacNelly/Bill DeOre stories which are way more entertaining and reminds me that some other political cartoonists wondered why a Big Celebrity Political Cartoonist like Jeff chose to hang out with nobodies like me and my Conservative Asshole Buddy Bill.

Two things wrong with the previous paragraph:

Except in the minds of members of my profession, there are no Big Celebrity Political Cartoonists and we went a lot of places with Jeff and he only got recognized once and the person who recognized him was an employee of The Kansas City Star.

Second mistake: Me and Bill weren’t hanging out with Jeff, me and Jeff were hanging out with Bill because Bill was definitely the ringleader in that group, probably because Bill would tell great stories  that could only happen in a foreign country like Texas and me and Jeff wanted to be there to hear them.

Like:

The time a family of professional wrestlers who lived across the alley from Bill’s family were out in their garage shaving each other’s heads with an electric razor and Bill happened by and they grabbed him and shaved a strip down the middle of his head and he went home crying to his Dad which is really embarrassing because Bill was 42 at the time.

(OK, I made that up. Bill was still a kid, but don’t blame me for getting it wrong because he hasn’t matured one teensy, tiny bit, which is a big reason I relate to him and is the foundation of our friendship.)

So Bill’s Dad is pissed off about his kid who now has what looks like a landing strip down the middle of his head and marches back across the alley to give the professional wrestlers a piece of his mind which I didn’t imagine going over real well and I asked Bill if the wrestlers kicked his Dad’s ass and Bill said no.

The wrestlers’ mother kicked his Dad’s ass and she did it by beating him around the head and shoulders with:

“A Tide box full of perch.”

A sane person might wonder why someone has a Tide box full of perch handy (I’m under the impression the original box had a handle) and decides to use it to assault a neighbor, but I believe I’ve already explained this happened in Texas which according to their own Tourism Bureau is “Like a Whole Other Country” and if you’re not the one getting hit in the side of the head with a detergent box full of fish, it’s a pretty hilarious country.

Bill told me and Jeff this story in an Oklahoma City BBQ restaurant and after he said the line “A Tide box full of perch” I looked over at Jeff and Jeff was laughing so hard he fell out of the booth and was lying on the restaurant floor, continuing to laugh so hard I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack because he wasn’t in the world’s best shape and if Jeff had a heart attack neither Bill or I would be willing to give him CPR so he’d definitely die, which also reminds me of the time we all went swimming at a Texas lake and Jeff showed up in a swimsuit and Bill told Jeff his head and body looked like:

“A 16-pound Brunswick on top of a sack full of golf balls.”

See?

Lines like that are why Jeff and I hung around Bill ‘cause you wanted to be there when he said things like he suffered from “EMS” and when you asked him what that was, he’d say:

“Early Morning Stiffy.”

Trust me, I got about 999 Bill DeOre stories, many of which he doesn’t want me to tell like the time him and some college buddies had a blind date with some female escaped prisoners.

Moving on.

Reluctantly.

So where were we?

Right, Josh Hawley’s a Lying Weasel and he lies so much the politician who helped recruit Hawley to run for the Senate – Jack Danforth – regrets that decision and anytime you can disgust another politician with how much you lie it’s kinda like disgusting Joey Chestnut by eating too many hotdogs.

But telling someone who lives in Missouri that Josh Hawley is a liar is like telling them the sun comes up in the East, so for me the most interesting part of the story was a sidebar about a woman – Patricia Roberts-Miller – who used to be rhetoric professor at the University of Texas at Austin (if she’s interested in rhetoric she clearly needs to meet Bill) and she had some advice on figuring out when someone is lying and I’ll sum it up so you don’t have to read the whole thing.

1. Don’t confuse sincerity with truthfulness.

Just because someone believes what they’re saying doesn’t make it true.

2. Look at the strongest opposition arguments.

The only way to figure out if someone is making a good argument is to look at it from other perspectives; what do people on the other side have to say?

3. Don’t just Google; look for reliable sources of information.

Patricia admits this is hard because people make up credible sounding names like World News Daily Report and then tell lies about a woman getting a Samsung phone stuck in her vagina, so she tends to go with established media organizations like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and reads what both sides have to say and this time I’ll give you one more thing to think about:

3 and 1/2. If someone gets caught lying, does the media organization fire them?

And just in case you’re wondering who I’m talking about, here’s a story about two conservative commentators who quit Fox News over the lies Fox was allowing Tucker Carlson to tell about the January 6th Capital riot:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/21/1052837157/fox-resignations-tucker-carlson-patriot-purge-documentary

And now more from Patricia:

4. Beware of people who have no credible evidence for what they’re saying and when the evidence they do have gets destroyed, they just come up with new evidence.

Patricia also advises people to subscribe to their local paper, but admits that’s a problem because you have to pay to get a newspaper and you can just go on the internet and get all the lies you want for free and the fact that you didn’t have to pay to read this means you probably ought to double-check what I’m saying.

5. There aren’t just two sides to an issue; it’s more like 10 sides.

And just because somebody thinks something different than you doesn’t necessarily mean those people are stupid or bad; not every disagreement is an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.

Timeout for a counter-argument, which sounds like a disagreement about kitchen remodeling, but isn’t

OK, I’m with Patricia up to a point and I like a lot of what she has to say and I get that people tend to get way too adamant about what they think – like the Chiefs are good and the Raiders are evil (it’s actually the Patriots) – but constantly bending over backwards to see things from somebody else’s point of view can lead you to some uncomfortable positions (there’s a joke there, but not much of one, so it’s OK if you missed it) and pretty soon you’re saying maybe the Nazis had some good ideas and the Ku Klux Klan has an interesting heritage.

Fuck that and the Panzer tank it rode in on.

As a political cartoonist my job was to cut to the chase and when someone would argue issues like abortion or handgun control are complicated – which they are – my counter argument was once you got done poking your way through the intellectual maze, things come down to some pretty simple choices:

• You’re either going to allow women to get abortions or you aren’t.

• You’re either going to allow people to own handguns or you aren’t.

And that attitude probably explains his answer when some long-forgotten editor (or maybe it was a publisher…don’t look at me, I already told you he was long forgotten) was asked why The New York Times didn’t have a political cartoonist, he said:

“Because cartoonists can’t equivocate.”

 Which if you think about it – and I have – is a pretty damning statement about the editorial writers The New York Times employ.

The one thing you should take away with you

Patricia said a lot of other stuff, but from my point of view the most important point she made came after the reporter asked her how people could do all this fact-checking when they had so many other things to worry about and Patricia said – and I’m going to put this in All Caps so you remember:

6. IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE THE FACT CHECKING, DON’T HAVE A STRONG OPINION.

OK, that’s it for today and if you remember one thing from today it should be that last one about strong opinions and if you remember two things from today the second one should definitely be avoiding a professional wrestler’s mother holding a Tide box full of perch.

And I’ve done the research on that.