Mitt Zombie

Mitt Zombie

On Saturday, I started kicking around a few ideas for a cartoon addressing GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. His history as a “corporate turnaround specialist” is the centerpiece of his candidacy, and he claims a knack for dealing with the tough economic problems burying the federal government and average Americans today.

Of course, he usually glosses over how his strategy in dealing with those affairs often involved mass layoffs and liquidating companies’ assets, allowing him to build a great personal fortune in the process.

There was a theme of parasitism or cannibalism common to many of my ideas, but I also thought it’d be funny to play up how Romney looks sort of like Lurch from the Addams Family (maybe crossed with Gordon Gekko and Dr. Jonas Carson’s android doppelganger from the movie Still Not Quite Human). Zombies were a natural meeting point for those two ideas, and appropriate for me considering earlier stuff I’ve drawn. By the time the Romney Campaign released an ad where people seem to rise from the grave, not so much in support of Mitt, but at least against Obama, my cartoon was already pencilled and ready to be inked.

As many readers are no doubt aware, there was a Republican debate in New Hampshire on Monday–the above-mentioned ad was rolled out mere hours before it, obviously in anticipation. To be fair, I don’t spend a lot of time watching debates, but this one seemed especially terrible in its terribleness. Nearly all of the questions were softballs, and barely any of the candidates gave a straight answer to anything, a special alchemy which resulted in honest-to-God not-fictional moments such as Rick Santorum stumbling over himself to choose between “Leno or Conan?” and Michele Bachmann failing to say whether she preferred “Elvis or Johnny Cash?” It wouldn’t have been the least bit surprising if one of the candidates eventually announced their ultimate preference for LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!!!

The most noteworthy thing to come out of it, for me at least, was Newt Gingrich’s declaration that the Red Scare was actually a good thing, and that the Federal government should apply the same standards of judgement when it comes to hiring Muslims. Really?? I thought this guy was supposed to be an historian or something. Ah I don’t know, who cares? He’s having trouble even getting his own campaign staff to care anymore.

When the dust settled, very little had changed: Mitt Romney was still the front-runner, Tim Pawlenty was still the little dog nipping at the big dog’s heels, Gingrich was hastening his meteoric fall to the ground, and Rick Santorum still apparently had a stick up his ass. Michelle Bachmann did manage to come off as less of an escaped mental patient than usual, but only by virtue of muffling many of her responses with gauze made from some variation or other of the phrase “my 23 foster children.”

Ron Paul was as crazy as ever, at one point launching into a bizarre rant about the Catholic Church in response to a question on whether the children of illegal immigrants should be denied emergency room care. But he still managed to make the most sense overall. That’s how bad the Republican crop is at this time! The crazy gold prospector in the dirigible is the sensible one.

Oh, I guess I almost left out Herman Cain. He’s with Newt on Muslims being terrorists until proven innocent. Also, we learned that he likes DEEP DISH pizza. Thanks for the utterly worthless debate experience, CNN.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Cartoons & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Mitt Zombie”

I’m subscribed to you on google reader, and I never want to mark your posts “read,” because they are all so good!

More robot than zombie. He’s so well put together. His hair has got to be synthetic. And robots as prone to repetition as zombies.

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