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Asshole of the Week: Rob Rogers
Jul. 17th, 2018 05:40 pmThis week's Asshole is Rob Rogers former house political cartoonist for the He was is syndication, and I assume he still is, but he was understandably a little upset. Now, for you and me, when we get fired and vent, we have no audience (or a very small one) to make fools of ourselves to. Rob rogered himself in front of everyone who reads the The New York Times or The Huffington Post. Just kidding, they're the same people.
There's a he-said, she-said about this, but it's marginal. Rob says he was fired for making fun of Trump, the Post-Gazette says he was fired for not working with them so that his cartoons fit into their vision of the opinion page. Both are probably true. There was a change in editor, the editor didn't like his cartoons (most likely of Trump), and when he wouldn't draw cartoons the editor liked, he was fired. Seems completely reasonable to me. You're only guaranteed a soap box if you steal your own. Even though the editor said "he could be funnier" and the publisher said "he hasn't been funny for a long time" (and you can judge for yourself on Rob's website), that doesn't really matter: political cartoons aren't funny (as I learned from the Denver Post's in-house cartoonist when I was a kid, who never was).
But, if he was too obsessed by Trump for the editor (which is another thing Burris claimed), then that is something to remove him for. Just like when the Wall Street Journal got rid of Thomas Frank because his articles contained no insight [1] (and replaced him with Alan Blinder, a liberal whose opinion pieces do contain insight).
Still, if you want to vent to 20,000 of your closest friends in public (and on the internet, I found this because Google thinks I like to read this kind of click-bait), that's your thing. If you have the internet soap box, you're free to make a fool of yourself with it [2].
Where Rob shows off his assholedom is when he rants about an earlier opinion piece in the Post-Gazette, calling it "openly racist" when it was arguing the opposite -- that calling things you disagree with "racist" has gone overboard, like calling people "Communist" in the 50's and "Fascist" in 70's. It harms democracy by giving technocratic questions (how many people should a country admit, and if not everyone, then who?) a pathetic answer (like giving political asylum to battered wives or giving fast track to extended family like adult children and parents). The article argues, very badly I might add, that to call a non-racial epithet that an unfortunately reasonable observation about certain countries that in your mind are associated with black people (and El Salvador) is racist is a failure of your ability to reason. [3]
Certainly, unreasonable people who have Twitter accounts and need to grow up (more redundancy) can interpret the article as racist because it calls their pathos unreasonable. But, it isn't openly racist because it's explicitly denying the racism the Twits see.
And so, for arrogantly assuming that everyone who disagrees with him about what counts as racist, for assuming that his publisher should be compelled to publish any tripe he comes up with, and for making me read all that crap about that clown, Trump, Rob Rogers is Asshole of the Week for the week of July 16th, 2018.
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[1] As you could tell just by his arrogant thesis in What's the Matter with Kansas.
[2] I certainly have with my much smaller soap box.
[3] In particular it shows a lack of sympathy -- an inability to view things in a way that you don't. Very much like the famous quotation, "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," the people who say Trump's remarks [4] were racist are describing what they mean when they say that Haiti is "a shit hole country" or possibly that Liberia is "a shit house of a country" or more likely that El Salvador is "that goddamn shit house" where they last caught the clap. The last rolls of the tongue like a Shakespearean couplet, as anyone with a doctorate in cursing will tell you.
[4] And damn Rob Rogers for being such an asshole that I had to look up all this irrelevant bullshit that the dull normals of the world were hurling at each other earlier in the year. That's what I get for being conscientious and trying to find a way to give that fuckwit a chance.[5] Fuck him, fuck them, fuck you.
[5] It is absolutely not fair of me to be angry at him for something I chose to do. But fuck him.
There's a he-said, she-said about this, but it's marginal. Rob says he was fired for making fun of Trump, the Post-Gazette says he was fired for not working with them so that his cartoons fit into their vision of the opinion page. Both are probably true. There was a change in editor, the editor didn't like his cartoons (most likely of Trump), and when he wouldn't draw cartoons the editor liked, he was fired. Seems completely reasonable to me. You're only guaranteed a soap box if you steal your own. Even though the editor said "he could be funnier" and the publisher said "he hasn't been funny for a long time" (and you can judge for yourself on Rob's website), that doesn't really matter: political cartoons aren't funny (as I learned from the Denver Post's in-house cartoonist when I was a kid, who never was).
But, if he was too obsessed by Trump for the editor (which is another thing Burris claimed), then that is something to remove him for. Just like when the Wall Street Journal got rid of Thomas Frank because his articles contained no insight [1] (and replaced him with Alan Blinder, a liberal whose opinion pieces do contain insight).
Still, if you want to vent to 20,000 of your closest friends in public (and on the internet, I found this because Google thinks I like to read this kind of click-bait), that's your thing. If you have the internet soap box, you're free to make a fool of yourself with it [2].
Where Rob shows off his assholedom is when he rants about an earlier opinion piece in the Post-Gazette, calling it "openly racist" when it was arguing the opposite -- that calling things you disagree with "racist" has gone overboard, like calling people "Communist" in the 50's and "Fascist" in 70's. It harms democracy by giving technocratic questions (how many people should a country admit, and if not everyone, then who?) a pathetic answer (like giving political asylum to battered wives or giving fast track to extended family like adult children and parents). The article argues, very badly I might add, that to call a non-racial epithet that an unfortunately reasonable observation about certain countries that in your mind are associated with black people (and El Salvador) is racist is a failure of your ability to reason. [3]
Certainly, unreasonable people who have Twitter accounts and need to grow up (more redundancy) can interpret the article as racist because it calls their pathos unreasonable. But, it isn't openly racist because it's explicitly denying the racism the Twits see.
And so, for arrogantly assuming that everyone who disagrees with him about what counts as racist, for assuming that his publisher should be compelled to publish any tripe he comes up with, and for making me read all that crap about that clown, Trump, Rob Rogers is Asshole of the Week for the week of July 16th, 2018.
------------------------------------------------
[1] As you could tell just by his arrogant thesis in What's the Matter with Kansas.
[2] I certainly have with my much smaller soap box.
[3] In particular it shows a lack of sympathy -- an inability to view things in a way that you don't. Very much like the famous quotation, "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," the people who say Trump's remarks [4] were racist are describing what they mean when they say that Haiti is "a shit hole country" or possibly that Liberia is "a shit house of a country" or more likely that El Salvador is "that goddamn shit house" where they last caught the clap. The last rolls of the tongue like a Shakespearean couplet, as anyone with a doctorate in cursing will tell you.
[4] And damn Rob Rogers for being such an asshole that I had to look up all this irrelevant bullshit that the dull normals of the world were hurling at each other earlier in the year. That's what I get for being conscientious and trying to find a way to give that fuckwit a chance.[5] Fuck him, fuck them, fuck you.
[5] It is absolutely not fair of me to be angry at him for something I chose to do. But fuck him.
