You know, THAT WAY

Kerry/Edwards quasi-slash is now an overt strategy to turn out the homophobe vote for Bush. (Matt Drudge is gay, isn't he? Oh, well, anything for the team.)

Note that the New York Post's abortive Kerry-Gephardt front page had a photo that was clearly chosen with the same tack in mind.

Addendum: Matt Drudge says he's not gay. I really don't want to get into the debate over the people claiming to out him; I was under the mistaken impression that he was openly gay.

Cognitive dissonance

In the comments thread for Reid Stott's post on vice-presidential candidates, reader "dan" recalls something from 2000:

A few years ago Cheney squared off with Lieberman in the VP debate. Both were professional and soft spoken, found areas of both agreement and disagreement. What I remember most is the reaction to the two men. There was a general agreement that perhaps both tickets were upside down. Some went further to say that the two Veep candidates would make a good team.

I remember that too. Even some Naderite lefties were impressed by Cheney (and Lieberman, for that matter). What happened to him? Was he just on his best behavior that day?

Why don't you do some more of that thing you used to do?

I get asked that question a lot, and I also ask it of myself frequently and feel vaguely guilty. It's probably because I've dabbled in too many different creative things without developing many of them to the level of public success. I am a dilettante at heart, and some of the things I like the most to do are things I'm not actually all that good at. These days I have to spend a lot of time working for a living, too, and the idea that the result of my extramural dabblings has to be good is an increasingly major inhibitor.

One of the things I've neglected the longest, and get the most prodding about from friends and family, is cartooning. This was a major preoccupation of mine as a kid. I remember it as a time when, since I didn't care much about having an audience, the inhibitions of self-criticism were almost completely absent. I plagiarized gags and characters with abandon (often with transparently minimal modifications that I thought made them original), wrote jokes that could only be gotten if you'd read a particular children's science book on insects, imitated the styles of the most pathetic stuff on the funny pages and found it sophisticated. If I could work in a drawing of a spaceship somehow, I would.

Over time, I got a little better at it, and my father started putting some of my work on his cube wall at the office, whereupon I got a fan base of three or four people. I started branching into editorial-page-style political cartoons, which I remember as being thudding, one-note, inane stuff, but, then, so are most professional political cartoons; in concept they weren't any worse than what you see in the papers.

I drifted away from that for a while and then came back to it in college; only this time, the cartoons were dreary, angst-filled, confessional stories about myself and my friends, passed around by hand, the same distribution method I used with the science-fiction stories that I wrote in high school. Matt Groening and Harvey Pekar were major influences. The stories were only any good if you knew the people involved, but my friends liked them.

So I have two different groups of people—my family and my college friends—who occasionally ask me if I've been drawing any cartoons lately. And today the Internet exists and can provide anyone's creative dabbling with a channel for public exposure. So I could easily put up a webtoon.

But it's so much work! I've never drawn cartoons on any sort of regular schedule, and I know for a fact that drawing them to look nice is hard. Also, my drawing, considered objectively, isn't really that great, and it would probably take years of regular effort to develop a really effective style, and in the meantime I'd be putting out crappy material.

Sometimes I think my standards have gotten too high for me to actually have the courage to create much of anything.