THE ART OF CARICATURE. CityJournal runs an article on right-wing cartoons. Credit to author Harry Stein: he knows a quick buck when he sees it -- most of the piece is Stein describing several Mallard Fillmore strips. It must have been as easy to write as it is painful to read.

It is of course hilarious to read right-wing affirmative-action hires like Mallard's Bruce Tinsley bitch about diversity. Even funnier is a marked tendency among this lot -- see if you can spot it:

[At Tinsley's middle school,] "One time, a girl sheepishly admitted that she wanted to be a homemaker -- and she was ridiculed not only by most of the other girls in the class, but by the teacher. These were the people who talked about ‘totalitarians’ and ‘thought police’"...

Tinsley even gets death threats. “These liberals are so sweet and gentle, they wouldn’t harm a baby seal,” he laughs. “But I guess I’m fair game"...

(Prickly City's) Stantis, like Tinsley, got a stiff dose of liberal hypocrisy growing up -- in his case, in Madison, Wisconsin, less than a mile from one of the nation’s most radical campuses. At 13 (he’s 46 today, again like Tinsley), he worked on the Nixon campaign, and “on several occasions,” he recalls, “the peace-loving McGovern types threw bricks through the window. After all, you can only be so tolerant... I get hundreds of vicious e-mails a week. I mean, the crudity and intolerance of the Left these days is unbelievable..."

... [Tinsley's] wife is a civil rights lawyer. There’s perhaps a lesson here. "It’s a funny thing,” Tinsley says. “All her liberal friends are incredulous that our marriage works, but none of my conservative friends have any trouble with it at all. They understand you can think differently about things and still be civil to one another."

Almost immediately, this observation leads Tinsley to reflect on something else. “You ever notice how often liberals seem to think that, because they hold these lofty social views, it excuses them from having to be civil to bellboys and cabdrivers? I really think that by and large conservatives are just much nicer"...

I was frankly disappointed to learn that the imbecilic caricatures of liberals in their lousy strips were not derived from a template created by the American Enterprise Institute, but apparently reflect the authors' visions -- they actually believe liberals are all intolerant, hate-mailing, brick-throwing, future-housewife-harrassing, low-tipping scum.

If they were cynically creating dull stereotypes to get over in an undemanding marketplace, instead of just plain stupid, I might have had some respect for them.