I wouldn't call myself a huge fan of the Boondocks (though it beats the hell out of most of the
creaky shit that still lingers on the comics pages), but I've got to give it up to Aaron McGruder, who amazingly was allowed to finish the following exchange with Aaron Brown on
CNN (scroll down) the other morning:
MCGRUDER: You know, what bothers me about shows like this, and all the news shows, after Bush talks I hear all these smart people completely ignoring the elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, which nobody wants to say, is that Bush is not a smart man. He can't articulate well. He doesn't speak in complete sentences.
BROWN: Well...
MCGRUDER: And everyone just ignores it, like that's OK.
BROWN: OK. So...
MCGRUDER: But he's really dumb.
BROWN: OK. That's a different thing. Let's say he is not articulate. And I think they would concede he's not the most articulate guy on the planet. It doesn't mean he doesn't have convictions. It doesn't mean he believes in some things. It doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. It just means he can't express himself.
MCGRUDER: But beliefs don't mean anything if you're stupid. And not only that, but he -- it's almost as though he's talking to the dumbest segment of society, whereas Kerry...
BROWN: Aaron, don't you think that's an incredibly arrogant way to look at the world?
MCGRUDER: It's -- you know, it's real, you know? It's just that nobody is saying the obvious, which is the man is not smart and he's the president.
BROWN: I wouldn't say that...
MCGRUDER: Everybody knows it, but nobody is saying it.
BROWN: What does that say, then, about the 52 or three or one, or maybe it's 49.5 tonight, percent of the country that not only believes he is smart enough to run the country now but should be the guy to run the country for the next four years?
MCGRUDER: I think they have been woefully misled. I think -- I think Americans have a natural inclination, like all people around the world, to believe that their government is not corrupt, that the people are fair and smart and they're not lying to them.
And history doesn't prove that out. And current events doesn't prove that out. The American people have been lied to, and it's at the point now where I think that that percentage of people simply are not interested in the truth. They don't want to go down the road the thought that the president, one, is not intelligent; and two, the people behind the president who are intelligent are deliberately lying and misleading the American people constantly....
...But nobody just says the obvious, that their president can't articulate himself and is dumb. And it drives me nuts.
You know, if there were actually such a thing as a liberal media, don't you think that expression of this sort of viewpoint would be commonplace? As it is I had to do a doubletake, and then a standing cheer, as the stunning clarity of McGruder's observations seemed like nothing so much as a klieg light piercing the dawny mists of Market Media Avalon.
