A Thinly Veiled Metaphor About America

This couldn't be more perfect if Bruce Tinsley (still MIA) drew it.

On first read it seems more like a slam on the late Sen Ted Kennedy then anything else.

Please explain - I really want to understand the real point of this one.

It's an old, old, outdated reference and I really should have explained.

Bruce Tinsley is (was?) the "talent" behind Mallard Fillmore, a neoconservative strip that gained small notoriety as a "balance" to Doonesbury. Smug with hypocrisy and delusional with self-importance, Tinsley--an ardent fan of Rush Limbaugh--embraced every stunt that the alt-right told themselves "triggered the libtards" while insisting he was "independent" rather than neocon. He claimed he held a spot high on Barack Obama's non-existent "enemies' list" because of his strip.

He regularly--and I mean constantly--had Mallard refer to Chappaquiddick to attack Sen. Ted Kennedy, depicting Kennedy in the strip as stumbling drunk...right up to the night Tinsley himself was busted for DUI. Tinsley cried that this was a conspiracy to shut him up, but immediately changed his caricature of Kennedy to that of a horny pervert running around in heart-covered boxers, rather than a drunk. (And then of course when Sen. Kennedy died, Tinsley put out a loving tribute strip, pretending his attacks were all in good fun, because Tinsley is a trashbag.)

As an aside: Jon Stewart published a parody of Mallard Fillmore in his book and Tinsley responded by depicting Stewart in his strip as a hook-nosed pedophile.

Tinsley recently vanished from both the strip and Twitter (some of his most recent tweets praised Cal Thomas and Michelle Malkin for their "sanity" ) without a peep. Mallard Fillmore is now written and drawn by someone else. No retirement was announced and no explanation has been made.

Shortpacked! is a webcomic that dips into political controversy and questionable taste itself--one strip depicted a character literally prying the gun out of Charlton Heston's cold dead hands--and the author had his own bit of "good fun" with Tinsley's DUI bust. Here is the first strip (of five) in the set about it:

https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/quash

The set's caricatures of the Mallard Fillmore strip are pretty accurate.

We're becoming ungovernable as a people. We don't share too many very basic understandings of facts. The academic "studies" designed to yield an outcome, the billionaire-funded system of academic chairs and the think tanks to legitimize, and then the pundits to push these distorted theories.

Our only real hope is deprogramming, seems to me. A long, slow process. Germany was compelled to go through that after WWII.

Spot on. Funny but sad because the stupid is all around us.