Standing Up to Bullies

In general, I tend to love Tom Tomorrow. At times his strip, This Modern World, oversimplifies and gets a big lefty-preachy, but sometimes I like lefty-preachy, at least as a change of pace from right-ish-preachy. But mostly he just has great biting satire, like this strip about an election on another planet that closely mirrors our own.

And I also like that he's not afraid to take on the Dems when they screw up, as in this strip:


However, I do think that Tomorrow is buying into the false 'tough guy/wimp' dichotomy here in a way that really undermines his point. He's suggesting that Bush Jr. is a bully, and I think that characterization tends to stand, and is shown in his actions. But then at the same time he's also characterizing Reid as a wimp. Sure, Bush Jr. likely does see himself as a tough-guy, and he has gone to great lengths to paint himself that way, but, angry as I am at Reid and other Dems for backing down on timetables for withdrawing troops from Iraq, I don't want to buy into the tough-guy/wimp idea. Reid, one hopes, isn't worried about being construed as a tough guy or a wimp when he makes his decisions--hopefully he's making political decisions based on political expediency, and on some, dare I say it, philosophical foundations (useless war is bad, mmmmkay?). I'm all for taking Reid to task for not standing up to the bully that is Bush Jr.--I'm just not interested in calling him a wimp because of it. I'm interested in calling him the ex-Senate Majority leader.