. . . when even conservatives are getting bored with conservatives’ blaming their problems on media bias. The campaign of defeated Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock is blaming the liberal media for its loss — and talented conservative cartoonist Gary Varvel, a Hoosier who works for the Indianapolis Star, is having none of it.
Still: You can disagree on the underlying issue and admire the cartoon anyway. I love it, not because I’m especially invested in either the media-bias issue or Indiana politics, but simply because I love the imaginative world of the late Charles Schulz, and I see here a very warm tribute by one of Schulz’s fellow practitioners of the cartoonist’s art. (Also: Fifty bonus points to Varvel for using a Schulz idea other than “Lucy-pulling-away-the-football.”)
PS. I once heard the conservative political philosopher Hadley Arkes, in a speech, refer to media bias as akin to the “law of gravity.” There was much wisdom in that comparison: To say that the law of gravity is the cause of plane crashes is not especially helpful, and if airlines got in the habit of relying on that explanation, we would have cause for worry.