QotD: The cartoon physics of politics

A generation or so ago, somebody — I think it was either Tiny Toons or the Animaniacs — identified and described the cluster of phenomena we've since come to know as "cartoon physics". Just as a single example, we now understand that the Law of Gravity doesn't actually apply to a cartoon character until he notices that it does, usually by looking down after he's accidentally run past the edge of a cliff.

In the 21st century, we are becoming forcibly acquainted with similar phenomena in politics. We have been presented, over the past few weeks, with an almost (but not quite) impossible number of absurd sights and sounds, associated with the publication, in Denmark, of certain cartoons deemed blasphemous by the dogwhistles of the Moslem world. [. . .]

"Dogwhistle?" I pretend to hear you ask. An extremely useful concept from the wonderful movie, Strange Days. A dogwhistle, says one of the characters, is somebody with an ass so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him. We have plenty of them here, in our part of the world, ranging from the type of folks who gave Hester Prynne her "A", to the morons who wet themselves over Janet Jackson's right nipple, to the idiots who censored songs by Mick Jagger that are probably older than the censors are, to Marxoid feminists against pornography.

L. Neil Smith, "Cartoon Politics", Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-02-13