It's a cartoon.

In Thursday's Buffalo News, an opinion piece by Albert Sterbak was printed in support of the fine art of political satire.

Apparently an Opus cartoon (Opus being famed cartoonist Berkeley Breathed's current iteration of Bloom County,) made a joke about a "post-prom moose-shoot[ing] with Sarah Palin," and was met by an uproar of furious Palin supporters.

A telling facet of political idiocy is an inability to handle humor.

The reality is that political satire is another tool for education, which is of course the natural enemy of fools everywhere. Sterbak cited not only Bloom County, but also Doonesbury, a comic that is widely acknowledged as one of the modern masters of political satire.

People pay attention to cartoons in a deeper way than they do the news. This is born of something that is almost a trick: people read or listen to the news with a grain of salt, feeling as though they can't really trust what they're reading or hearing, but they read cartoons with a totally open mind. It's a cartoon, how subversive could it be?

Pretty subversive. When Richard Nixon was facing impeachment but had so far dodged the bullets sent his way, Troudeau wrote a strip where two senators wish that Nixon (who remains unnamed) would just knock over a bank, because "by George, we'd have him then!" It's funny, but it reflects both the dominant mood of the people and also the reality that in spite of being an obvious slime-ball, Nixon seemed to be getting a free pass from the justice system.

Satire is a way of presenting truths from an angle that people are receptive to. If someone demonizes satire, maybe the problem isn't the satire but the truth behind it.

Put differently: maybe there are serious issues about Sarah Palin's political history, moral character, or even intelligence that need to be addressed. Maybe that anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach that you get when someone makes fun of her, or of any politician, doesn't come from some notion of propriety, but from the inkling you have deep down that maybe what's before you is a funny way of presenting an unfortunate truth.

Don't hate the penguin. Hate the politician.