Political Satire

[Outlaw]

For my next assignment I have to choose a satirical comic strip whether it be found online or in a newspaper. I've gone and chosen the above comic. I was wondering if anyone could point out some techniques which the author used in his work. Only one I've found is irony in the form of an overstatement (exaggeration). Any tips or advice on what else to write on this piece? If not I'll just go and find another comic.

[Riku]

The person reading from the board has glasses on, and the little dude behind the chair says "He's got that vision thing!" alongside a little birdie.

Call that what you will.

[Zoen]

As far as the chart goes, I Googled "Guantanimo Bay" and "Geneva" to find this snippet on Wikipedia:

The Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp is a prison operated by Joint Task Force Guantánamo of the United States government since 1987 in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, which is on the shore of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The detainment areas consists of three camps in the base: Camp Delta (which includes Camp Echo), Camp Iguana, and Camp X-Ray (which has been closed). The facility is often referred to as the Guantánamo, or Gitmo. The detainees currently held as of June 2008 have been classified by the United States as "enemy combatants". After the administration of President George W. Bush asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, 2006 that they were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

I also added Gonzales to the search and found this in another article:

The "quaint" reference to "athletic uniforms" cannot hide the point of the memo. It is a common tactic of neocons such as Alberto Gonzales, to pick an insignificant aspect of something–in the case of the Geneva Conventions, the "quaint provision" of distributing athletic uniforms to prisoners of war–as an excuse to attack and dismiss the whole. In this way, the quaint provisions are equal to the "harmless error," and whole treaties and bodies of law can be dismissed as trivial. But the whole is comprised of its parts, not the other way around. If athletic clothing is not needed, wanted, or regularly given to prisoners, that in no way dismisses the entire Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. The requirement to give out athletic clothing is just one small piece of a treaty that aims through all of its collected pieces to prevent just such treatment as Afghani and now Iraqi prisoners face every day from a vengeful American government.

There remain about 560 people held in Guantánamo, and, in spite of widespread accounts from those released that they were subjected to various forms of torture, from sleep deprivation to beatings, every one of those abuses was authorized by Alberto Gonzales’s agreement under the sole jurisdiction of the president’s tribunals. Despite four years of torture disguised as investigation, only four prisoners have been charged and government officials have admitted that "investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts."

Guantanamo Bay detention camp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
International Socialist Review

Aside from these two bits of information, there's not much I can point out or link...

[Lunkwill]

Guantanamo is obviously the US Naval base in Cuba where prisoners of war are kept, and supposedly mistreated. The Geneva Convention were a series of meetings were international laws were created for humanitarian concerns.

As for Gonzalez, I found this quote.

We can detain any combatants for the duration of the hostilities. If we choose to try them, that's great. If we don't choose to try them, we can continue to hold them

There is much concern about Guantanamo because most prisoners there have been there for years, and have not been put on trial, had no chance to prove if they should be there or not. They are prisoners of war. A case went to the supreme court, and if I recall correctly, government courts already had no authority to prove if the prisoners are wrongly there, and after the case neither did civilian courts.

That's all I got. Hope it helps

[Shmoo]

Originally Posted by Lunkwill

Guantanamo is obviously the US Naval base in Cuba where prisoners of war are kept, and supposedly mistreated. The Geneva Convention were a series of meetings were international laws were created for humanitarian concerns.

As for Gonzalez, I found this quote. There is much concern about Guantanamo because most prisoners there have been there for years, and have not been put on trial, had no chance to prove if they should be there or not. They are prisoners of war. A case went to the supreme court, and if I recall correctly, government courts already had no authority to prove if the prisoners are wrongly there, and after the case neither did civilian courts.

That's all I got. Hope it helps

YOU BEST BE JOKIN.
caps