The good doctor returns to the Bizarro World of Tom Toles again this week, emerging with his sanity mostly intact. Confucius has edited this slightly for space.

There are now four kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and now, Political Cartoons.

In this Toles cartoon, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s complaints about the Romanian-tween degree of acrobatics that congressional Democrats are performing to pass Obama-care is simply a complaint about ‘democracy.’

Were that the case, Obama-care would have passed long ago, considering our Democratic president, the year-plus with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a wide majority in the house. As the the president put it, “We won.”

Toles errs: We do not live in a democracy but a representative republic. In a representative republic, as the Gormogons’ gentle readers know, we send people to Washington to make decisions on our behalf. In our representative republic, Democrats could argue that they are doing what they were sent to do by those overwhelming majorities. Tellingly, they are not.

There is, however, a certain amount of ‘grass-roots democracy’ afoot, screaming louder than Hello Kitty screams for justice that they do not want this particular health-care solution nor do they want it solved in this manner. They want better sausage and they want to see how it’s made without wanting to vomit.

Ergo, Toles, et al., want to portray the will of the people and the consent of the governed appear as a Republican ruse.

True dat. But one wonders if we should reassign Dr. J to Garfield or Hägar for a couple weeks for the sake of his blood pressure…

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.