Talk:Mallard Fillmore

Stereotypes
"Anti-Semitic stereotype" that Hollywood is run by Jews? Look up the executives in Hollywood. It's not a stereotype, and why that would be considered ANTI-Semitic is beyond me. As a Jew I'm proud of that.
 * Yeah, but nobody "runs Hollywood"; even though there are lots of Jews running individual companies, it's not like the companies are allied together under one authority structure which is full of Jews. Fact is, you might even say the companies are in competition. Gzuckier 19:00, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I removed the NPOV tag from the section on Jewish stereotypes. The statement was made and is cited and nothing here shows anyone disputing the claim that he was accused of it, only the accusation.  The NPOV tag is added to articles when we suspect the article of not having a neutral point of view, not when we suspect individuals or groups of it.  If you take objection to the claim that Mallard Fillmore contains such stereotypes, take your issues to the people who made them and not to Wikipedia. - 24.10.25.141 18:29, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

In the opening paragraph, we read that Mallard is a "green feathered duck." Later on in the entry, it says that Mallard usually is colored black, even in the Sunday color comics. This seems like a contradiction to me. Checkerpaw 17:10, 18 April 2006 (UTC)


 * And they call liberals "flip floppers." oofa!


 * Heh. It's true that Mallard switches back and forth from green to black seemingly at random.  I think it's supposed to represent the way that real ducks can look different shades of green (one of them very dark and verging on black) depending on the angle of the ambient light. --Jfruh (talk) 20:30, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It is possible that Mallard's ever-changing feathers are meant to represent irridescent mallard feathers, but it's important to keep in mind that Bruce Tinsley is a drunken hack. 76.201.179.175 (talk) 01:41, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It seems like 2/3 of white conservative cartoonists express themselves through black characters. Maybe Tinsley is trying to get on the bandwagon but can't keep the color scheme straight because of the DTs. 71.209.70.6 (talk) 05:56, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Copyright infringement?
What 'copyright infringement' is at issue here? You can't copyright a name! 72.128.16.232 18:37, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

7/10 Strip
You cannot find the j@#k, in order to feed him some of his out of context comments back to him. This is what I found looking for the answer to his cartoon dated 7-10. Here's the only email that I found for him. kfs-cartoonists@hearst.com HIS CARTOON Brittany McComb valedictorian of Foothill High School, had her microphone cut off during her graduation speech for thanking Christ.

NOT!!OUT OF CONTEXT In the 750-word unedited version of McComb's speech, she made two references to the lord, nine mentions of God and one mention of Christ.

In the version approved by school officials, six of those words were omitted along with two biblical references. Also deleted from her speech was a reference to God's love being so great that he gave his only son to suffer an excruciated death in order to cover everyone's shortcomings and forge a path to heaven. http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Jun-17-Sat-2006/news/8014416.html


 * Tinsley has published his e-mail address several times in the strip, including this one. It's Mallardmail@yahoo.com --Rubber cat 05:31, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Forgetting Veterans Day
I'm not going to just jump in here and write it, but it seems that Tinsley has a new item for the "Events" part of this page. It looks like he forgot about Veterans Day this year: he just posted his standard "thank the vets on this special day" cartoon today, a week and a half after Veterans Day. Obviously he simply forgot about the holiday a month or so back when he normally would have written the cartoon.

Of course this is a terrible embarrassment for Tinsley, as it undermines his mission to convince people that right-wing folks like him are especially patriotic and supportive of the troops. It's quite possible that he was simply too distracted by the elections to remember the troops this year.

=
======= For that matter, there should also be an Events listing for the August 7, 2004 cartoon http://seattlepi.com/fun/mallard.asp?date=20040807

in which Tinsley falsely claimed that a Max Planck Institute report suggested that global warming is caused by cyclical variations in the output of the sun. In fact, the Planck Institute report http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20040802/genPDF.pdf

clearly states "the Sun is not the cause of the present global warming". Tinsley apparently did not read the report he was claiming as his source, and instead got his misinformation from a deliberately deceptive article on Telegraph.co.uk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml

--Sylvie369 15:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

PreMarital Sex?
This page lists pre-marital sex as one of the strips 'targets,' cane anyone point me to a strip where Mallard Fillmore criticizes premarital sex, I'd be very interested to see that.

Of course, Mallard could be criticizing it part out of envy(as he is neither married nor apparently HAVING a sex life). Then again, if he did, we can thank Tinsley for not showing us that. Sorry.

Senator Endorsement
I thought this section was good, but deleted the explanation on the senators views. I felt that this was not germaine to the intent of the article and was primarily placed as a means of implying that the creator of Mallard Fillmore has political views that are fully consistent with the Senator from Oklahoma. If one could substantiate this view with further evidence of these views, say from a mallard fillmore strip, then I would have no objection to the paragraph. - —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.123.233.230 (talk • contribs)
 * I've reverted your deletion for the moment. The fact that he went out of his way to endorse a candidate within the strip is notable, which makes the political beliefs of that candidate relevant to the event. It might be more neutral to rewrite it somewhat, and point out the controversial aspects in a link to the Senator's page. -- Kesh 01:18, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

America the Book controversy
I removed the misleading statement that Tinsley made the implication that Stewart had innapropriate relations with underage boys in one of his strips. (I read the statement, and was misslead until I found the actual strip). If you'll read the actual strip (which has an easy reference next to it) you'll note that Tinsley was trying to make a point about signing a name to a work. He in fact said that Stewart never made these statements, and they were purely made up by him. If someone still thinks the underage boy thing is important, please word it so it's not misleading and doesn't imply that Tinsley is accusing Stewart of being a pedophile. --Vellmont 18:52, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I agree, the summary was not written to give the correct interpretation of that strip. However, I'm at a loss as to a better way to word it at the moment. Might come back to that one later. -- Kesh 20:32, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Here's a summary, then:
 * AtB, a fake textbook written by staffers from a fake news show, includes among literally hundreds of pages of fake stuff several fake comic strips, including a fake MF strip, the latter apparently to convey the point that MF is often polemic to the point of being not funny. (They also include a Peanuts strip where Lucy accuses Pigpen of being a communist; I wonder if anyone ever let on to Mr. Tinsley that this was a fake, too?)
 * About a year later, this brainwave makes its way to Bruce Tinsley, who then publishes a series of strips where:
 * Mallard declares that AtB was intentionally misleading people into thinking that the MF strip in AtB was a real one;
 * Jon Stewart is drawn with exaggeratedly Semitic features;
 * Mallard declares that because Bruce Tinsley signs his strip, we know that people in his strip didn't really say the things he made up.
 * I personally find "my name on the bottom means 'don't believe anything I say'" to be an odd point to try to make, and his logic is a bit flawed since the AtB cover says "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents", has Jon Stewart's picture on the cover, and credits a page full of writers, none of whom is named "Bruce Tinsley", all of which would seem to be the equivalent of signing their work. However, I do think it's clear he doesn't really say that Jon Stewart is a pedophile -- he just thinks it's funny to make an anti-Semitic caricature of Jon Stewart say that he is a pedophile. Which does a better job than AtB of making their original point.
 * Probably what belongs in the article, though, is what's there now: parody appeared in book, Tinsley responded by casting it as an integrity issue.--NapoliRoma 00:42, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree- what is currently in the article should be in the article, and what isn't there shouldn't be. It is of note that the strip that appears in America is no different than any of the other fake comic strips in that section; all of them contain dates that the strips were supposedly published, and many of them (inc. Mallard) do not include an author's/illustrator's signature nor mention the author's name. But with that said, why Tinsley decided to strike back at Stewart and the book is neither here nor there; it was done, and the article mentions exactly what should be mentioned. -- Kicking222 16:34, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Digression on political leanings of Wikipedia contributors
This is a hilarious wikipedia page. Could anyone, reading this page, work out the political leanings of the majority of wikipedia contributors? Tee hee. 62.189.46.50 16:23, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Here, 62.189.46.50 -- can I call you 50? -- I'll try. There are 12 posts above this one, which I've coded to the following key: L = clearly liberal, C = clearly conservative, "L" = could be interpreted as liberal, "C" = could be interpreted as conservative, BT = Bashes Tinsley, DT = Defends Tinsley, N = Neutral.
 * I read them as: L, N, BT, DT, "L", DT, "C", "L", DT, DT, BT, "C". So, the most representative view is "Defends Tinsley." If you make a crude mapping of pro-Tinsley = conservative, and anti-Tinsley = liberal, the score would be liberal 5, conservative 6, neutral 1.  Looking at it either way, I don't see a clear bias.
 * However, I think this is overly simplistic. I think it's clear that rather than discussing political leanings, the content of this page is mostly about the content of the MF page.--NapoliRoma 19:43, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Mr. 50, it would be very helpful if you could cite some examples of this alleged political bias. --Rubber cat 11:16, 20 December 2006 (UTC) Wikipedia is known to be run and edited by left-wing moonbats. They will praise America-hating trash like Doonesbury while trashing patriotic works like Mallard Fillmore. This is to be expected, unfortunately. 68.197.173.163 (talk) 14:19, 25 June 2012 (UTC) Wikipedia is known to be run and edited by left-wing moonbats. They will praise America-hating trash like Doonesbury while trashing patriotic works like Mallard Fillmore. This is to be expected, unfortunately. 68.197.173.163 (talk) 14:21, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

New theme / controversy: "fat Chinese kids eat dogs"
I noticed that my local paper has been running MF repeats the last couple of days. Fortunately for all of us who just can't get enough of the zany avian red-stater, the current strips they dropped can be found on the Jewish World Review Web site, where we see that Mallard has decided to side with his pals the doggies -- including a name-check to another surprising ally (surprising for Tinsley, that is, not necessarily for a duck): PETA. Apparently the Merc, located in an area with a large Asian-American populace, wasn't having any of this.--NapoliRoma 21:56, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Should it be mentioned that this comic strip isn't funny?
I mean, I know that on the surface this seems to be POV...but I think I can empirically prove that Mallard Fillmore is indeed neither entertaining nor informative. Well, I suppose constantly portraying Republicans as victims is slightly humorous... KyuzoGator 04:19, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

KyuzoGator, I think that I can prove that leftist comic strips are indeed neither entertaining nor wholly based on factual events, rather than liberal "spin". Perhaps it can be empirically proved that you are liberally biased, too.

Liberals own the whole "victim" issue anyway.

Kepiblanc 23:27, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion it's definitely not encyclopedic to put that it's not funny. However, posting inflammatory comments like "Liberals own the whole 'victim' issue" doesn't help at all. --Tombomp (talk) 09:19, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * There may be an issue in the sense that the strip hardly has any narrative anymore: I usually can't avoid Mallard Fillmore, and I notice what story-telling aspects the strip had have been replaced by an increasingly bitter series of rants against whatever it is Tinsley is mad about.  The list of characters in the article hardly matters anymore; it's a man screaming about all the conspiracies around him.  Sad.--Idols of Mud (talk) 23:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

So what? I don't think "Doonesbury" is funny.67.45.113.91 (talk) 16:00, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Neutrality dispute
There's been a non-NPOV dispute tag on here for a while - it would be good if somebody could elaborate on why they consider it non-NPOV. --Tombomp (talk) 09:24, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't read Mallard Fillmore, but from this article I would believe that it has the same style as the cancelled show 1/2 Hour News Hour. Exaggerate stereotypes about people you don't like and then make fun of said stereotypes. Throw in a splash of racism and you've got typical conservative humor. With that said I think the reason why the neutrality dispute is up is because if MF is like the article states, then there may be more controversies floating around that haven't been included yet.Reinoe (talk) 15:47, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Removing the POV tag for the time being, pending a concrete and demonstrable problem. There's been plenty of time for somebody to point out what's wrong. No objection to putting it back up if it can be justified. – Luna Santin  (talk) 00:44, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Recurring themes of Mallard Fillmore
Whoever did this. Fucking hilarious. But this is an encyclopedia, not an uncyclopedia. I'd fix it, but I think it's just too damn funny to take out. Plus, I'm not NPOV to be able to be able to tell what stays and what goes. Honestly though, I think the whole section should go
 * Liberals?! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.236.151.193 (talk) 16:26, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

67.34.148.116 (talk) 23:43, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

LIBERALS. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.244.204.47 (talk) 21:45, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Liberals —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.57.192.225 (talk) 02:21, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Liberals --208.117.13.177 (talk) 06:34, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

the joke is...liberals —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.28.16.173 (talk) 00:12, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Humor Section
I added a section to criticism detailing the frequent attack on MF as not being funny. like it or not, this is legitimate criticism of the strips humor value. I have provided references and links. Please notify me before removing this section. Thanks. Wikilost (talk) 23:47, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

History section question
There's a discrepancy between the history of the strip on this page and on Tinsley's bio page.

The Tinsley biography page says:

'''Jay Kennedy, a liberal-leaning comics editor working for King Features, saw Mallard Fillmore in the Washington Times and contacted Tinsley, as Kennedy had been looking for the conservative response to Doonesbury. Kennedy was convinced that Mallard Fillmore should be in syndication. (Kennedy would later rise to editor-in-chief at King Features before his death in 2007.)'''

This page in the history section says:

'''Tinsley started sending samples of Mallard Fillmore, then known as The Fillmore File, to newspapers across the country and was eventually picked up by The Washington Times, who began running it in 1992. The strip was soon later picked up for national syndication by King Features Syndicate, who began distributing it in May 1994.'''

The bio gives the impression that Tinsley was invited to have his strip published by King Features, whereas the Mallard Filmore page makes it sound like he was shopping it around. Which is correct, especially since the history section doesn't cite its sources?(208.58.207.32 (talk) 04:38, 27 June 2010 (UTC))

You're making it sound like these two stories contract one another. They don't. Here's a merged version that uses the facts stated by both:

'''Tinsley started sending samples of Mallard Fillmore, then known as The Fillmore File, to newspapers across the country and was eventually picked up by The Washington Times, who began running it in 1992. Jay Kennedy, a liberal-leaning comics editor working for King Features, saw Mallard Fillmore in the Washington Times and contacted Tinsley, as Kennedy had been looking for the conservative response to Doonesbury. Kennedy was convinced that Mallard Fillmore should be in syndication. As a result the strip was picked up for national syndication by King Features Syndicate, who began distributing it in May 1994.''' 98.254.202.225 (talk) 14:54, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Since when are all comic strips supposed to be "funny?"
Atacking Mallard Fillmore for its political perspective makes sense if you disagree with it -- as it is to attack any other comic strip with a political perspective you disagree with -- but since when are all comic strips supposed to be "funny?"

Would anyone claim that Prince Valiant or Dick Tracy or Alley Oop or Mary Worth or Terry & The Pirates or Steve Canyon were ever intended to be "funny" comic strips? Is Luann a "funny" comic strip? Is "Doonesbury" a "funny" comic strip?

Some editorial page comics may be funny or humorous, but many others are not. If we assume that Mallard Fillmore is intended first and foremost to be a political comic strip -- and I think we can all agree that it is -- there is no logical reason to expect it to be "funny," and no logical reason to attack it because it isn't. (71.22.47.232 (talk) 11:01, 2 January 2011 (UTC))


 * If something's clearly intended to be funny, then yeah, it's supposed to be funny. Doonesbury is supposed to be funny and thoughtful at the same time and its fans seem to feel it hits the mark more often than not. Mallard Fillmore? The style seems to imply an intent to be witty by the author, though I've yet to find anything particularly funny about it and it may be I'm misunderstanding the intent. Glenn Beck describes himself as a clown, and Rush Limbaugh has made similar statements about his own show, so it might just be that right-wing "humor" requires a particular mindset to enjoy it. 98.254.202.225 (talk) 14:52, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Generally, as a social conservative, I agree with and enjoy Mallard Fillmore, with one big exception:  his portrayal of government workers as lazy, shiftless, overpaid, etc. That may be because I am a retired civil servant. While I agree that government is too bloated and should be reduced, attacking the good and usually hard-working people who serve in it is not good and does not serve the conservative cause. JerryGoe (talk) 20:51, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Grasping for straws in controvery section
Point 1: I thought controversy sections were going away, but apparently not.

Point 2: One of the points here is Tax burden overstated. If you're getting your news on tax matters from a comic strip, you belong in a home -- and I don't mean your mom's basement. 155.213.224.59 (talk) 14:29, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Concur. The current selection is pretty sad -- akin to saying the author's socks are different shades of blue. Pitiful, but I guess someone is determined to have a "controversy" section for all conservatives. 155.213.224.59 (talk)  — Preceding undated comment added 17:28, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree, too. Paul Krugman - who is hardly an unbiased source - essentially said, "The tax burden for most Americans isn't 50%; it's only 25%."  Gee, that's comforting (sarcasm intended). 67.45.113.91 (talk) 16:02, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

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Views on Trump?
I came to this article because I was curious what the strip had done with regard to Trump -- in favor of him, against him, or perhaps trying to ignore him (which would be noteworthy in itself for a political cartoon). Someone should write a section on that topic. 108.26.137.211 (talk) 12:35, 16 June 2018 (UTC)