Wednesday, October 8, 2008

America's Cocktail Waitress

With apologies to all you gals out there serving drinks, stereotypes are almost always wrong, but occasionally useful. So, what's the difference between a cocktail waitress and a '55 Chevy? Not everyone's had a '55 Chevy.

Raw Story

However, CNN may now have found the ultimate Palin comparison -- a 1932 cartoon titled "Betty Boop for President," in which Betty winks broadly while singing, "Some of you have money, while some are poor, you know. If you send me to Washington, I'll just divide the dough, oh!"

No doubt Palin, who insisted at the debate that paying taxes is "not patriotic," would consider Boop's plans for income redistribution -- along with her promises that "we will get things for nothing, movies, cabarets and jazz!" -- to mark her as a wild-eyed radical and probable associate of the Weather Underground.

Go see the CNN video. The post led me to the one below as well as the title of this post. From Heptune:

Betty Boop's 36th cartoon is rich with political references. Leslie Cabarga gives the copyright date as November 4, 1932. We don't know how closely that date corresponds with the release date, when people would have actually seen it in the movie theater, but in November 1932 was the presidential election in which Franklin Roosevelt defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover. Prohibition, which began in 1919, was still in place but was soon to end. The Depression was well underway following the stock market crash in 1929.

During the credits, we hear an instrumental version of the Civil War song, "The Battle Cry of Freedom." Then we join Betty Boop at a political rally, where she is addressing an enthusiastic crowd:

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