Ducky

“Irate liberals succeeded in getting one prestige paper, the Chicago Tribune, to drop Mallard Fillmore,” reports Harry Stein in City Journal — in “Laughing at the Left,” about conservative comic strips.  Not so in Portland, however, where “liberal complaints moved the Oregonian to run a reader poll deciding the strip’s future [and] respondents voted 4,720 to 3,547 to keep it.”

Go Portland!  And go newspaper that asks people what they want!  Meanwhile, in Beantown, the Globe’s ombudsperson suggested the less acerbic Prickly City replace Mallard, which is what Chi Trib did, only to douse the strip in which Prickly “derided Senator Ted Kennedy’s moral high-handedness at Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings by making a none-too-subtle Chappaquiddick reference,” which was too much for the Michigan Avenue Puritans.

It’s not easy being a guardian of public propriety.