Yes, Doonesbury has been moribund for decades. It's not quite true that it's exactly the same, though. Consider Trudeau's treatment of college students. They were whimsical youth in 1975 when the core gang was hanging out at their commune. Today Walden College students are portrayed as ignorant mercenaries. He's "progressed" to fogie-ism.

He's run out of things to say, but that hasn't stopped him from saying it.

Must run in the family... How else are we to explain the awful, non-inventive "The Jane Pauley Show"?

Trudeau's always been a phony, going back to when he attacked Howard Stern. Trudeau came on the scene posturing as this iconoclast, but when a REAL iconoclast like Stern showed up, Trudeau couldn't handle it. His pissing about bloggers just shows what a fat old fuddy duddy he is, like when Eric Clapton had a hissy fit about punk rock (& punk rockers, like bloggers, had a DIY ethic because their stuff was shut out of the ossified, mainstream music industry).

Trudeau should've quit 20 years ago ;p

In 1984 I was a registered Democrat. I disliked Reagan thoroughly, and voted for Walter Mondale. I was also a big fan of Doonesbury, and had always considered it fairly balanced in its outlook. That was the year that Trudeau took his sabbatical, and he didn't come back until right before the election. My friends (also liberals) and I, were wanting him back to add his voice to the anti-Reagan argument. When he came back, though, the strip was nothing but one long ad hominem attack. There was nothing in it but low, personal attacks on the president. Not only was the strip unfair, but it was unlikely to convince anyone except those who already hated Reagan. It was more apt to generate sympathy for the man. That's when I first began to lose my respect for Trudeau. Looking back, it seems to me that in the 80s he drifted further and further left, and became very rigid and reactionary in his thinking. By the early 90s, after my political views had altered from left-liberal to laissez-faire liberal, I found that I was completely unable to enjoy his comic strip. It was a shame.

Ardsgaine:

I think many of us who came of age in the 70s went though an evolution similar to yours. I always leaned conservative, but in my ute (NYC for "youth") I was loose enough to enjoy the strip. That changed when Gary Trudeau turned into a vicious a**hole, particularly in his attacks on Reagan. I NEVER took Doonesberry seriously after the infamous "inside Reagan's brain" series.

What appalled me was how Trudeau become so purile, arrogant and hopelessly doctrinaire in such a short time. I agree that he went off the tracks completely in the 80s. I think that Reagan's popularity and enormous political success--Ronnie did, after all, win the Cold War by bankrupting the Soviets, and restored a sense of pride to Americans--literally drove Trudeau crazy.

The conservative revolution in the years since has only deepened Trudeau's mad spiral to the left. Today I think of him as pure moonbat, in the same class as Ted Rall. And, as Jeff and Powerline's posts show, I'm not the only one actually READS his strip about once a decade only to see that, yep, virtually "nothing has changed" in Gary Trudeau's narrow, bitter world.

Hi - I was directed to this site (attracted by mention of Doonesbury) while killing time on the 'net' reading a liberal site called Tbogg.
My - there seems to be a hot division in the USA in the blogworld. Rather bitter, most of it!!

I have the first couple of Doonesbury books from my time living in Washington DC. I was reading them again the other day and still find them fun.

The current Doonesbury is on an irritating site called Slate. It's still worth checking out though. It's still fresh, well-drawn and funny.

I suppose, if the politics offends... then it's not well drawn, not fresh and.. naturally... not funny.

Good luck with the site. Lenox

"I suppose, if the politics offends... then it's not well drawn, not fresh and.. naturally... not funny."

Heheh. Well, that might be one way of reading what's been said, but I think that in my own case it had to do more with Trudeau's methods than his politics. Being neither a leftist nor a religious conservative, I can often appreciate humor directed at either side. I get offended, though, when people try to substitute unfair personal attacks for critique of their opponent's ideas.

There is a caveat to that: a politician doeshimself up to some examination of his personal behavior if it smacks of hypocrisy given his political beliefs. Al Gore's mining operations, John Kerry's tax returns and Newt Gingrich's marriages fall into that category. If a politician is going to chide other people for their behavior, and attempt to coerce them with the power of the state based on his view of morality, he had better make sure his own house is in order.

Even still, although poking fun at hypocrisy can be good comedy, it's not really an argument against the person's politics; it's an argument against the person. And there's so much hypocrisy among politicians on both sides that a comedian who focuses exclusively on the hypocrisy of one side either has a serious blind spot, or he's devolved into a partisan hack--or both. I think that in Trudeau's case it's both.

I used to be a fan in the '70s as well, but like many in this stream grew to despise the man and his politics. I had the first 6 (or so) books and recently ran across them. After a brief gander, I pitched them.