In Monday's Washington Post political cartoon, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning progressive cartoonist Tom Toles paints conservative House Reps in Washington D.C.as arsonists out to destroy the government.

In the first of a two-panel cartoon, Toles presents a schoolboy in a cap writing about what he did during his summer vacation: “Came up with a plan to burn down the school.”

The second panel depicts an adult wearing the Capitol Rotunda on his head, writing on what he did during Summer Recess: "Came up with a plan to shut down government.”

Granted, political cartoons rely on comedic exaggeration for stronger effect, but there's no humor to be found in the issue of school violence on the part of disturbed students. And Toles equates House members debating the option of shutting down the federal government with the senseless, purely destructive, and criminal act of burning down a school. Such an equation is not only spurious but offensive, disturbing, and unfunny - in other words, it's par for the course for the progressive strategy of substituting demonization for rational argument.

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