Maybe Its Just Us

Maybe it's just us, but when we spotted OrangeCountyRegistercartoonist Mike Shelton's depiction of a hook-nosed, slovenly Larry Agran raining down coins and misery in the paper's July 24 edition, we got an uneasy feeling we'd seen it before. A couple of key strokes, and there it was: a hook-nosed, slovenly Jew raining coins and misery in the savagely anti-Semitic German magazine DerSturmer, circa 1937. The similarities extend to the cartoons' alliterative titles: "Larryland" and "Legion of Shame." Shelton was taking Agran, an Irvine councilman who is Jewish, to task for his myriad conflicts of interest in handling the construction of the Great Park, a theme we've been investigating for a couple of years. So we guess we should be happy. But have you ever found yourself in an debate and had a total lunatic take your side?