Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Strike Three, Dubster! You're Outa There!

In his film, "W," Oliver Stone found baseball to be a touchstone for W's life. Poppy (Bush 41) had been a star baseball player at Yale while The Dubster was the family ne'er-do-well until he landed in the owner's box with the Texas Rangers. The Dubster couldn't play, but he could wear a team jacket and hang out with players and other owners. Today, The Dubster takes a called third strike in this blog. "Get out of here, ya bum!" If this is (fair & balanced) baseball jeering, so be it.

[x Boulder (CO) Fishwrap]
The Dubster's "Legacy"
By John Sherffius

Click on the fine print to enlarge.

[John Sherffius began drawing editorial cartoons for the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper at UCLA. After two years of working as a freelance artist, after graduation, he was hired by the Ventura County Star in Southern California as a graphic artist and gradually worked his way into editorial cartooning for the paper. In 1998, he was hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as the newspaper's editorial cartoonist, a job he held until 2003 when he quit the paper over editorial differences. Sherffius bridled at editorial insistence that he tone down cartoons attacking Republicans. Sherffius then went to work for the Boulder Daily Camera where his cartoons appear regularly and are syndicated nationally by the Copley News Service. Sherffius won the 2008 Herblock Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius/Boulder Daily Camera

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Angry Bob Has An Idea Whose Time Has Come: No Free Pass For The Dubster!

Angry Bob wants The Dubster to pay for the damages he has inflicted upon the Land O'The Free and The Home O'The Brave. The first step would be a law to rescind The Dubster's post-presidential pension and perks. A second step would be a national tour for The Dubster: a flatbed trailer hauled to each of the 50 states with The Dubster chained to a pole in the trailerbed. The rig would be parked in the center of each town through which it passed. Citizens would be welcomed to bring shoes and fling them at The Dubster. After the tour was completed, then — and only then — would The Dubster be allowed to skulk into his reitrement home in North Dallas. With no Secret Service agents present, any passerby would be allowed to hurl shoes at the front door of the residence. The Dubster might become a shoe target busker as a way to earn a retirement income. The Dubster would stand in the front yard and allow someone to fling a shoe at him after the thrower put a buck in the cigar box. If this is a (fair & balanced) fantasy of retribution, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Add Up the Damage
By Bob Herbert

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.

We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.

But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”

And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.

Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.

The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.

If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.

In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.

He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”

It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.

The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.

He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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What A Day! Hurry, January 20, 2009!

To makes sense of today's "This Modern World," The Dubster (aka the Alfred E. Newman clone) needs no explanation. However, Sparky and Blinky do merit comic strip hermeneutics. To that end, this blogger turned to the source of all knowledge:

[x Wikipedia]
Sparky the Wonder Penguin
Sparky can actually talk. Spark's first words in the strip are "George [H. W.] Bush is a wanker". A strong liberal advocate, he briefly became a Republican after being hit on the head with a random falling toilet.

Blinky the Dog
A small dog (Boston Terrier) who shares some of Sparky's political sympathies. Normally very mellow, he briefly became a radical when steroids were put into his food when he was intended to replace the then-Republican Sparky.

It will be a Happy New Year, beginning January 20, 2009. Praise the Lord (of your choice)! The Dubster will be gone and this blogger will be rotten glad of it. If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.

[x Salon]
"Don't Let The Door Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out!"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge.

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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