Time for more cartoons

I found some great political cartoons on the Internet today, most of them from Slate Magazine. As many of you know by now, I have a profound love of the political cartoon, especially the biting ones that get straight to the point. The less words the better - I like the story to be told in pictures.

This one hits close to home, but it's true.

I'm really going to miss Dick Cheney after 1.20.09, because there is no one I love disliking more than him, and that's saying something, considering the level of incompetence of many in the Bush Administration. Above are just a few examples of the absolute bunk that comes out of Cheney's pie hole.

This one is money. I'm SO tired of the idiotic, oversimplification of Cut and Run. I love it that when Great Britain announces its withdraw of forces from Iraq, it's "a sign of the success" in Iraq, but when Democrats want to bring our troops home, it's Cut and Run. Damn liberal media!

Speaks for itself. I'll have more on the Cheney close call a bit later.

Another one that's tragically right on the money. I was listening to Sean Insanity this past week, and I heard him blabbering on about how we should be going to war with Iran and how we should be treating that country in the strictest possible terms. Mark him down as another Republican who knows nothing of war, since he never served, but who is all gung ho to send more troops to another country. If it comes to war with Iran, it comes to war, but, unlike Iraq, let's exhaust all diplomatic options first. Since up until this past week we haven't even been talking to Iran, we've got a long way to go before we can declare that we gave diplomacy every chance to work.

I'll have more on this one soon, too, but the cartoon is a good summary of what is going on with cervical cancer vaccines.

Right on the money. Thank God for small favors - President Bush returned to the Gulf Coast this past week for the first time in six months. Without even checking, I wonder how many times Bush has been back to his Crawford "Ranch" since he last visited Hurricane Katrina victims? And I wonder if a stop off in New Orleans, Mississippi and other hard hit areas from the worst natural disaster in history would really have been that inconvenient?

Katrina and the federal government's response (and seeming indifference) to it reminds me at least a little to Hurricane Andrew, a devastating Category 5 hurricane that struck south Florida in 1992. President George H.W. Bush was slow to respond to that disaster, but not on the scale of the ineptitude of his son's handling of Katrina.

Good for Al Gore. He's battled Republican lies, slander, distortions and outright lies for decades, but, with the exception of the 2000 presidential election, he's rarely melted like so many polar ice caps. This week saw more of the Karl Rove playbook, when an allegedly non-biased think talk went after him for his electricity bills, less than 24 hours after his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar for best documentary. The Swiftboating sure was swift, and thankfully, so was the revelation that the whole attack on Gore was bunk.

Love it.

This one hits close to home, too, because of bitter memories I have about the '04 presidential campaign. Yes, Kerry flip flopped (I'm soooooo effin' tired of that term) on several issues, but Bush's list was twice as long. And, what did we get from the Kerry camp? Silence.

This time around, so far it's McCain, Giuliani and Romney who are doing their best to be all things to all people. All three of the GOP front runners have, thus far, switched positions more than a porn star.

When I say I love political cartoons that say a lot by saying a little, this is the kind I'm talking about, and this one almost certainly is the truth. But, we'll probably never know Libby's whole story, or how Bush & his cohorts lied to get us into the war, considering this administration's Nixon-like penchant for secrecy.

I'd be remiss if I left out the Walter Reed controversy. This story is far from over & bears watching over the coming months, if not years.

It's hard to comprehend how our troops are being treated and "cared for" at Walter Reed and elsewhere.

It looks like help finally is on the way, thanks to some investigative journalism on the part of two Washington Post reporters, Dana Priest and Anne Hull. In a day where responsible and relevant journalism is becoming more scarce by the day, it was good to see that journalism can still function as The Fourth Estate, thereby effectively bringing about much needed change in our government. There isn't nearly enough of this today.

I don't think it's overreaching to say that if something happened today with the scope and size of Watergate, it would probably go at least partially unreported or perhaps even covered up. Lazy journalism is now the norm; slipshod reporting can no longer be referred to as isolated or seldom seen. Lazy journalists have been around for hundreds of years, but the level and quality of journalism seems to be regressing.

So, it appears that Bush never knew about conditions at Reed. I don't accept that, but even if I did, how could this have happened at the Pentagon? Where was defense department oversight? Two words: Donald Rumsfeld.

Another one right on the money.

Phew! Okay, that's enough cartoons for a while. But, I found all of these today and I couldn't decide which ones to post, so I decided to put 'em all up.