Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 8/21/02

Artist's Statement

"I think this George and Mister Cheney thing has legs," says Megan Kelso, my friend and colleague. This is very encouraging because Megan is the person I always feel like I'm disappointing whenever I depict George Bush as doofy and harmless instead of arrogant and despicable. I do feel like maybe I hit on something last week with the conception of the cartoon duo of hapless, earnest George and his "friend," the humorless and long-suffering Mister Cheney. (it occurs to me that their relationship is not unlike that of Dennis the Menace and Mr. Wilson.) It seems like it may be possible, using them as my Laurel and Hardy or Bugs and Daffy, to draw serious political cartoons that are still funny, which any reader of political cartoons will know is rare. Let's let the last two weeks' efforts be the test of that proposition.

It is beginning to look like the Bush administration will be pretty much on their own if they decide to avenge G.W.'s daddy in a blood feud in Iraq, without the support of our Allies, or Congress, or even the Pentagon, and certainly not that most decisive faction, the political cartoonists of the alterntaive press. This cartoon is sort of a creative visualization, a dream of what might be, and a feeble effort at making it come true. It would be a beautiful thing if George and Mister Cheney really had to go it alone, without even their entourage of staffers and interns to back them up. But one of the subtler points this drawing is meant to make is that neither George nor Mister Cheney, who are so gung-go for this pointless, unprovoked invasion, are going to be anywhere near Asia Minor when the shooting starts. George's daddy's political connections got him assigned to the "Champagne Unit" of the Texas Air National Guard--so-called because it kept the scions of wealthy Houston society safely on the other side of the planet from Viet Nam. We all know who'll be on the front lines, and their fathers won't be presidents or senators or oil company executives.