Artist's Statement
An unusual six-panel extravaganza this week. This
proved to be an especially fecund premise; I could’ve drawn
an infinite number of panels on this theme. I have learned so
much about the arts of callous, brazen deception from this administration.
There were so many ideas I had to discard. The one panel I still
wish I’d had room and time to include is: "WHEN YOUR FRIENDS
FUCK UP, REWARD THEM LAVISHLY." This referring to a particularly
ballsy and infuriating move of Bush’s; whenever one of his cronies
comes under fire for exceptionally appalling incompetence or
criminality, he routinely promotes them or gives them a medal,
as a defiant fuck-you to public opinion. It epitomizes his attitude
of blithely flouting the ethics and consequences that apply
to everybody else in the world. The drawing would’ve shown my
beloved cat sulking after having clawed out someone’s eyeball
and me coddling her, saying, "Are you an unhappy cat? Bist
du eine unhäpische këtzle? I want you to be happy.
That is what we all want, is a happy, happy cat. Who would like
some catnip? Would you?", even as her victim clasps a hand
in shock over the bleeding socket.
That’s my friend Carolyn in panel #1, cast
in this role because of all my female friends she is perhaps
the one who would least welcome pregnancy. I had to ask her
and her husband whether they’d object to my drawing her as having
been knocked up by me, and I hereby thank them for their gracious
permission. Thanks, too, to my friend Isabelle who, when I described
panel #4 to her, asked me, "What will Boyd be dressed as?"
Until then it hadn’t occurred to me that Boyd would be in costume
at all; in my original drawing he was still wearing his same
old stained T-shirt. But as soon as she posed the question,
the obvious and inevitable answer, the only answer possible,
immediately presented itself. Early this morning I woke up and
thought, "Time to draw Boyd as an Ewok." Another day,
another dollar.
On the subject of the "meaningless
re-shuffling of associates," let us take this opportunity
to bid a contemptuous but nonetheless grudgingly fond farewell
to Scott McClellan, by general consensus the worst liar ever
to appear on national television. He reminded one of a child
smeared with chocolate adamantly insisting that he does not
know who ate the mousse but it wasn’t him, or a murder suspect
soaked in blood doggedly insisting that the true culprit was
"some other dude." His standard rhetorical tactic
was to obstinately recite his single scripted line—"we
cannot comment on an ongoing legal case," for example—over
and over, robotically, maddeningly, in response to increasingly
specific and pointed variations on some perfectly straightforward
question. It was sadistic good fun watching him straining to
draw a fine and convoluted distinction between the treasonous
crimes of the administration’s critics and the President’s identical
but necessary and virtuous actions. And his face---that tiny,
clammy face peering nervously out, as if trapped, from the center
of a broad, doughy bowlful of head. Not to mention the soft,
plump little white hands held up as if to tamp down and placate
the constant barrage of incredulous and outraged demands for
a single straight answer. He was a pathetic toady, a dim, bumbling
stooge who couldn’t handle the one simple job he’d been given
of stonewalling the press while the administration did whatever
the fuck it wanted. If he’d been a front man for the Mafia instead
of the White House they’d’ve put two bullets in the back of
his head and dumped his body in Jersey. Instead he undoubtably
goes off to become a well-paid flak for some corporation, to
ineptly deny less glamorous crimes. We will not see his like
again.
Last night, after I finished this cartoon,
I went out to have a self-congratulatory cocktail and met someone
who told me an extraordinary story. (Since I am not a journalist
but a cartoonist, I feel no obligation to attribute or confirm
this story. I’m just telling you what somebody told me in a
bar, which is one of the few places on Earth where the truth
is ever uttered.) The story concerns Karen Hughes, counsel to
the President and one of that celibate harem of brittle, fawning
women with whom George Bush creepily likes to surround himself.
Hughes invited the head of a well-known P.R. firm to Texas to
advise her on the administration’s P.R. problem. For a long
time they didn’t acknowledge that they even had one, she admitted,
but now they do, and they need to know how to fix it. The head
of this firm warned Hughes that if she was really asking, he
was going to tell her the truth, not what she wanted to hear.
She said that was exactly why she had come to him; they’d been
hearing what they wanted to hear for too long. Well, first of
all, he told her, you don’t have a P.R. problem; you don’t even
have a P.R. department. What you have is an attitude problem.
You’re arrogant, and you don’t listen. Also, you should’ve changed
the White House staff in your second administration. It would
have been a perfectly acceptable time to fire a bunch of people
and bring in new blood. And the first person you should’ve fired,
he said, is Dick Cheney. Hughes agreed with all of this. She
knew it; everybody knew it. But she was afraid to tell it to
the President. Everyone around him was afraid to tell him anything
he didn’t want to hear. She told an incredible story: George’s
own father, Former President George H.W. Bush, had called him
around Thanksgiving to tell him that Dick Cheney was horrible,
he should be fired immediately, and George Bush hung up on
him.
This person told me that this P.R. man also
incidentally confirmed what I have heard elsewhere: that all
George Bush ever really wanted was to be baseball commissioner.
Hitler wanted to go to art school. If we have learned nothing
else from World War II and the Holocaust, we have learned this
much: let everybody into art school who wants to go. Why didn’t
they just let Bush be baseball commissioner? He would’ve been
a disaster, of course, just as he was a disaster as a baseball
team owner and an oil company executive before that. The man’s
a chronic failure. He can’t do anything well. But so what? Destroying
major league baseball would’ve been relatively harmless. Nobody
would’ve died. Maybe we could still offer him the position in
exchange for resigning the presidency. Shit, I’d be happier
with George Steinbrenner as President of the United States than
George Bush.