Cartoonists With Attitude

Marc Thiessen defends the “al-Qaeda 7″ attack ad by likening the attorneys who defended detainees in Guantanamo, as well as Jos Pedilla, John Walker Lindh, and others to “mob lawyers” and “drug cartel lawyers.”

Setting aside the obvious point that even mobsters and drug lords deserve representation in a court of law, we should not get sucked into Thiessen’s argument that The Public Has a Right to Know when Justice Department lawyers have experience advocating the rights of the accused. He’s created a false equivalency that would seem to mine new depths in intellectual dishonesty were it not for this next question:

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack?

That is the dumbest question I have ever read in the pages of WaPo — a feat, given the other members of the op/ed brain trust over there. But I’ll humor him. Here’s the obvious answer: we were too busy being outraged by the unethical and illegal advice the “fine lawyers” gave to an administration too eager to apply techniques favored by the Khmer Rouge and Augusto Pinochet’s thugs. Besides, it is hard to get too vicious in attacking a guy like John Yoo who can be so cavalier about massacring villagers and crushing little boy’s testicles.

UPDATED to include this excellent riposte by Dahlia Lithwick:

Ten years ago, if some paranoid hysteric accused you of being an al-Qaida sympathizer or a jihadist, you could find a lawyer to help you make the case that you were not. But in the ever-expanding war on the Bill of Rights being waged by Liz Cheney, once you’re designated a terrorist, you lose your Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Because just by representing youeven if you’re acquittedyour lawyers become terrorists, too!

Read the whole thing, cuz Dahlia brings the pain. Also, Glenn Greenwald jumps on Thiessen and takes down Fred Hiatt.

The big news in bated breath anticipation of outcomes hopefully serving American geopolitical interests is the Iraqi election on May 7. The stakes are high, whoa-ho-ho!, so CNN sits down with its resident foreign expert guy, Fareed Zakaria. The main question on every Americans mind is, Will the trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives destroyed be redeemed by Iraqi democracy? Tell us, Fareed!

And that positive outcome is that Iraq will be the first Arab country to have a genuine functioning democratic system with a free press, open economy and that is something of a revolution in the Middle East.

So what Iraq has to demonstrate is that the majority, which will inevitably be largely Shia, has the capacity to give some form of representation to the various minorities within Iraq. Iraq has to show that it understands that democracy is not just majority rule but pluralism and inclusion for the various minority groups.

So in the long arc of history was this worth it? You probably do need a little more time and perspective, and you do need to see how it turns out. But I think we could be heartened by the fact there are things we can place on the positive side of the ledger to balance the enormous costs that both the Iraqis and the Americans have paid.

How reasonable. That Fareed is a reasonable centrist guy. He takes out a ledger and draws two columns, one labeled “Pluses” and the other “Minuses.” In the negative column: Abu Ghraib, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, destabilized Middle East, Halliburton, Blackwater, civil war, balkanization, American soldiers killed or traumatized, including a rise in domestic violence and suicide. In the plus column: neocon talking points. See? It all balances out. Just ask Ahmad Chalabi.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-led GWOT has new fronts in Somalia and Yemen. When I say “Yemen,” you say, “underpants bomber” and “Ft. Hood shooter.” When I say “Somalia,” you say, “pirates.” When I snap my fingers, you will have no recollection of this conversation. Currently, the U.S. is assisting a Somalian military effort to retake Mogadishu from Al Shahab and al-Qaeda control.

Most of the American military assistance to the Somali government has been focused on training, or has been channeled through African Union peacekeepers. But that could change. An American official in Washington, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly, predicted that American covert forces would get involved if the offensive, which could begin in a few weeks, dislodged Qaeda terrorists.

What youre likely to see is airstrikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out, the official said.

Perhaps I have been reading too much John le Carr that it’s making me all cynical about the motives and competence of everyone involved, but this tidbit toward the end of the article offers some amusing trivia:

There seems to be a qualitative difference, too. Somalias forces are now led by General Gelle, a colonel in Somalias army decades ago who most recently was an assistant manager at a McDonalds in Germany. He is known among Somali war veterans as one of the best Somali officers still alive.

I have nothing to add to the parting words of Kai Eide. But I think the Google Ad accompanying the article adds something to the conversation, don’t you?

Because Bart Stupak wants to screw over poor and middle class women and risk the fate of health care reform in Congress, I have decided to fight back the only way I know how — by drawing mean pictures of him.

Once again I go inside baseball with a political caricature. Today it’s Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol as dung beetles, which I fear unjustly insults dung beetles. After all, they roll balls of shit into perfect spheres, a truly impressive accomplishment for creatures with no geometric sciences to speak of. I was going to say they were low on the evolutionary ladder, but that’s not good biology: they’re on a very different evolutionary track than we are, and the whole notion of a “ladder” implies more special chauvinism than I am comfortable with. That said, Liz and Bill are pond scum.

Um, words on technique: I used dry brush for shadow and texture effects. I feel like I should have made the dung ball more poopy, but the reference photos I used showed some rather bland balls of dung.

See what I mean? Look more like balls of straw and gum. Again, I tip my hat to dung beetle mad skillz. I should just accept that as a cartoonist, I am not bound by reality.

Delayed by back pain and tooth extraction, a new page arrives at Wanderlost full of color, merpeople, and song.

Click it to embiggen it!

Friday’s caricature will arrive later today. Targets — I mean, subjects will be Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.

Karl Rove has learned his lesson:

Mr. Rove adamantly rejects allegations that the administration deliberately lied about the presence of weapons in Saddam Husseins Iraq. But he acknowledges that the failure to find them badly damaged Mr. Bushs presidency, and he blames himself for not countering the narrative that Bush lied, calling it one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years.

Too bad it’s the wrong lesson.

Anyhoo, nothing new. Remember - “it was just a matter of emphasis.” (Link found via Mikhaela.)

I wrote about this tool earlier. Rendered with a humble Pilot Precise 5 pen. Those are great for sketches. I like the bite of the line work here. I wonder if I can duplicate it in a more finished product. The challenge is to not tighten up, but respond to the line you are putting down. I’ll be using different tools — a couple of Hunt crow quills — so the line will feel different. But those quills have plenty of teeth. We’ll see.

Shorter Harold Ford: “Dude, I coulda totally pwned that bitch if you pussies hadn’ta hold me back.”

Glad that sideshow’s over. I have not lived in New York in 15 years, but I still take its politics very seriously. I didn’t want no Teabagging Palinites and I don’t want no Carpetbagging Blue Dogs.

FWIW, I was born in Tennessee, but I’d be totally happy to send Ford back home. I doubt he wants to go back. Can you blame him?

Kentucky GOP senator Jim Bunning screwed over 1.2 million jobless Americans with one filibuster. And that ain’t all:

“This means that construction workers will be sent home from job sites because federal inspectors must be furloughed.”Federal projects shut down include more than $38 million in project funding for Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest and Fernan Lakes Idaho Panhandle National Forest and $86 million for bridge replacements in the Washington, D.C., area. Bunning’s home state of Kentucky has no projects affected by his action.

However, nearly 1.2 million unemployed workers, including 14,000 in Kentucky, would lose federal jobless benefits this month if Congress doesn’t extend them, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal-leaning research group. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that about a third will lose benefits in the first two weeks of the month.

I’m glad the press has found the ovaries/cajones to confront this dill-hole. “Excuse me! This is a senators-only elevator!” should be the new “get off my lawn.”

David Rees already has an excellent Halloween costume in Bunning’s honor. (Link via Brian McFadden tweet.)

UPDATE: Jon Kyl of Arizona says people on unemployment are lazy shits anyway. Kick ‘em off the rolls, make ‘em desperate for a job. Oh, sorry; that wasn’t fair. Let his own words hang him:

“I’m sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue that it’s a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it’s a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here,” said Kyl.

See? He was being nice. As he takes away their food and rent and health care money, he makes sure to say polite things about their hard-workiness.

Anyone remember Lynn Forester de Rothschild? Think reeeeeaaaaalllllly hard back to the closing days of the 2008 election; and you may recall an upper class white woman with strong ties to the investment class making a big regretful noise that, contrary to decades of loyalty to her Democratic Party, she could not in good conscience vote for that radical lefty Obama and so must endorse the proven centrist John McCain.

Right. You forgot. So for some reason The Daily Beast has given her bandwidth to remind us, this time in the form of an I Told You So. Yes, that is literally the headline. “I Told You So.” Um, okay, I’ll bite — you told us what?

Suddenly now everyone is worried he is trying to transform America. He had said so all along. His is an effort to make a bigger, more intrusive and more costly government. His hope is, and has always been, to turn the country into a nation that looks more like a European social democracy. He ignores that the roots of our strength have always been small government and a dynamic private sector, fostered by both Democrats and Republicans. His cynical use of centrist language as a tool to get elected does not change the fact of his true objectives for America. It is telling that under Obamas presidency, according to Sundays CNN Poll, 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans see the federal government as a threat to the rights of Americans.

The stuff I emphasized above is the “what planet are you on?” stuff. If Obama’s true objectives are to turn the U.S. into a stable social democracy based on successful European models, I would be the first in line to blow him.

But before I get out my knee pads, I have to say, he’s really going about it all wrong. Cuz first thing out the gate he bails out Lady de Rothschild’s investor cronies with no strings attached, ensuring uncannily enormous profits, until public outrage prompts him to try to get the moolah back; and even so, nothing significant has changed, no significant regulatory regime has been implemented, leaving plenty of opportunity for another Ginormous Financial Meltdown.

And as for health care reform…. Wouldn’t a dedicated social democrat push a lot harder for single payer or a robust public option? Cuz I seem to recall he caved pretty quickly on that issue almost a year ago. Does someone seeking to transform America into a Lefty Paradise sell out his green technology agenda to the “Clean Coal” (sic) and nuclear energy industries? And, hey, how about those wars?

But whatever. Best to stick with a Radical Extremist straw man conjured out of the paranoid stereotypes of Black Power that haunt the white ruling class imagination. Surely the craven little weasel currently animating McCain’s corpse would have been a better bipartisan player had he won the Presidency, reaching across the aisle to throttle the Pelosi-Reid Hydra with all the force of his vindictive, angry, tortured soul.

Here’s the thing: It is really important for certain sectors of the ruling class to believe, or to have the rest of us believe that Obama is not the corporate centrist that he actually is. Because then any move he makes that is both practical AND progressive — that is, that holds the investment and financial class accountable for the horrible mess they’ve made and that might make them more socially responsible (ha, ha, ha) — infringes on their entitled sense of unchecked social and economic power. De Rothschild is not a very effective voice in this chorus, but their overall aim is to intimidate the altogether Wall Street friendly president from spoiling their party. They need to keep painting him as a Loony Leftoid. If only he were such.