Cartoonists With Attitude

…but I know you didn’t. Still, it’s helpful that Frank Rich put together in three paragraphs a litany of the intelligence and national security madness pursued by the previous White House:

Obama may well make or is already making his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddams imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.

The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheneys former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.

Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.

One thing Rich omits: For all the sourcing he does of recent New York Times articles, he neglects to mention the critical role played by Judith Miller’s “reportage” of Cheney-sourced disinformation of Iraqi WMD propaganda that largely justified the invasion in the public imagination. Perhaps that’s too much to expect of the Fourth Estate.

Click to see the whole thing.
This week I chose Lady Gaga. I explain why at the post.

Also, I updated the caricature gallery at In Contempt to include recent sketches, not all of them posted before.

Click thing to read bigger, grunt!

A new page of Wanderlost. Full of sharks. We all need more sharks in our lives.

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.