MISSING PRESIDENT BUSH

Rex Babin at the Sacramento Bee said this about a future without Bush to bash: In the weeks since the November election, I have received many, mostly well-intentioned comments that go something like this: "Aren't you going to miss George W. Bush?" The premise being that despite the fact the Bush administration has wreaked havoc with its policies both at home and abroad, at least it provided good editorial cartoon cannon fodder. "Do you hate President Bush?" readers would also frequently ask. The answer, of course, is no. I do disagree, however, with just about every decision ever made by this president. And while his administration has long since become a caricature of itself, which makes drawing editorial cartoons about the Bush gang the equivalent of harvesting low-hanging fruit, my cartoons have always been in response to their policies and their positions on the issues facing the country. In other words, it's nothing personal. Cartoons, after all, are more meaningful when they delve into the heart of issues rather than dwelling on personalities. Rest assured, I will not suffer for lack of characters and personalities. Heck, we've got a bodybuilder-actor as governor and a basketball player as mayor, don't we? And, believe me, I will have my differences with the incoming presidential administration. So here's to a memorable 2008 and to an entertaining and meaningful year to come.

What Will You Miss About Bush? Michael Cavna, who describes himself as a “recovering cartoonist”at his Washington Post blog, ComicRiffs, asked several top editorial cartoonists this question the week before GeeDubya would be leaving office — adding, immediately, that he wanted them to respond not as a U.S. resident or as a voter but “strictly as a cartoonist.” Here are some of the answers:

            Matt Wuerker (at Politico.com): I'm going to miss having a president like Bush who writes all his own political cartoons.

            Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug): Even as a cartoonist, I'll miss absolutely nothing about Bush. After you've mocked his bad policies, you can mock his sticking with bad policies despite bad results, and then you can mock the enormity of the bad results, and finally you can mock your own inability to keep up the mockery despite the consistently enormous bad results. But
then you've got seven more years of his administration, and it can get repetitive.

            Ann Telnaes (cartoonistgroup.com and WashingtonPost.com): His Vice President.

            Matt Davies (The Journal News, NY): ... with President Bush one could always count on a reliably healthy trickle of mind-bogglingly outrageous and cartoon-worthy behaviors: The a la carte approach to the U.S. Constitution, ideological distortions passed off as sensible policy, the dismissal of science in favor of religio-political theory, environmentally destructive directives with deliberately cynical and misleading titles, wars of our choosing, tax cuts for only very, very, very rich people who gave money to the GOP, blatant politicization of horrific national tragedies, Gitmo, the careful loosening of financial regulatory standards, the attempt to dismantle our social safety net, the propensity to link pretty much everything in the pre-existing neo-con playbook to "the war on terror," the childish need to label those with alternate points of view as unpatriotic, the swaggering certainty of having God "on his side," and a total disregard for the 51percent who didn't vote for him in the 2000 election. Oh, and I'll miss his boyish smirk. I will forever be grateful to the man, as, to be fair, I owe my Pulitzer to all of the above.

            Signe Wilkinson (Philadelphia Daily News): Is he still president?