An Anniversary Nobody Really Cheered About

Please Note: the Anniversary Cake is Yellow

When the airplanes struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, somewhere amid the horror of what I was seeing rose an additional realization, “Oh, my God, we’ve just had our Reichstag Fire.” I could see with horrifying clarity that this would be the defining moment that turned the United States from its democratic principles to something totally antithetical to the dreams of our nation’s Fathers. We have resisted the impulse of creating concentration camps for Moslems–we incarcerated many, but mostly exiled them for visa transgressions. We have created gulags where we gathered a mostly hapless group of alleged terrorists whose major crime seems to have been being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the wrong person wanted to collect a reward. We HAVE built massive PRISONS, but these are privately run camps to provide slave labor and corporate profit and anyone can enter. We passed the grossly obscene “Patriot” act through which almost any crime can be considered to be an act of terrorism–when the need arises.

Our incursion into Afghanistan almost looked legitimate. We claimed the head of, what was his name, Osama bin Laden? Yes, he was there, later on he claimed credit for “9/11”, which our government was already doing within minutes of the tower falls–since it had pointedly ignored the warnings from the intelligence community of terrorist actions inside the US. He was there, but the Taliban government had the nerve to ask for evidence before they would consider handing him over. So like a western posse, we went in and cleaned up the corruption in Rock Ridge and hunted down bin Laden until we were just yards from his hiding place in the mountains when…

Wait, what? The real danger is from Iraq? The country which had been under UN sanctions for a decade? Whose dictator, Saddam Hussein, couldn’t even afford to buy shoes for his army? HE had weapons of mass destruction? Yes, we had the ominous YELLOW CAKE requests–which turned out to be forgeries. We had George Bush and Tony Blair smirking their way into war. We had Dick Cheney and Condi Rice promising us mushroom clouds of doom if nothing was done immediately. We had a mountain of evidence that Colin Powell presented at the UN. I remember listening to him and being absolutely convinced by the man’s sense of sincerity… until the next morning, when I realized that all that evidence had no context. That if you believed it was something bad it was, but those conversations about hiding things could have just as easily been hiding the porn when the inspectors arrived.

And so we went off and destroyed a country within weeks. Killed several thousand Americans and maimed 10s of thousands. Killed 100s of thousands Iraqis and destroyed the infrastructure of the country. Wasted around two trillion dollars (when asked about the loss of a trillion dollars from the Pentagon budgets, Donald Rumsfeld remarked, “I’ll have to look into that,” and didn’t) which the Tea Party is now trying to collect from the poorest among us. For which sinful errors of judgment or outright acts of war-mongering for profit no one has been held accountable.

Many of us felt powerless to do anything to stop it. Only after the deed was done did I decide that I could do a political cartoon series against these criminals. I was scared too–protesting the war COULD have been considered an act of terrorism according to the Patriot Act.

HAPPY F$%^&*G ANNIVERSARY.

ANNOY YOUR FRIENDS! CONFOUND YOUR ENEMIES! PRESS ONE OF THESE BUTTONS--OR ELSE!

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FOX NEWS Reports: Obama Bin Laden Dead–oops, we mean OSAMA

Donald Trump's hair takes credit for the successful Navy SEAL attack on bin Laden...

Well, well, well, ding dong the witch is dead–we finally seem to have gotten Osama bin Laden. I am loathe to actually draw bin Laden. The last time I did it, I received an email from a gentleman of rather poor English skills suggesting that the rest of the accursed Western cartoonists and I should stop making fun of Mohammed (blessings and peace be on his name) if we wished to remain healthy. Only not quite as nicely. While my cartoon was definitely NOT mocking Mohammed, I guess if you don’t write English that well, you don’t read it much better and any protestations on my part that he may have misinterpreted my work would probably not have mattered that much anyway. Sorry, I can’t afford a 24-hour guard on my house. So no drawings of bin Laden.

Besides, how could I adequately satirize a man who single-handedly (well, OK, with a handful of followers) perpetrated an act which set the American people on a crazy ass course where they willingly gave up freedoms that the terrorists were jealous of, started two wars that had nothing to do with revenge for the events that inspired them, but which cost hundreds of billions of dollars per year for nearly 10 years, materially aiding greatly to the destruction of the American treasury? Osama never dreamed that his airplane hijackings would actually manage to bring down the Twin Towers–similarly he probably never dreamed that one act of terrorism could cause the American dream to self-implode. President Obama is to be lauded for finally terminating the proximate cause of our national misery. But the national misery continues since we are still dealing with those two wars, which will not be ended if our military has its way. Nor will the Treasury be repaired, since far more damage was done by continuing idiot tax cuts as we doubled our expenditures and since the economy of THE ENTIRE WORLD was broken by the greed of our bankers–who have been punished by smaller bonuses for that year. So the burden has been placed on the people responsible for … not protesting the idiot actions that others perpetrated and soon we will be destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and the rest of the social safety net to pay for the tribute we owe the ruling class. Land of the free market and home of the gravy.

One Fox News affiliate managed to mangle the news: But while this was defended as an unavoidable typo (unavoidable by IDIOTS that is), the standard Republican boilerplate response has been to universally applaud President BUSH for his great efforts in avoiding finding bin Laden for seven years as the reason for Obama’s successful effort a mere two years and a few months into his presidency. Thanks to the troops and oh, yeah, you too, President Obama.

At least we were able to watch ALL of Celebrity Apprentice before the news. Otherwise, after the reception he’d gotten at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, we’d have to face the wrath of the Donald’s hair turning rabid…

ANNOY YOUR FRIENDS! CONFOUND YOUR ENEMIES! PRESS ONE OF THESE BUTTONS--OR ELSE!

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