"What will I miss professionally about W? I think mostly I will
miss the fall-back nature of his Presidency.
"One of the scariest aspects of being a political cartoonist is
the prospect of wandering bleary-eyed into the office on a Monday
morning and having nothing to sink your teeth into. With
President Bush one could always count on a reliably healthy
trickle of mind-bogglingly outrageous and cartoonworthy
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 51 percent who
didn't vote for him in the 2000 election."
- Matt Davies, political cartoonist of The Journal News (N.Y.).
