[Newsbot]

<strong>Filibuster Cartoon</strong>
<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="http://www.filibustercartoons.com/archive.php?id=20061127" target="_blank">Bush\'s Heroes </a> (click to view)
<strong>Date: </strong> November 27, 2006

Increasingly, it appears that George W. Bush is turning control of his Iraq strategy away from the hawkish neoconservatives of his first term, and towards realist, moderate conservatives from his father\'s administration. While the neo-cons had great hopes for Iraq becoming the democratic keystone of a dramatic new world order of world peace, the realists tended to be against the war in the first place, and are now most concerned with how to obtain a quick and easy \"peace with honor,\" a la Vietnam. <br> <br>More and more characters continue to pop out of the woodwork. Bob Woodward famously reported that Henry Kissinger is now a top advisor to Vice President Cheney, James Baker is now heading a bipartisan Iraq \"strategy\" forum, and 1980\'s-era CIA director Robert Gates has been appointed as Bush\'s new defense secretary. <br> <br>All this has neo-cons like Christopher Hitchens worried. This cartoon was heavily inspired by a piece he recently wrote entitled \"look who\'s cutting and running now,\" <br>

[Kjorteo]

Without getting into the political debate--just yet, anyway; will wait to see what others say first--I love the style on this comic. How did you do the comic/newspaper dots, anyway? Is there a PhotoShop filter for that? Also, are those Piranha Plants? Now that's just classy.

[gattsuru]

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer?

I'm sorry, but the whole thing seems a little too... pat. Politicos are known for flip-flopping, true, but Bush is an idiot; I don't see him changing his tune so much in less than a month. Seems more like political insulation than anything else. Other than the ISG folk, of course - those idiots were appointed yahoos whose primary purpose was to come up with the ideas everyone already knew about (retreat or stability, for those who missed the memo).

Honestly, I'm starting to have no idea what to think about Iraq. Four days ago, I was told that four Mosques had been destroyed in a fit of arson as 'revenge'. Today, I've found that only one was even near a fire, and that one suffered minor damage to the entry way. Report after report being shown to be pretty notably false.

Generally speaking, people only lie if the truth doesn't work for them. This many big lies make you wonder exactly how far it takes to get to reality. I'm not claiming it's a land of sunshine and daisies, obviously, but it certainly makes the claims of a certain and inescapable quagmire a bit harder to swallow.

Nice art style, of course. Did you use a customized fill pattern, a filter, or something more specific? I'm assuming the first, but I only use GIMP not the more popular PhotoShop, so my experience isn't particularly useful.

[dubyah]

About my last line there - so what?



W.

[JJ]

Ah, well I am glad the dots are a hit, because they were an enormous hassle to do. The Photoshop has a filter called "half tone" under the Pixelate heading, but it doesn't do the dot effect automatically... I had to meddle around with it and come up with my own process for creating single-color dots.

This cartoon took like five hours to do, in all. But some of that was due to my crappy, very slow computer.

[Scape]

*applause*

I really like the toons myself.

[Kjorteo]

Okay, thought of something political to say.

It dawns on me that this whole Plan B strategy could be some sort of elaborate Republican trap. The 2006 elections were a disaster for the Republicans, because there was a strong anti-Iraq sentiment, and the Democratic candidates campaigned on a "time for a new direction in Iraq" platform.

So now that they're mostly in charge, the Republicans could just be calling their bluff. First, we have two years of "Okay, smart guy, you get us out of Iraq." Since Iraq is an unwinnable disaster in and of itself, I somehow don't expect any miracles within that time. However, when that's over, the Republicans can get on them for the "no vision/ideas" thing, and thus essentially make themselves immune to the "Iraq is a mess; let's vote against the incumbent" aura that cost them so much this year. This is especially true if the Democrats can't find someone who's both exciting and qualified for '08 President, and soon. (Kerry is a little dull and gaffe-prone, Edwards has barely any qualifications except being Southern, Hillary is controversial and a lot of people hate her guts, and Barack Obama has no qualifications except serving almost one Senate term and being kind of good at speeches.) If the Democrats can't pull an Iraq miracle in the next two years, and they can't find a better star, then this whole revolution might not be lasting as long as they were probably hoping it would.

(Personally, I like Wesley Clark, but no one else seems to, which is kind of sad. Bill Richardson would have my support over any of the other guys I mentioned, as well.)

[dubyah]

Quote:

Personally, I like Wesley Clark

I am accused often of being particularly stupid. I am not; I am merely a poor public speaker. The REAL buffoon is Wesley Clark, who's superior once remarked that he did not understand how the man made it beyond the rank of lieutenant. This is the bastard that was endorsed by Michael Moore.

God, I HOPE like HELL that he's the dem's candidate in '08. He is absolutely unelectable.



W.

[gattsuru]

Clark's biggest drawback is that his wartime experience doesn't really help him. The Kosovo War, which would come up first if wartime management does, shows him to be at best a rubberstamp and at worse a bigger tool than Reno regarding Waco or Rummy regarding Iraq.

No, I'm not kidding. The reasoning for war was never proven - the alleged mass graves were never really looked into nevermind found - and NATO pilots complained that their orders put civilians on the ground at an unnecessary risk.

As to the rest of the Democrats... they've spend the last three or four years claiming that they've had a plan. They've complained that the lack of a plan has kept us in Iraq, lead to deaths, and somehow distorted known facts (the poor make up a disproportionate amount of our army!) or even basic laws of physics (lambda isn't a constant is Stefan-Boltzmann's law?) or math.

If the Democrats can pull a solution out of their backside that instantly turns Iraq into a utopia complete with sunshine, rainbows, and sparkles, the Republicans will be back in charge of this issue by 2008. Unless the Dems actually show a plan, they're sure to lose the next election. Given that the closest so far is Pelosi shooting down Rangel's draft, I'm not even sure they can do that.

[Kjorteo]

Well, the problem with that logic is that Iraq just isn't going to be turned into a utopia. It's just not. The situation has spiraled way too far out of control. For the Democrats to take over now is kind of like hiring them to fix a TV right after you drop it off the top of a building. I think the reason things look so bleak for both sides now is that...well, take these ingredients:

A) No one wants to leave without fixing Iraq first
B) No one wants to stay without Iraq actually being fixed
A) Fixing Iraq is impossible

Can you think of a good way to put them together? The people whose job it is to come up with a plan essentially have to resolve a "Statement B is True/Statement A is False" argument. Of course, Republicans are still in a perfect position to take advantage in 2008 of the Democratic control not fixing anything. I never said finding a solution and taking advantage of a lack of one were remotely the same issue.

[Murray_Smith]

I'm going to be really, really cynical here, just to warn everybody.

I don't think it matters anymore what we do with Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites are still murdering one another, and I don't think they'll stop anytime soon. You know what the difference is between Sunnis and Shiites? It is, for the most part, a difference of loyalty to caliphs whom have been dead for nearly 1500 years. They way I see it, if they're going to be this immature towards one another over something as insignificant as that, then I figure, screw 'em! Let them kill each other! I seriously don't think they deserve our help.

At this point, I suppose my feeling is to just get our soldiers out of Iraq. That house is burning, and it's coming down one way or another. There's no need to let it fall on them.

[Kjorteo]

Isolationism and cynicism so harsh that you couldn't run for neighborhood dog catcher and get elected with that kind of mouth? Now you're totally speaking my language. "Stay the course" and hoping we can win in Iraq does kind of strike me as being about as practical as holding your station and attempting maintenance on the Titanic, yes. Bring them home, maybe spend some resources on security to ward off the extra terrorists this whole thing will inevitably create. "Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" backfired to the point of having the opposite effect, so you may as well not fight to the last man and lose over there and have no units left to fight here.

[JJ]

It really is like Vietnam in many ways, though people don't like that analogy.

Everyone was in agreement that there had to be "peace with honor," but as the years went on people just got tired and bored and frustrated and settled on half-assed honor with no follow-up to maintain the peace. In Iraq, I figure the same is likely to happen.

The big thing will be finding a convenient exit cue... something that can be pointed at and said "okay, good enough, mission accomplished" like maybe their next parliamentary election or some such. It's different (and thus more acceptable) than a time-table, because an event-based withdrawl is automatically less shameful than one attached to some arbitrary date.

[Psudo]

The quote "A measured defeat is still a victory." makes me cringe.

[Rhoffman]

hehehe.... great comic, JJ. The style's awesome.

I have to admit that it's definitely going to be interesting to see how the ongoing troubles in Iraq and divergence in opinion within the GOP is going to affect their power structure and capability to stand as an united front agains the Dems starting in January. This could very well signify a major rift in the Republican Party in foreign policy matters that would help the Democrats substantially.