Throw Out the Vote

Bizarro is brought to you today by Political Justice.

This classic Bizarro appeared in papers days before the last presidential election in '04, and it is my favorite political cartoon I've ever done. At that time, Rove was in full swing as liar-in-chief for W's reelection campaign.

When this first ran, I received a few emails from angry readers who were still on the Bush bandwagon. Amazingly, one of them whose email was particularly vitriolic, wrote back the next year when a lot of info about Rove and Scooter Libby were in the news, and apologized for his original email. He had seen the light.

Rove is one of my least favorite humans in the world. Though dirty tricks have never been unusual in politics, he has taken them to new levels, finding ways to blatantly lie to the American public in ways that play to people's most base qualities of bigotry and fear, thus getting them to vote against their own interests to avoid an imagined threat. McCain was a victim of this kind of campaigning when he lost the nomination to Bush, but now uses the same tactics against Obama with robo-calls that attempt to convince voters that he is everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Manchurian Candidate. The examples linked above are not necessarily Rove's creations, of course, but he has inspired this environment of ends-justifies-the-means sort of campaigning.

Yes, as some of you are saying right now, the Democrats have done their share of lying. But the facts will verify that nothing along the order of Rove's tactics are as ubiquitous among Democratic campaigns as they have become in Republican ones.

It seems now that most of America is rebelling against this kind of abuse of power, as McCain continues to plummet in the polls and shows on the Fox News Channel's ratings are experiencing a distinct downward slide. Let's all pray it sticks, before the Neo-Cons take our country into the Third World for good.

Unless it is already too late.

On another note, when this cartoon first came out, something in my schedule prohibited me from being able to color it myself. There is a default system in place when this happens and the syndication company has a unit that colors cartoons for artists. Some artists use this service routinely, instead of coloring their work themselves. You can see from this example how the colors in this version look much more like the average daily comics.