About this time, the implosion of the Dot-Com Bubble was really starting to ripple through the economy, causing an uptick in unemployment and a “recession-ette” — nothing like the massive Fail we’re experiencing now, of course, but still quite a jolt at the time.

In the midst of all this was the run-up to Iraq War v2.0 — batshit-crazy Neocons throwing absurd lies and fabrications at the wall in hopes something will stick, craven Democrats fighting each other to be first in line to support Bush’s lunacy, and an increase in aggressive military recruiting tactics — i.e. stalking high-school kids coming out of class or at the shopping mall, threatening kids with imprisonment in Guantanamo when they attempted to back out of enlistment.

In this piece, I’m sort of wondering aloud about whether or not the Neocon Mob were actually banking on the increase in unemployment to supply them with the volunteer cannon fodder they needed to properly stomp on Iraq and steal its resources and destroy its culture. Need a job, kid? No prob, dude; the Army is still hiring!

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This was my first — and so far, only — “made for TV” poster, a “throwaway” idea that’d been rattling around in my head for a while, which I drew for the benefit of a crew from Swedish Public Television (STV) who’d come to town to interview me in my studio and to show my posse and I out for an evening’s wheatpasting in the wake of my big bust-out in the Washington Post.

This particular piece was done during the run-up to Iraq War v2.0, in which President Chimp was pushing the doctrine of “pre-emptive war”, which was basically the foreign-policy version of those scenes in old Three Stooges comedies where Moe bashes Larry upside the head from clear out of nowhere; Larry asks “hey, what’d you do that for?”, and Moe says “that’s for what you were thinking!”

I’ve chosen not to post the video of the actual STV segment here, as due to my nervousness about public speaking, my studio interview segment shows me saying “like” and “you know” in every other sentence, totally going against everything I was taught by my tenth-grade English teacher and my college Oral Interpretation teacher with regard to proper public diction and the avoidance of “vocal tics” (which is what “like” and “you know” are) in public speaking. STV actually portrayed me and my work in a very positive light as part of “the other America” in the Bush Era, but I was still terribly embarassed at what a bashful public speaker I am… like, you know…right?

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Heading into the home stretch of Clintontime, all the media gush about the Clinton Legacy conveniently left out the assaults on the Constitution, military adventurism in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Act, not to mention a little perjury. Oh, wait, yeah, that’s right, we had that big ol’ Impeachment trial coming up; and if your name happened to be Bill Clinton, then there was only one thing to do: War Scare Time again, boys and girls! This time, as I recall, it was Serbia and its head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, who were Enemy Of The Month owing to accusations of “mass murder” or somesuch against Milosevic, in which it was eventually discovered that the “mass” part came to about the total annual murder rate for DC in a good year. So, President Elvis’ Secretary of Snake…uh, Snake, the venerable old Reaganoid Madeleine Albright, was engaged in a round of diplomacy with Mr. Milosevic right about this time — if, by “diplomacy”, you mean “sign this absurdly one-sided, crippling list of our demands*, or else we’ll crater your asses flat”. Nothing, if not Mafia Diplomacy…only difference was, the actual Mafia would’ve let him slide with broken fingers.

Meanwhile, with the “Impeachment Tide Surging” — as USA Today put it — it was time once again for President Bubba to get all Presidential, meaning, of course, to fan up another war scare someplace against a country with no air force and damn near nothing to shoot back with and then fly the most technically sophisticated, most expensive and deadliest air force on the planet over them and stomp the fertilizer out of them for about a month and a half while going on TV with some grim-assed speech about how you had to do it. Also, if you’ve really got your ducks together, you find some fresh-faced young flack from Human Rights Watch to go on the Today Show the week the bombing starts and deliver the most spectacularly convoluted, steaming, quivering mass of triagulation ever seen in any mass media to date in an attempt to show that it really is OK that Clinton’s air force is bombing civilians because they’re defending human rights against Milosevic.

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November of ‘98, heading towards the end of The Good Old Clintontime, saw the by-now usual Sunday morning spew about the Clinton Legacy. Predictably, this took the form of gushing about “welfare reform” and his Crime Bill, but not a whole lot about the things that were really on peoples’ minds — like the Chinese takeover of American manufacturing, and stagnating wages. What we did hear a lot about, as well, was how well he dealt with the Iraqis, and his decisive action in his missile attacks on The Sudan and Afghanistan — which turned out to have targeted civilians (as usual) and were timed so soon after his video testimony in the Lewinsky Scandal that it could’ve been the premise for a movie (what? wait a minute…)…

…which brings us to the real Clinton Legacy, the legacy of one of most right-wing and violent Administrations ever to be winked at and given a free pass by desperate, fawning, attention-whoring American Liberalism. Let’s see… there was extra-Constitutional military violence against Iraq (twice), the Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia; threatening and dick-wiggling at North Korea, Bosnia, and Iran — not to mention the military assault on the Branch Davidian outfit, with young children and elderly inside, right here in the good old USA. All this — on top of assaults on the Constitution at every possible opportunity, most notably in the form of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which sought sweeping censorship powers over the then-emerging Internet and which was deservedly smacked down by the Supreme Court — gave President Elvis Clinton a legacy that any modern head of state could envy, if his name happened to be Deng Xiaoping.

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