I’ll never forget the first time I heard George W. Bush, in the ’00 Presidential Campaign “debates”, describe a vision of a national education policy in which “no child is left behind”. At the time, I didn’t think much of it beyond noting the Bush campaign’s total lack of original ideas in their theft of a slogan from an educational nonprofit’s PSA that appeared on TV in the 1970s — and a Liberal educational nonprofit, at that.

Of course, by the time Iraq War 2.0 kicked off, we’d heard plenty about Bush’s vision for No Child Left Behind, and large numbers of parents could be heard commenting to the effect that if this is what President Chimp has in mind, then they’d prefer that their children be “left behind”. Needless to say, the sickening carnage of the US bombing of Iraq in the first six weeks of the war had given us a whole new meaning for the slogan “No Child Left Behind”.

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A friend of mine noted that it’d been quite some years since I did one of my good old-fashioned blood-spattered antiwar cartoons, so I came roaring back with “Super Service”, and the even more brutal piece here. As I recall, it was about this time that Lisa Beamer, wife of a 9/11 victim, went on a whirlwind promotional victimhood-pimping tour including a stop on the NBC Today Show plugging her book, and — what really sent me over the top, inspiring this cartoon — her attempt to register a trade/service mark on the phrase “Let’s Roll”. Sweet friggin’ Jayzus, I thought, does this goddamn’ woman have any shame at all?

While pretty much everyone I knew in the antiwar activist community was totally down with the message, many found the imagery disturbing (much to my delight). Washington DC media activist Zoe Mitchell wrote:

…the argument he chose to present his argument with disturbs me. It’s violent. It’s bloody. It makes me sick. Unfortunately, it’s dead-on accurate. US soldiers driving SUVs have shot and killed Iraqi civilians. Contrary to the US Media’s imagery, Persian Gulf War 2.0 is violent and bloody. It should make us ALL sick.

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Revisiting the meme that never fails: Blood For Oil. By this time, more and more people in actual positions of influence were “outing” the real reason for the wars in Iraq: to brutalize and intimidate the population while making off with their oil. US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, in a rare ballsy moment, actually came right out and publicly blurted out the truth that sent the pro-war factions into conniptions: this was a war for oil and resources, and had nothing to do with the (non-existent) WMDs or with restoring democracy (the claimed purpose after the WMD claims were debunked). By this time, I’d developed a pretty much foolproof system for determining whether something was true or not: if it was in the Washington Post or on TV, it was a sure bet that it was false, and if somebody said something that sent the mainstream punditocracy and pro-war howlers into a shrieking tizzy, you could be sure that it was true.

My research for this piece consisted of hitting Google for some scans of old gasoline advertising from back in the days when gas-station attendants wore actual uniforms with hats and bowties, and — now I can confess to it — nabbing the title from a favorite old Three Stooges comedy in which the Stooges were running a gas station (“Super Service! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk…”).

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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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