I originally wrote this gag for President Bush. In a way, that’s all that really needs to be said about Obama’s approach to the “War on Terror”–his policies have become so similar to those of the Bush Administration that they’re practically interchangeable.

I remembered the joke while trying to develop something on the Anwar Al-Awlaki assassination about two weeks ago, which was the first official targeted killing of a US citizen on charges of aiding and inciting terrorism. Additional air strikes since then have resulted in the death of Al-Awlaki’s son, so I read today.

The idea of targeted assassinations like these makes me uncomfortable. Even if the target’s a really bad person who may deserve it, I feel it’s dangerous to grant the President the same power to chase down individuals that we grant him to wage war for national defense. I also feel that assassinating terrorists before attempting to capture, try, and convict them like the crooks they are is a self-defeating strategy that only serves to inflame new, even harder to defeat terrorists, as these cartoons argued. It’s a bit like fighting bacterial infections–do so too aggressively, and even though it may kill off all the weaker bacteria, you’ll end up with stronger ones that are resistant to antibiotics.

I nearly finished this a few days after the Chris Christie cartoon, but I wasn’t happy with the results at the time, and so chose to spend more time working on it. Unfortunately, this overlapped with a trip I took to Portland, Oregon that ended up lasting much longer than I expected it to. I was staying with my sister, and even though she has a scanner, it’s of such a poor quality that it was useless to me except to sketch out colors before I could rescan the lineart with my own.

Speaking of Portland, I should probably point out part of why I was visiting, for any readers who happen to live there: I was looking for work, because I find the local arts community vibrant, and would like to move there. If anyone reading this can point me in the direction of some good job openings in the area for someone with my talents, or hook me up with some interviews, please let me know. Or, if you can’t help with that, you could put money towards helping me move, instead…