I so desperately want this to be prophetic. Just how long can one safely dance on the edge of the abyss, anyway?

That's the spirit, Opus. Gotta love that penguin; never afraid to fail in a whole new way.

Now, the delegator-in-chief just needs to wait out the next 18 months. Then he can blame whoever has to clean up his mess for not cleaning it up fast enough.

Is anyone else going nuts over Bush's ability to make political stooges and lap dogs out of previously honorable American Generals? The Armed Services are broken and the Generals are partisan whores. Only in Bush's America...

I am not getting this comic strip. I understand this cartoonist has a rep from a previous incarnation but in the few episodes published so far I am not charmed, amused, incited, excited, nada. Ho hum.

Don't "get it", sorry.

Re: Is this insightful, amusing, droll, what?

Just thought I'd jump in here before others jump on him, without considering the tone of his previous posts. Yep, Breathed's stuff takes some getting used to, and at 66 I came to it from the far side. Give it time to build. It's an acquired taste. And if you don't enjoy it, just skip it.

"Chacun à son goût", said the old lady as she kissed the cow under the tail. Google that.

I think you get it but you don't know what to do with it anymore. I find my associates and I are suffering "rage exhaustion". The comic strip is true/accurate but who can gin up the energy to even chuckle? This is the result of long term conflict. Don't let the bastard wear you down. Continue to resist. Continue calling your rep's to remind them of the same thing.

Is anyone else going nuts over Bush's ability to make political stooges and lap dogs out of previously honorable American Generals? The Armed Services are broken and the Generals are partisan whores. Only in Bush's America...

-- El Duende

They never were honorable in the first place, for the most part. Sure, there's the (very)rare exception, but the truth is that 90% of the officers above the rank of O-3 (lieutenant for the Navy, captain for the other services) are either incompetent, self serving, corrupt, or a combination there-of. Above O-4, it's 99%, and so on.

The higher ranks are chosen by how well they contort their spine and fluff the egos of their superiors, and how willing they are to shaft those below them on a whim. Those with honor and integrity get passed over, and eventually are either forced out or quit to get properly rewarded in the civilian world.

Anyone making Admiral/General these days has long ago sold their soul for bits of sparkling brass and shiny ribbons for their hollow chests.

General Pace is the worst of the lot, a man without honor or integrity. He consciously took a job that required supporting sending thousands of servicemen and woman to their deaths in order to appease the ego and pocketbooks of Bush and his neo-con cronies. I don't demand that he (or any other high ranking officer) denounce the war, or refuse an order. It'd be nice, mind you, but not realistic. All he had to do to show a shred of decency and integrity was to refuse the Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff(as it is rumored others had already done).

But hey, who can refuse a nice Pentagon office {far away from any actual danger), frequent fellatio of your ego (if not other things)from all around you, and a huge paycheck (greatly in excess of $250,000 a year)? Someone with integrity, a conscience and a spine, that's who. Which leaves out most officers in general, and Pace in particular.

This episode takes us back to the first Bush problem, which was a failure to commit the troops necessary to accomplish the mission. Every action since then has been a half hearted effort to bring the troop levels into line. The surge is too little, too late. The bitter irony of the plan to stay in Iraq as long as it takes, is that we aren't committed to victory.

An historian comparing Ancient Rome to Bush's Pax Americanus, said that Iraq would have been crushed by the Roman army. Their empire did not take half measures. Yet we delight in the comparisons, which makes me wonder if the next President won't be a heckuva lot worse than the one we have now..

Berkeley Breathed may be many things, but he is no fool. He knows where his bread comes from. It comes from two sources mainly: Syndication and royalties from his creations. Opus is more than a gold mine, it's a diamond mine, a platinum mine, and a penguin that shits a wad of hundred dollar bills every 10 seconds.

Breathed is only going for the gold now. He's hit the right formula and he's flogging cute little Opus with Made in China plush toys, coffee mugs, key rings and every other kitchy piece of junk that could make him a dime.

Take a look at your Sunday comics pages. Is there really any social-political strip with an edge anymore? Occasionally Doonsbury is still sharp. But more often than not, Doonsbury is toning it down for the same reason Breathed does: King Features and the other syndicates doesn't want any complaints from readers. If you want to be in the Sunday funnies you have to create a strip that stays obtuse, with just a little sprinkling of sarcasm, but not too much. After all, when mommy and daddy and the kids all gather around the coffee table on Sunday mornings to go through the Sunday paper, they don't want anything disturbing or offensive. After all, think of the children!

Would you really be surprised to learn that there is still a large majority of Red State, church-going Americans who get pissed off enough at the Sunday comics to complain and threaten to cancel their subscriptions, even over a strip like this week's Opus offering?

This demographic of the pious is exactly the largest readership of the Sunday funnies and King Features and the comic strip cartoonists know it. They know that even the most oblique reference to anything political or religious is going to raise a lot of unwanted complaints.

Why rock the boat? There's big money to be made here. Huge money! Play it safe. Be cute. Draw in pastels. Use a lot of bland metaphors and don't get too clever or your average American mush-head won't get it. It used to be said in J-school that a reporter should aim his story no higher than the average Kansas City milk man. That was then, when educational standards in America were higher than now. These days, you can't dumb down too far. You can't go wrong by aiming at your average Fox 'news' and Bill O'Reilly fan. If you offend any of them, man, they'll scream like stuck pigs, and that's bad for the comics business.

But let's look at today's strip. Isn't just so daring! Breathed takes a shot at Bush's War. Ooooh! How dare he?

But let's not be too sharp in our criticism of the President because we don't want too many reader complaints. Let's just keep it nice and pastel and use gentle, soft soap humor to poke a little funny fun at the man whose sociopathic mind is the reason why 3,600 American soldiers are dead, and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians too.

We wouldn't want to rebuke him too harshly now would we? After all, there are still about 26 percent of American assholes who think Bush is Jesus incarnate. They read comics. They write letters. They cancel subscriptions.

And Berkeley Breathed is out to make money by syndicating a strip to them every Sunday and by selling them little Opus toothbrushes and plush toys (Made in Communist China).

(Note to my critics: Don't, please don't, come back at me with "if you don't like it, don't read it." I pay $45 a year to be a Salon premium member and the money Salon spends on Opus could be put to better use elsewhere. If I want to read Breathed's namby-pamby, toothless mush, I can get it delivered to my door, tucked in between the real estate and used car ads in the six-pound advertising supplement that used to be known as the Sunday newspaper. Thank you.)