Doonesbury nails Bush's torture past

Is satire dead? Maybe. But how else to better compare Bush's current attitudes on the subject of torture to, as Sunday's Doonesbury strip put it, "a long-forgotten incident on (the) Ivy League campus" of Yale -- alma mater of W and Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau (as well as, of course, John Kerry). This Editor and Publisher piece interviewed Trudeau and checked the Paper Of Record (the NYT) on the 1967 incident in which members of Bush's fraternity were branded -- with a red-hot coat hanger -- with the Greek letter delta.

 
Aside from the frisson of pleasure one experiences from seeing Bush's words come back to haunt him (if indeed he is "haunted" by what appears in Doonesbury, which I doubt) the questions I have to ask myself are, why am I laughing at jokes about torture? Is it that the actions of our own country to trivialize torture have made it something appropriate for even the Sunday funnies? How ironic is that?

Also: Today's Yale Daily News reports on the cartoon and recalls its story on the 1967 incident