President of Cartoonists Group Hails 'Wash Post' for Backing Toles

By: Dave Astor Clay Bennett said the Joint Chiefs of Staff have more important things to do than write a letter criticizing a Tom Toles drawing.

"They should be as concerned with the soldiers in the field as they are with a cartoon in The Washington Post," said Bennett, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), when reached Thursday by E&P. "Maybe they should provide the body armor soldiers need to help avoid the sort of injury shown in the cartoon."

This Sunday's Toles cartoon pictured a quadruple amputee being visited in a hospital by "Dr. Rumsfeld," who says: "I'm listing your condition as 'battle hardened.'" The Joint Chiefs letter, published in Thursday's Post, said Toles was making fun of the soldier, and called his cartoon "reprehensible." Others noted that Toles was actually commenting on Rumsfeld, the state of the Army, and the carnage caused by the Iraq War. The Post has defended running the cartoon.

"It appears they [the Joint Chiefs] interpret cartoons as accurately as they do pre-war intelligence," Bennett said. The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Christian Science Monitor added: "It was a tough cartoon on [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, but he certainly deserves tough cartoons."

People, said Bennett, can be "purposely obtuse to pick a fight. You can always take a cartoon at face value -- rather than looking at it as a metaphor -- and make it something it's not."

Bennett concluded by praising the Post for backing Toles: "It's great to see a newspaper supporting their cartoonist under this kind of pressure. A lot of papers would have buckled under far less pressure."

Toles' cartoons are distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, while Bennett's work is syndicated by The Christian Science Monitor News Service.