In most American states any person 16 or older can apply for a driver's license. If teenagers can't afford their own car (many can, since they earn money from part-time jobs after school), then they ask to use a family car. In today's cartoon Pat Oliphant shows us the young George W. Bush returning a bunch of keys to his father, who is seated in an armchair. At first an American reader would assume that the keys are to a car -- but in this case the keys are to the nation.

　　In his youth George W. Bush had a reputation for carousing; he was not the most responsible of young men. And what does Oliphant portray young George as having done to the car, or rather, nation entrusted to his care? He has "totaled it", as Americans say: He's had an accident in which the car/nation has been totally de-stroyed, or at least damaged so badly that repair is totally out of the question. For starters, George W. has ruined social security, health care and Medicare, the federal program that pays a large part of older Americans' medical costs -- all of which he refers to as so much①"liberal trash". (Remember that in American politics "liberal" means moderately left-wing or semi-socialist; elsewhere in the world it has quite a different connotation.) Republicans haven't achieved this yet, but Oliphant thinks they aim to. In the course of young George's rampage the environment and education also suffer, yet no one seriously objects. Oliphant suggests that ordinary citizens are asleep, their minds dulled by patriotic post-9/11 rhetoric. And the Democratic Party? Inert.

　　Do Republicans approve of the younger Bush's presidency to date? Ask his mother, Barbara Bush, who appears in the lower right corner. "That's our boy!" she says, using a phrase often em-ployed to express pride in the achievements of a son -- of the Bush family or, here, of the Republi-can Party.