我顾不上拉登啦！

　　Three years ago this month Usama bin Laden masterminded the assault on the World Trade Towers in New York. In the days following, US President George W. Bush swore that he would bring down Usama and his Al-Qaida terrorist organization come hell or high water①. Though Bin Laden was later injured in the successful US-led invasion of Afghanistan to drive the Taliban from the country, today he remains at large.

　　Americans are oddly untroubled by Bush's failure. True, their attention was diverted to the effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq and to the endless bloody turmoil that has roiled the land since the American occupation. But with the handover of civil authority to a provisional Iraqi government in July, even the events in Iraq have tended to fade from the headlines -- despite a steady trickle of deaths among American soldiers, not to mention the large numbers of Iraqis killed in military confrontations or blown to bits by suicide bombers. Usama bin Laden is loose and Iraq is a mess, but many Americans appear to have put these matters out of their mind.

　　What irks Democrats like cartoonist David Horsey is that many such people are prepared to vote for "W", the man Dems see as responsible for these woes.

　　Today's cartoon mocks the American leader. His big cowboy hat and fringed leather jacket are the sort of gear worn by characters in Hollywood westerns. His speech, with its Texas accent and western turns of phrase, is also straight out of films and TV shows of cowboys, Indians, rustlers, outlaws, shootouts, posses, cattle drives, wagon trains and cavalry rescuing settlers under attack. The cartoon evokes the black-and-white moral world of typical westerns, something out of the nineteenth-century popular fiction that was translated to the screen in the twentieth by Hollywood directors.

　　The cartoon shows W pinned down by fire from Iraqi insurgents. Usama bin Laden is so far from his mind that the villain himself can appear and go unrecognized by the lawman supposedly out to "git" him. Yet Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat to Americans, while Bin Laden struck America hard and clearly has plans for future mayhem, quite possibly within US borders.

　　Will W's government catch him before he strikes again? David Horsey isn't betting on it.(听英文53588,文章注释535881)

　　①布什：……所以，在他们袭击了美国后，我别无选择，只能过来抓他们！

　　②拉登：伊拉克人袭击你们啦？

　　③布什：那倒不是，是另外一些家伙。但是，既然已来到此地，我就不会手软！

　　④拉登：那拉登呢？

　　⑤布什：谁？

　　⑥拉登：拉登，那个又高又瘦总穿白衫的人。

　　⑦布什：哦，他！见鬼，伊拉克人把我困在这儿了！我没法儿去追拉登了！

　　⑧拉登：听你这么说真是太好啦。

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