"The Year of Passion."

Here's a link to the article on the front page of the NYT Week in Review section, but you won't be able to see the whole illustration unless you get the paper version. You can, however, get a sense of the style of the illustrator, Ward Sutton. The paper NYT bursts with cartoon characters of various sorts, including a blogger, but the NYT perversely deprives us bloggers of the opportunity to link to the picture of the blogger, giving us only the vying veterans, the Texan "W" lady, and the black "Anybody But Bush" guy. Oh well. I'll describe the blogger guy. First, of course, it's a guy. Just to make sure you can tell he's a blogger, on the screen of his laptop are the words "MY BLOG." He's sitting at a little table, and on the table, along with his laptop, are a mug of black coffee and two stacks of magazines. He's wearing a T-shirt and jeans and little rectangular glasses. And he's got a goatee. So I guess he's an anti-Bush blogger. Maybe not. Could be some young libertarian guy.

The article itself? The author, Todd S. Purdum, reminds us that in past years, we complained about too much apathy. I'm a little apathetic about his article though. It's nowhere near as good as Sutton's illustration. He mostly says there's been passion in our politics this time around and that passion has its good and bad points. But I couldn't find a paragraph pithy enough to quote. He gives some respect to the internet:

If the Internet has been the source of vicious blogs and half-baked rumors, it has also often been a worthy watchdog on the mainstream media, a direct route to the candidates' records and official Web sites and a means of instantly checking their half-truths and evasions through nonpartisan outlets like FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center.

But no respect for blogs in that! Blogs are, in the conventional wisdom of MSM, "vicious."

UPDATE: I'd also like to link to Lloyd Dangle's cool cartoon on "Page Two" of The Week in Review, but can't find it on line. It's called "Lawyers, Florida Welcomes You" and has six drawings of 1950s style non-chain motels, with names like Sharks Nest Motel and Supreme Motor Court.