Bush is a Midget

George W. Bush isn't really that short. He's 5'11", which makes him a woman in my family, but then I come from a family where the shortest adult member just needs to put on a normal pair of shoes to reach 6' regardless of gender. For most people 5'11" isn't too shabby. In fact, he's more or less an inch above the national average. However, I've spent a lot of time clicking through Slate.com's editorial cartoon archive (they collect cartoons from a variety of papers and magazines from all over the world) and noticed an interesting trend in the portrayal of Bush: He's portrayed as extremely short with surprising frequency. I didn't want to dig through all 900 Bush-related comics, so I just skimmed through the first 100 where I found more than 30 comics that portrayed Bush as abnormally tiny compared to other characters in the piece or proportioned as to suggest smallness. If you were to remove the strips out of that 100 that mentioned Bush but included no physical portrayal, the percentage was probably over 50 percent of short Bush versus normal Bush. I think it'd be an interesting communications study to compare the portrayal of Bush's height in editorial cartoons compared to that of other presidents throughout history. Perhaps that's something Courtney should look into.

Out of those 30+ mini-Bush comics, I've weeded out repeats of the same artist and ended up with a list of 13 examples of this trend. BTW, the illustration above also came from Slate.com and just happened to illustrate this topic perfectly.

1. Here, Bush barely makes it up to Pervez Musharraf's and Vladamir Putin's nipples.This also features another common caricature feature of Bush: overly large and pointy ears.
   
2. Another very tiny, rabbit-like representation.
3. Now we find Bush portrayed as a child playing at politics. Representing him as a child is common, but not the only time he's portrayed as vertically challenged.
4. Just a shorty here.
5. He looks a little elfin here.
6. Here, he's towered over by Laura. It may be an attempt at perspective (not something comic art is known for), but the effect is the same.
7. Ah, look! Li'l Bushy is asking Santy Claus for more money for his military budget.
8. Cheney is a hulking brute compared to Bush.
9. Even Nixon's ghost fills more volume than W.
10. Ben Sargent regularly portrays Shrub as being both short and with very simian features.
11. Again, Bush is portrayed as being shorter than a woman, although he doesn't look like a midget for once, but he does seem very small and weak.
12. Apparently, Bush is small enough to fit into former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's pouch, if Howard were a kangaroo.
13. Again, Cheney looms over his supposed superior.

Also, on an unrelated note, if you fail to hear from me after this, it's because I've drowned. Most of my yard is underwater, the pond has forgotten its boundaries, and it's not supposed to stop raining until tomorrow morning. There was actually talk of canceling school today. It's not stormy or windy or even thundering. It's just that when you live in a county were over half of the roads are unpaved, heavy rain wreaks havoc on transportation. There was at least one bus that had to bring the kids back to school this afternoon because the rain had already made the road they lived on impassable. There was a discussion of closing schools for illness that involved much disbelief, so I expect this to be a shock for many of my more urban-raised readers. I remember having school canceled when I was a kid for excessive rain occassionally. I even had friends who were occassionally stranded at home because of water damage to the roads they lived on. It was rare for my family though because we lived close to a paved highway and our road only had our house on it, so it had very low traffic.