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When you became more political, did you enjoy the reactions you were getting? I know you've talked about the hate mail that you get.

Feedback is not an unmixed blessing. Especially these days when everyone has a Web site or a blog. There are so many damned opinions out there. It's just this relentless tide. I've reached a point where occasionally it might amuse me and occasionally it might annoy me, but mostly I just don't care. And it took me a long time to get to that point. I don't mean to suggest that I'm sitting here in my Zen-like serenity, but when you've been out there for a number of years and someone picks up a clump of dirt and throws it at you, after a while you learn to build up barriers and ignore it.

E-mail has made feedback way too easy. Certainly in the early '90s when people had to write down their thoughts on paper and put it in an envelope and buy a stamp and put it in a mailbox, they really needed to want to say something. They weren't just going to share some fleeting thought that happened to pass through the back of their mind. E-mail has made it possible to share thoughts that are probably best kept to themselves. I changed the color of the links on my Web site and people wrote in, very angrily -- they liked the old color better! One guy said the new color looked too slick and corporate! I don't mean to disparage the person who wrote that, I'm sure he meant it, but gosh. There are only so many hours in the day.

There also used to be context. When a letter came in and it was in crayon, you had some sense of context. E-mail strips it all away. You have some basic indicators like when someone writes in all caps, or has no sense of grammar or uses terms like LOL for "laugh out loud" -- then you know you're mostly dealing with an idiot. But most of the time it's hard to know who's writing this stuff.

During which era did such feedback bother you the most and coming from whom? You've been doing this through four presidential administrations at this point.

What bothered me the most was immediately after Sept. 11 when conservatives immediately decided that anyone who did not agree with them on abortions and prayer in school was aligned with the terrorists. The afternoon of Sept. 11, I went online and there were people writing me saying things like, "So you think America deserved this. Well, fuck you!" And I'm thinking, "Hello! What did I say? What did I do?" That really, really pissed me off. I found that shocking, and a little bit frightening, honestly, that there was this undercurrent out there ready to latch on to this. Conservatives just felt that their entire worldview had somehow been vindicated by this event.

I wanted to ask you about your Sept. 11 cartoon -- because you didn't draw one. You used a photograph. Why?

I wasn't feeling very funny that week. Because it was clearly such a momentous event, such an overwhelming and somber -- I'm sorry, I'm just going to sound banal saying this stuff. Everyone reading this interview went through the day also so I don't need to expand on that. Short answer: I didn't know what else to do.

Back to what you were saying about bias: One thing that was obvious during the Clinton years is that you really tried to find the ridiculousness on all sides. You could see where your sympathies lay but ...

You could see where my sympathies lay, but I pointed out that Clinton was lying about the whole Monica Lewinsky thing straight out of the gate. It was very clear to me many months into the scandal when Clinton supporters were still claiming -- as Bush's supporters are claiming now [about our reasons for going to war with Iraq] -- that he didn't lie. Well, first they were arguing that he didn't lie at all, that he didn't do any of it, and then we got into the semantic issues of the meaning of "is." I guess with Bush we've jumped right into the semantic issue. Everyone acknowledges that it was a lie in one form or another. They're just arguing about the meaning of a lie.

Clinton is more or less the guy on my side of the fence. But I had many, many, many issues with Clinton, and I acknowledged right away that it was pretty clear he was lying. Bush's supporters should be doing the same thing. Clearly they're not.

How do you feel that the tone or tenor of your cartoon has changed with this administration? Do you approach Bush's controversies differently?

The mood of the country changed. You react to what's going on and to the people in power. During the Clinton years, the cartoon got a little more ethereal. I would be discussing fine points of trade policy or some damn thing like that. My main problem with Clinton was that he sounded good and said a lot of the right things and made all of the liberals feel nice and warm and fuzzy and then went and gutted the social safety net and pushed through trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. His actions often belied his words.

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