Weekend TOON roundup

Mike Luckovich, the cartoonist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, had to wait awhile to truly express doubts about the Bush administration's honesty.

In 2003, he was prevented from publishing a sketch spelling out "W LIED" with 37 little military coffins. Luckovich's editor told a trade magazine that she thought "it was too early in the war to lay these deaths firmly at the president's feet."

By 2005, as public support for the war plummeted, Luckovich's paper approved a heart-wrenching cartoon to mark the loss of the 2,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq. Luckovich hand-wrote the names of every dead soldier to craft the word "WHY?"

The "WHY?" cartoon, which helped Luckovich win his second Pulitzer Prize, reminds us that, when freed to deploy the potent weapon of ridicule, cartoonists matter.