Smokebox: You said in an interview in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that you consider the death penalty to be "one of the basic moral questions of our age"; now we have the execution of Tim McVeigh delayed for a month due to the FBI bungling, losing over 3,000 pages of documents that should have been used in his trial. What does that say about these dozens of executions that we do carry out every year?

Tomorrow: More to the point–in the past month there have been three well-publicized cases of innocent people being released because they were wrongly convicted. One of them was a man in Boston who spent 30 years in prison because he was set up by the FBI; they knew he was innocent, but if they came forth with proof that he was innocent it would blow the cover of an informant or something, so they just let the guy go to jail. Then there were a couple of other cases, very serious crimes–one man convicted of rape, I don’t recall the conviction in the other case–but people who were convicted of very serious crimes, who were sent to prison for ten or fifteen years, until DNA technology came along and they were able to prove their innocence.

The really extraordinary case, I believe was here in New York; two men had been convicted on the word of a crack whore, who was given a thousand bucks to lie, so these guys were sent to jail for fifteen years. They get out, they’re totally proven innocent, DNA testing, the whole thing; the guy who really did it has confessed; the crack whore has confessed; everybody has confessed. These guys get out and they have a hearing with the judge, and they have to spend an hour in this hearing with this judge who tried them, because this absolute motherfucker is sitting up there on the bench saying, "Well, you know, I thought you guys were guilty, and the evidence seemed pretty strong to me, so why should I let you out?" And they had to spend another hour wondering if they actually were going to be released, at the very end, because of this son-of-a-bitch of a judge…which I just thought was astonishing, and says a lot about the judicial system right there.

But, the fact that all of these innocent people are being released, clearly says there are some innocent people being given the death penalty, and I think that’s the only argument you need to make. If any innocent person in this entire society is executed wrongly, convicted wrongly–I mean, what can I say? That should speak for itself. It’s a terrible thing when a man spends twenty years in prison and then gets out because it turns out he was innocent; at least he has some of his life left. But when you take a man’s life and he’s innocent, that’s it.

Smokebox: Which you pointed out in pretty startling detail in one of your better known cartoons.

Tomorrow: Unless we have Almighty God himself judging people; unless we have someone who is absolutely omniscient and there is no possibility of making a mistake; I just don’t think the state should be in the business of executing human beings.

Smokebox: So what kind of mail response did you get for that one?

Tomorrow: Well, I did that one, and I got–a lot of people agree with me, and a lot of people think I’m wrong, although there is absolutely no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, people continue to believe that. I guess it’s like religious faith; there’s absolutely no evidence for the proof of Heaven and Hell and an afterlife, but people still believe in these things. The difference being, in the case of the death penalty, there is a great deal of evidence that we get it wrong sometimes. One woman wrote–since I said that if we’ve executed anyone wrongly, then all of us, as a society, we are all accessories to murder–she wrote and asked, "If we imprison somebody, then are we all accessories to kidnapping?" [laughs] In a sense I suppose we are, but of course there is a very large difference, as I say, because that person who was wrongly imprisoned still has a chance of living out some of their life. As you know, a person’s life is not over at the age of forty [laughs].

Smokebox: I certainly hope not…popular opinion to the contrary. And now I’m going to ask the impossible: Tell us where you think we’re headed, for the next four years at least.

Tomorrow: [pained] Oh, I hate making predictions! Well, there are any number of scenarios that can play out; a lot of them depend on whether the Democrats find their balls or not; if the Democrats actually start fulfilling their ostensible purpose as the opposition party. It’s going to be a very interesting four years if the Democrats continue to roll over. And the problem is, when you say "the Democrats," they have a very slim majority right now and you’re including the likes of Zell Miller, John Breaux, and Robert Byrd, all of whom might as well be Republicans.

So, it’s going to be a very interesting time politically. I think–I will predict, because I’m doing it on a somewhat obscure website, with all due respects [laughs], and not in Time Magazine, I will make a prediction that Bush is a one-term president. I keep making references to his obvious incompetence and stupidity, and people write me saying, "Oh no, this is just a trick, a way of lulling us into a false sense of complacency; he’s actually very smart." So I actually just did a cartoon about that for the American Prospect, where I have a cartoon every issue, in which I examine this question. And Eric Alterman–oh God, Eric Alterman, the Nader-basher of all time–let me just interrupt myself here and say, Eric Alterman has really got to give up the Nader-bashing. In an election that came down to 150 votes in Florida, the Socialist Worker’s Party could have thrown this election. But I’ll even give him, let’s say he’s right, let’s say Ralph Nader threw the entire campaign, and it had nothing to do with Gore’s unpopularity, that it had nothing to do with anything else–you’ve just got to give it up, it’s over, and you need the Naderites. You need their energy; this squabbling at this point is completely worthless, because those are the people who are going to be out in the streets protesting, and to continue with this "I-told-you-so, I-told-you-so," it just serves no purpose at all.

At any rate, Eric Alterman made reference in his column in The Nation to Bush not being so stupid, and really just pulling the wool over the eyes of liberals, and I started thinking about it, and I wrote this cartoon which asks, "How exactly is it that knowing the president is a complete moron and the government is actually being run by shadowy corporate interests, how exactly is it that that’s supposed to lull us into a false sense of complacency? Why are we supposed to be reassured by that again?" So I don’t see that exactly.

I don’t think Bush literally has the intelligence of a four-year-old; I think he’s probably a fine, competent person who would be capable of buying his own groceries and driving a car and so forth, but I don’t think he’s up to this job, this extraordinary job. So I think he’s a bit clueless and he’s surrounded by all these unrepentant Cold Warriors who are still seeing the world as it existed twenty or thirty years ago.

So I think that what you get here is this remarkably clueless administration which is going to be tripping over its own feet for the next four years. We’ve already seen that with the arsenic-in-the-water thing; it was actually complete nonsense. Arsenic standards have not changed in fifty years and would not have changed under Clinton’s order until the year 2004, so whether Bush had repealed that order or not, you would still be drinking the same arsenic in your water as you have all your life for the next four years. To hear the Democrats tell it, it was as if Bush was forcing arsenic down the throats of our children. They actually produced an ad in which this really irritating little girl asks in a plaintive voice, [falsetto] "Mommy, can I have some more arsenic in my water, please?" That’s all just propaganda, and I just did a cartoon this week pointing that out, and a lot of people were rather unhappy about it, but that’s just complete nonsense. I think it was probably a trap, you know, a land mine that Clinton set, and Bush was so clueless he walked right into it.

And that’s the thing–they have no sense of public relations; they have no sense of what the mood of the country is, and so they come in with their nuclear power and their oil drilling and their arsenic in the water and they’re behaving like the elephant in the china shop, and I just think it’s going to get worse and worse. I think they are going to make some really stupid mistakes, which is good for the country because it means that their agenda will be further hampered. And it’s good for cartoonists, because it means there’s plenty of material, so for once, what’s good for cartoonists is actually what’s good for the country as well. I’m actually fairly optimistic about it.

But that doesn’t mean people should be complacent; the reason I’m optimistic is because I believe there’s going to be so much public outrage over everything they do, because they are so out of step with the times.

The oil crisis is another interesting case, when you have all these people–I mean, the reason we have an oil crisis in this country is very ironic. The oil crisis is happening because of refinery capacity. The reason we don’t have enough refinery capacity, the reason they didn’t build any more refineries, is not because of environmentalists stopping them. It’s because up until a few years ago they didn’t need any more refineries. The refineries they had were not operating at full capacity. And you know what changed that, is this booming economy; this demand for SUVs and the amount of gas they were guzzling. This is Paul Krugman of the Times, this is his analysis of it, which is really wonderfully ironic if you think about it: the very people who are hit hardest by rising gas prices, the SUV owners, are in fact the ones who caused the entire problem.

Smokebox: And of course now the economy, at least the dot-com economy, has gone south. I can almost see it, I can see Sparky with his big bass drum and majorette hat—

Tomorrow: I actually did that once.

Smokebox: Right, the one I saw was about single-payer health care, but he could have been doing the same thing on the fact that booms don’t last forever.

Tomorrow: Well he was; go back and read all the cartoons about the economy that I did. It’s ludicrous to think of it now, but there were people claiming that this Internet boom was going to last forever; that gold would be spun out of straw; and I was one of the first people, honestly, to make the connection with the tulip mania . I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, but I’m one of the first people I saw in any capacity to liken the dot-com boom to a tulip mania. I’d been watching this thing happen so I went back and dug up some old reference material on previous booms, and researched it myself, and said, "Hey, that’s what’s happening here," and of course now that’s conventional wisdom.

Smokebox: Well, we’re forty minutes into this interview, maybe I’ve taken up enough of your time…

Tomorrow: I probably should get some work done today.

Smokebox: Okay, I really would like to thank you again for talking with us, and good luck to you.

Tomorrow: Sure, thanks a lot.