Aaron McGruder
Boondocks Cartoon
Biography
and Quotes
Liberal Hall of Shame
The Top 1000 Liberals in America
WASHINGTON – He did it again, but this time on national TV. Aaron McGruder, a black syndicated cartoonist who's getting his own prime-time TV series on Fox, called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice "a murderer" for her role in the Iraq war.
He made the remark as a guest on the nationally syndicated TV show "America's Black Forum," hosted by syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor Juan Williams.
The creator of the popular "Boondocks" comic strip reportedly caused some discomfort at an anniversary dinner for the Nation magazine here last month when he told the mostly anti-war audience, "I've met Condoleezza Rice and called her a murderer to her face."
In a Sunday broadcast of the "Black Forum" show, McGruder, speaking from Los Angeles, repeated the epithet, arguing that Rice, as one of the administration's "biggest hawks," advised the president on a war that led to the "slaughter of innocent people in Iraq."
Some of the black panelists assembled in the Washington studio winced at the remarks. Conservative syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams rebuked the cartoonist, whose strip is syndicated in more than 250 newspapers.
"I can't get over the fact you labeled Miss Rice a murderer," he said.
The low-key McGruder, 29, asserted that he has a right to his opinion. "She's a murderer because I believe she's a murderer," he said coolly. NAACP chairman Julian Bond, another panelist, wrote it off to "satire," but added, smiling, "I agree with his politics."
Late last year, McGruder made Rice's love life the topic of his comic.
"Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it," one of his "Boondocks" characters speculates in a strip. The Washington Post pulled the series on Rice, which ran some five days. The Cincinnati Enquirer dropped the strip altogether.
McGruder, who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, claims Rice, also black, asked him to write her into his strip. "Boondocks," a hip-hop version of Doonesbury, is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. McGruder, who graduated from the University of Maryland with an African-American studies degree, has written a best-selling coffee-table collection of his strips called "A Right to be Hostile."
He's reportedly developing with Sony a prime-time animated series based on "Boondocks" for Fox. It's slated for the fall.
Cartoonist calls Condi Rice 'murderer' – again This
time 'Boondocks' creator levels charge on national TV
Posted: January 27, 2004 5:00 p.m. Eastern
By Paul Sperry © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36798
McGruder faced the television cameras and said, "I created the strip because I wanted to create a radical Black voice that the United States government could not kill." To audience cheers, he continued: "My politics, for those of you who read the strip, are well known. I don’t like the president; I don’t like the war... The strip is about getting people to challenge what they tell you. Because they are lying."
On National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice-
But, as McGruder noted in a scathing Boondocks strip, "She works for a man who disenfranchised thousands of black voters!" and "She personally wrecked the world conference against racism!" In fact, a more appropriate name for Rice’s commendation, McGruder scoffed, would be "President Bush’s Most Embarrassing Black Person" award.
In Whose Image?
By Jennifer L. Pozner, TomPaine.com. Posted March 15, 2002.
http://www.alternet.org/story/12633
