Over the past year, the world has experienced endless threats from the terrorist group, ISIS, and yet it seems that only after the attack on Paris has the world began to understand the gravity of the situation. About a year ago, when the ISIS threat was beginning to become imminent, President Obama referred to the terrorist group as a JV basketball squad, and how if they put on a Lakers uniform, it doesn't make them Kobe Bryant. This statement resulted in much debate about the legitimacy of ISIS. Rick McKee, illustrator of this cartoon, has been editorial cartoonist for The Augusta Chronicle since 1998, and now has his own website where his cartoons are becoming quite popular around the nation. Through the uses of ironic humor, McKee effectively communicates his purpose that Washington needs to start addressing ISIS as a ominous threat to western civilization and focusing their attention to eliminating the problem.
Although this cartoon was originally created in August of 2014, after watching the chaos that transpired in Paris last month, the irony in McKee's cartoon is magnified to an even greater scale. With Obama focusing on his golf game, we see him brush off ISIS "the JV team" acting as if they were no big deal. The irony - the figure representing the terrorist group has shoes that are just as big as Obama himself. With the attacks on Paris, the entire world was forced to turn their attention to the conflict that ISIS proposes. It is time to stop avoiding the war on terror, and time to address and eliminate the issue that the entire western hemisphere is beginning to face.
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