Barack Obama's Greatest Heroics: Taking on, and Emasculating, the American Eagle

Two Le Monde cartoons, from the same date a couple of days after the 2009 inauguration, show Barack Obama taking on the American eagle — in a heroic fashion, needless to say.

As the eagle holds one poor innocent Iraqi in its breast and another in its talons (and as — a shoe-wearing — George W. Bush leaves the White House, saying "Mission accomplished"), Plantu has Barack Obama prying open the jail bars (the stripes from the American flag) to free a prisoner with a typically-looking innocent face.

In Serguei's nihilistic daily on page two, a naked man (L'Homme Nu) with no attachments walks the world, waxing philosophically day after day on various pseudo-philosophical matters. On this date, he asks a question to the day's special guest star:

• Will you manage to rein it in, Barack?
• I have brought a coach

Notice that in his daily wanderings, the all-knowing, wiser-than-thou nihilist (indubitably a nuanced European) has not managed to find anything needing to be broken in, from Putin's Russia and Iran's Mullahs to Sudan's killers and Venezuela's president-for-life (in fact, nothing but capitalism is usually a target for allegedly well-deserved anger). But (!) the American superpower, yes, there is something that needs to be tamed!