Now that Bush is back in office, will his critics start feeling the wrath? Even Howard Stern is keeping his mouth shut.

New York- BUSH-bashing cartoonist Garry Trudeau is in danger of having his “Doonesbury” comic strip dropped by papers across the country as he gets increasingly partisan. In the Oct. 30 strip, Trudeau had Vice President Dick Cheney say, “Tell him to go [bleep] himself,” an echo of the remark he made to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy in June. Newspaper editors complained that neither Trudeau nor Universal Press Syndicate warned them about the line in advance.

Some 20 papers pulled the strip, and some are considering killing “Doonesbury” altogether. “It sparked a conversation about keeping ‘Doonesbury’ or not,” Sam Mittelsteadt of the East Valley Tribune in Scottsdale, Ariz., told the Boston Globe. Last spring, Trudeau sparked an uproar by having his character, B.D., curse after losing a leg in Iraq.

UPS warned editors in advance and many papers decided not to run it. Since then, two more strips have caused trouble, one picturing a head on a platter, and another listing all the American casualties in Iraq. Last summer, a consortium of 38 newspapers decided to drop “Doonesbury” because its Republican-bashing generated so many complaints.