Q Toon: Devices to Their Own Left

Wisconsin failed — by a whisker — to follow Democrats in the rest of the country in the march to Democratic Socialism this Tuesday. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley edged out Madison Statehouse Representative Francesca Hong in the race for the party's gubernatorial nomination.

In polls, Hong, a self-identified Democratic Socialist, had led a crowded field for months, and Republicans were eager to run against her. Not that their campaign against Crowley will be any different than their campaign against her; Tom Tiffany and his corporate backers will simply edit his face into their attack ads in place of hers.

The embarrassing tweets played up in Republican ads will be significantly older than the stuff they wanted to hang around Hong's neck (Crowley has semi-plausible deniability that he was responsible for them). We can make a drinking game for every time a commercial warns us that "David Crowley Is Too Liberal For Wisconsin." We're a heavy-drinking state, you know.

Well, anyway, Max and Leo hadn't heard the Wisconsin primary results before walking their dog in this week's cartoon. Zoran Mamdani's election as New York City Mayor heralded a string of high profile victories by young, left-wing Democrats over older, more "establishment" incumbents: Melat Kiros in Colorado; Abdul El-Sayed and William Lawrence in Michigan; Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota.

On the other hand, 

The winners in the Democrats’ moderate faction include Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), who fended off a leftist challenger; former Rep. Elaine Luria (Va.) and Richmond-area prosecutor Shannon Taylor, who won swing-district primaries; and Rep. Wesley Bell (Mo.), who prevailed in his rematch against democratic socialist former Rep. Cori Bush.

Republicans purged moderates (and anyone willing to stand up for constitutional democracy) from their number several election cycles ago, so as far as the GOP is concerned, there is no difference between moderate Democrats, liberal progressives, Democratic Socialists, Socialists, and Communists. Potayto, potahto. 

French fries, gnocchi, tater tot, lefse, spud.

The Flight of Abraham

Detail from "The Flight of Abraham" by unknown cartoonist, in Harper's Weekly, March 9, 1861

You have, no doubt, heard about Donald Taco Trump being sneaked off Air Force One via a food service truck at the Ankara, Türkiye airport to a waiting Air Force C-32A, because of an allegedly credible threat that Iran or its proxies were planning to shoot down the President's plane.

Members of the press and the White House staff on board were unaware of what was going on as the supposedly targeted plane they were on took off; happily, it landed without incident. That was two months ago, but was just reported this week by the Washington Post and New York Times.

Similar episodes have taken place involving Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Clay Jones summarizes them in his Substack, so I won't go into detail here, save to note that the head of the White House press corps was in the loop during the Clinton incident, and the others all entailed the media playing along with the fiction that the President was at Camp David, or his ranch, or the White House.

Those presidents may have avoided the mockery that editorial cartoonists and Jimmy Fallon have heaped upon the present one, but it has not always been that way.

"Passage Through Baltimore" by Adalbert Volck in Confederate War Sketches, Baltimore MD, 1863

On February 11, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was about to leave for Washington D.C. by train, when railway security agent Allan Pinkerton informed him that there was a plot by southern separatists to assassinate him along the route. On Pinkerton's advice, Lincoln, wearing a Scotch cap and overcoat as a makeshift disguise, changed trains at Baltimore, avoiding a crowd that had gathered to greet him. He arrived in Washington before dawn, without any reception or fanfare.

The New York Times reported the episode on February 23. While it was a public relations disaster for the incoming president, Pinkerton used it to advertise how effective his security firm was in foiling the assassination plot.

Two years later, a German-American Confederate sympathizer in Baltimore, Adalbert Volck, published the above cartoon mocking Lincoln over the incident. His cartoon appeared in a book of his Confederate propaganda, distributed in Dixie but not in Baltimore. The book was one of a series, only one of which survived the Civil War.

I've seen reports of another cartoon, in Vanity Fair, lampooning the incident by depicting Lincoln borrowing his wife's dress as a disguise. If anyone knows of a copy of that cartoon in print or on line, I'd love to know where to find it.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Wisconsin's partisan primaries are tomorrow, and if the polls and the Republican-interest advertising are to be believed, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who identifies as a Democratic Socialist is going to be victorious over three more mainstream Democrats.

Even without the endorsement of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocaso-Cortez, Francesca Hong (D-Madison) has become the left-wing's darling here. Outside interests have been attacking Hong on television and in social media for weeks; one Republican-affiliated group, however, has been using language that won't scare off any Democrats, calling her "progressive" and "liberal" and accusing her of being opposed to Trump's immigration policy.

Like every Democrat who isn't named Fetterman.

Hong has given Republicans plenty of ammunition to use against her in the general election. Before announcing her campaign, she had called for "defunding the police" and shutting down all the state's prisons; she advocated cancelling Thanksgiving because it "celebrat[es] colonialism." Now she is busy backtracking all of that.

The early mainstream favorite, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, was obliged to withdraw from the race due to a campaign accounting snafu; Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley had suspended his campaign because of lackluster poll numbers, but rejoined the race when Rodriguez dropped out. He immediately won the endorsement of retiring Governor Tony Evers in spite of Evers's promise to keep mum about his preferences.

The others still in the race are State Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) and former Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Administration Joel Brennan, neither of whom has been able to poll above the statistical margin of error in spite of their bona fides and worthy résumés. Also on the ballot are former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Missy Hughes, who have also dropped out of the race.

Meanwhile, Republican Tom Tiffany faces only token opposition on his side of the ballot, and has flooded the airwaves with feel-good, folksy ads before whoever the Democratic nominee is will have a chance to characterize him as a right-wing Trumpster eager to return Wisconsin to the Scott Walker era of Ruthless One Party Rule.

A Hot, Keenly Contested, Scrappy Campaign

Our Graphical History Tour has been revisiting recent history lately, so it must be time to catch up on the news from 100 Augusts ago. 

"So Busy He Didn't Notice Him" by E.R. McTaggart in Vancouver Daily Province, July 26. 1926

On July 18, 1926 the Boston Post printed a letter from Channing H. Cox, a former Governor of Massachusetts, proposing a union of the United States and Canada. The Post lauded the idea, apparently a pet cause of its Financial Editor, Arthur J. Bean, who wrote, "It is of paramount interest to New England, which, as shown by the map, reaches up into Canada like a giant hand of friendship."

The Post editorial barely registered elsewhere in the United States, but was front page news north of the border, where parliamentary elections were underway. The campaign of Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen, heading a minority government that lost a no confidence vote in record time, seized upon the spectre of annexation by the U.S. as a weapon against recently ousted Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.

"Summer Studies" by Arthur G. Racey in Montreal Daily Star, August 10, 1926

King had nothing to do with the Boston Post editorial, but that didn't stop Canada's Tory press from running with the story.

On the campaign trail, King brandished a full-page article in the August 26, 1926 Toronto Telegram, purportedly taken from the Wall Street Journal, headlined "Mackenzie King Pictured as Wall Street's Hero — Financial Interests of U.S. Are Told That King and His Followers Believe Canada Should Be Free of British Influence."

King told his audience, "The article, according to the statement which appears at its head, has been written not in the States but in Canada. I venture to say it was written not very far from the office of the Toronto Telegram itself."

"Welcome the Wanderer" by George Shields in Toronto Evening Telegram, August 6, 1926

Shields's reference to John D. Rockefeller apparently comes from the Wall Street Journal article in question, which, according to the Telegram, identified King as "a graduate of Harvard University and late head of the Rockefeller Foundation."

In 1914, during a stretch when he was out of office, King did in fact come to New York to advise Rockefeller how to resolve a coal miners' strike in Colorado. Rockefeller asked King to stay on as a Standard Oil executive, but King returned to Ontario to resume his career in Canadian politics.

The Telegram article quoted the Journal as saying, "If Mr. King and his party succeed then Great Britain might just as well give up on the idea of a united empire. If, on the other hand, the Conservative Party is successful, it will mean that a Conservative Premier will take his place at the Imperial Conference and that Canada will have assured Great Britain that she has turned her feet toward a closer relationship with the Empire."

"The Axe Is His Way" by George Shields in Toronto Evening Telegram, August 9, 1926

Thomas L. Church was the Conservative candidate running as the incumbent for the Toronto Northwest constituency in the House of Commons. As such, the former Mayor of Toronto was strongly favored by the Telegram, so their cartoonist depicted him touting several of their shared causes as a sturdy platform for the Tories. They included "forcing" Canadian coal into Ontario in place of coal from the U.S.; and stopping Canadian farmers from illegally smuggling grain, oats, and barley to U.S. grain elevators for better prices than they could find domestically; and extending the Tories' longstanding "National Policy" of high protective tariffs.

Church would win this election, after which he threatened to launch a rebel “ginger group” within the party if Meighen were reelected as its chief standard bearer.

"The Anti-English Cry" by George Shields in Toronto Evening Telegram, August 17, 1926

King and the Liberals heaped criticism upon Governor General Baron Byng, who, as the crown's representative, had called upon Meighen to form a government when King had asked him to call for new elections.

The other head in Shields's cartoon is Henri Bourassa, a former Liberal from Quebec recently returned to Parliament as an Independent. Also the publisher of Le Devoir, Bourassa declared his full support of King and accused Byng of playing politics: "He put himself at the service of Mr. Meighen to satisfy either personal rancor or perhaps to serve the Imperial policy, for, after all, the Governor General is an employee of London, responsible for his acts to England and not to Canada.

"Poor Shooting" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Daily Star, August 17, 1926

"That is where the question becomes more grave than the customs inquiry," Bourassa concluded, bringing up the scandal hyped by Meighen's Conservative Party that was the reason for Lord Byng to dismiss Prime Minister King's government in the first place.

According to Sam Hunter's cartoon, the Canadian public agreed that the charges fell short of justifying a change in the government.

"Doesn't Desire to Be Rescued" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Daily Star, August 28, 1926

Neither did Hunter think Meighen's policy of restoring higher National Policy tariffs on U.S. goods and services from the 1920-21 Conservative-led government was a winning issue for the Tories. The sheet held aloft by Tax Payer reads "The Robb Budget Suits Me!", referring to James Robb ("Baldy" Robb in the Toronto Evening Telegram), Finance Minister in the Mackenzie King cabinet.

"I Was Assured This Was to Be a Hot, Keenly-contested, Scrappy Election Campaign" by Arthur G. Racey in Montreal Evening Star, August 23, 1926

Ah, well, and zut alors. I suppose it was as difficult to keep Jean Q. Publique interested in politics in the heat of summer. Especially when he had to vote on a new government every couple of months.

Q Toon: The GOPranos

On Jennifer Welch's I've Had It podcast last month, and later on Don Lemon's eponymous Show, Hunter Biden confided that there is a cabal of closeted gay Republicans who take their self-loathing out on the rest of the LGBTQ+ community:

"Everybody in DC knows this: There is this closeted gay mafia, largely Republican, that exists in Washington, and everybody knows every single one of them, who's gay. The only reason that that is relevant is  because I believe that internal  conflict creates so much vitriol inside a person that they take it out on the rest of the world...

"And so what they do is their whole lives they've been closeted, and so you have this, like black ball inside yourself, this, like, blackened heart by the fact that you can't be who you wanna be, and so you take it out on everybody else."

Pressed to name names, Biden coyly replied, "I'm already in enough lawsuits, Don. Are you asking me if Josh Hawley [R-MO] is gay? Are you asking me if Stephen Miller [NSDAP-WH] is gay? Are you asking me if Speaker Johnson [R-LA] is gay?"

As if Don Lemon wouldn't already know who's gay in D.C. He's a journalist. He's got gaydar.

The topic came up upon the death of the famously closeted Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), at a time when the Republican Party from top to bottom has gone all-in on persecuting transgender persons, drag performers, and the gender non-conforming. If yethinks the party doth protest too much, you're not alone.

Republican policy may be "No Fats Or Fems" for the moment — paging the Secretary of Testosterone Testing the Troops! — but the party has established a record of moving the goalposts ever rightward.

Don't think your gym membership is going to keep you safe.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I've got a cartoon this week that got pushed back because of a few more significant news items that came up before I had it ready to send to my editors. 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
 

Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.