A Strange Feeling of '92

It's that strange feeling you sometime....mmmms get ... that you've drawn something thirty years before.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Jan. 21, 1992

When that election year started out, the sheen was wearing off from Operation Desert Storm, Bush the Elder's splendid little war to liberate the Emirate of Kuwait from the evil clutches of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Drawn, apparently, for a January 16, 1992 issue that wasn't published

Bush entered that election year dealing with renewed concern over the state of the economy, in part due to worries that the balance of trade between the U.S. and Japan had begun to tilt in Tokyo's favor. His highly publicized trip to Japan would be remembered, however, for an unfortunate bout of intestinal flu during a state dinner with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. 

in UWM Post, January 27, 1992

Dozens of Democrats, meanwhile, were vying for the nomination to run against Bush in November. Leading the pack was one William Jefferson Clinton, a former Governor of Arkansas. When his campaign was rocked by an accusation of an extramarital affair, it seemed to be a replay of the scandal that scuttled Gary Hart's run for the Democrats' 1988 presidential nomination.

in Milwaukee Journal, "Taking Names" column, February 4, 1992

I've rerun that cartoon before, and whenever I do, I have to accompany it with this clipping — the only time I've ever appeared in the Milwaukee Journal and/or Sentinel.

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Okay now, today's post seems to be running a bit short. Christmas was kind of hectic and I topped it off with a mild case of the 'rona — thanks to my being fully vaccinated and boosted, it wasn't any worse, and I'm pretty sure I'm over it. (Although it keeps trying to flare up again after I think it's gone.)  I haven't had the energy to do the kind of research you, dear reader, deserve, so I end up today posting three cartoons from a month when I only drew four.

And I don't have anything to say about that fourth cartoon, so here's one from January, 1982, instead.

in UW-Parkside Ranger,  Somers, WI, Jan. 21, 1982

For those of you not old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State, General Al Haig, you really missed a master of military syntax. It actually earned the neologism "Haigspeak," defined as "Language characterized by pompous obscurity resulting from redundancy, the semantically strained use of words, and verbosity," or "not using one syllable when five would do." 

It's kind of a shame he only lasted in office a little over a year, because satirizing his brusque demeanor and linguistic legerdemain was actually rather fun.