The Good, The Bad, and The Cheney

A special Graphical History Tour bulletin: former Vice President Dick Cheney passed away this week. Since the man was often the subject of editorial cartoons, not least by your humble scribbler, this week's installment is dedicated to his memory... for better or worse.

Cheney, then a Congressman from Wyoming, was President George H.W. Bush's second choice for Secretary of Defense, after his first choice, powerful Texas Senator John Tower was forced to withdraw over a drip, drip, drip of allegations of womanizing and heavy drinking.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March, 1989

No, there were no such pesky rumors against Mr. Cheney, who had not cultivated the kind of resentment among his colleagues that Mr. Tower had. 

As Defense Secretary, he oversaw the Bush administration's military overthrow of General Manuel Noriega's regime in Panama; and later, Operation Desert Storm. The latter successfully repulsed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, but Cheney allowed General Norman Schwarzkopf to be the public face of the military action.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 23, 1991

Operation Desert Storm was one of the Bush administration's many foreign policy wins, even though it left Saddam Hussein in power; the international coalition behind Operation Desert Storm would not have held together for an advance on Baghdad. By the time I drew the above cartoon, the Soviet empire was crumbling, reformer Boris Yeltsin was the hero for thwarting a hardliners' coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and the U.S. had extended Most Favored Nation trading status to Communist China.

Moving on to the year 2000, I've got a couple cartoons that I drew but didn't submit for publication:

August, 2000

After George H.W. Bush lost the presidency to Bill Clinton, Cheney was in charge of energy conglomerate Halliburton. Then Republican nominee-presumptive George W. Bush tapped him to lead the search for his 2000 running mate. After vetting several potential vice presidents, Cheney found the perfect choice staring back at him from the mirror.

I didn't submit the above cartoon for publication because I was not satisfied with how this cartoon came out visually; a vertical format might have worked better than this horizontal one.

Every once in a while, a cartoonist gets an idea that is too mean to publish, but too wicked not to draw.

November, 2000

When Dick Cheney suffered one of his five heart attacks while the outcome of the 2000 election was still being decided in the courts, I drew this take-off of the running gag in the TV cartoon South Park. I posted it to the GeoCities page I had at the time, and nowhere else.

The joke here was that the Kenny character got killed off in every episode only to reappear in the next. Yet aside from being such an insensitive cartoon, the one other problem with it is that no Republican then (or now) would pronounce the "ic" in "Democratic bastards!"

As for worrying that the level of political discourse had sunken so low, none of us a quarter century ago would have imagined a President of the United States posting a video on line of himself literally bombarding citizens of an American city with a planeload of shit.

February, 2002

I think this was another unpublished cartoon, but only because I didn't have a market for it: not local enough for the Journal Times, not addressing LGBTQ+ issues for Q Syndicate, and not aligned with a Business Journal editorial. I apparently expended quite a lot of ink on it anyway.

The cartoon comments on Cheney's efforts to intercede for California energy provider Enron from his position as Vice President. When mismanagement from the top forced the company to go belly-up and under-the-table deals between the company and government came to light, any association with Enron could have been injurious to one's political career.

March, 2003

I drew this one for a former editor of mine from In Step days, Jamakaya, who liked my conceit of a Journal of Faith-Based Statistics. The imaginary magazine's medical advice has since come to fruition in the Health Department of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy the Lesser.

Cheney would be the most forceful advocate for achieving the unfinished task from twelve years earlier of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but unlike so many of my colleagues, I didn't draw any cartoons depicting his role in Iraq War II (or, for that matter, any cartoons about the famous incident when he accidentally shot a friend in the face while quail hunting. What could I possibly draw for publication a week later that outdid what all the other cartoonists and late night comedians put out the next day?).

Q Syndicate, January, 2004

Instead, I drew a series of cartoons highlighting how his daughter Mary living openly with her partner, Heather Poe, left Cheney in the awkward position of having to support President Bush's advocacy of amending the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as existing only between one man and one woman (at a time, one presumes) despite how it directly affected his own flesh and blood.

His rival for the vice presidency in 2004, Senator John Edwards, attempted to needle Cheney about this during their televised debate.

for Q Syndicate, Oct., 2004

John Edwards: "I think the Vice President and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And and you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy. ...." (He went on to criticize the GOP's Definition of Marriage constitutional amendment.)

Moderator Gwen Ifill: "Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds."

Dick Cheney: "Let me simply thank the Senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much."

Ifill: "That's it?"

Cheney: "That's it."

At another point in the debate, Cheney dismissed Edwards as an empty suit: “I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.” When Edwards's running mate, Sen. John Kerry, brought Mary Cheney up during the next presidential debate, Cheney told reporters that "I am a pretty angry father," and his wife, Lynne, accused Kerry of "a cheap and tawdry political trick."

for Q Syndicate, February, 2007

Mary and Heather welcomed son Samuel into their family in 2007, so I supposed that Dick and Liz were still tight-lipped on a subject about which most grandparents are more than happy to regale passers-by. Drivers-by, too.

This cartoon broke free of my clientele of LGBTQ+ niche publications, catching the eye of my esteemed colleague Joel Pett, who put together weekly editorial cartoon round-ups for the Sunday Los Angeles Times in those days. (February 11, page M2, at the top of the display, for gosh sakes! Thanks, Joel!)

I did check with my syndicate editors in case having the cartoon in the LA Times might scoop a subscriber in the local LGBTQ+ press. They gave the go-ahead.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2007

Early in the 2008 presidential campaign cycle, some genealogist with lots of time on their hands determined that Dick Cheney and Democratic candidate Barack Obama are ninth cousins once removed. It was a news story that didn't stop certain other people from making up stories about Obama being born in Kenya. Nor did it get Cheney and Obama to invite each other to family reunions.

for Q Syndicate, 2013

By the time Cheney's other daughter, Liz, ran for Congress, Dad had mellowed on the question of marriage equality. Liz, however, campaigned on a platform of anti-LGBTQ Republican orthodoxy. But she and her father deserve credit for putting country above partisanship after Donald Trump's attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Unfortunately for them and the rest of us, the MAGA Kool-aid has proved thicker than TEA.

That, ladies and gents, would be my last cartoon of Mr. Cheney, except that I have drawn one more. See you next week.