Stop Me If You've Heard This

History, it is said, repeats itself. Or at least it rhymes. Or exhibits recurring themes and leitmotifs. Or wanders in circles. Or suffers flashbacks.

In the past week or so, the NRA elected itself a new leader best known for illegal arms sales; a foreign enemy released three American prisoners; Donald Joffrey Trump abrogated a treaty with Iran; and the White House complained that a criminal investigation was getting too close to the president had dragged on too long.

Where have I heard this song before? Doesn't that tree look familar?

When the Reagan administration's secret arms deal with Iran first came to light in 1986, it was immediately associated with the release of one of the hostages who were being held by various factions in Lebanon's civil war. Iran was backing Hezbollah there, while also in the sixth year of war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

I drew a connection with Nicaragua, whose socialist government had just arrested Eugene Hasenfus, an ex-marine from Marinette, Wisconsin. Hasenfus had been shot down while flying arms to right-wing rebels known as the Contras. I wasn't making the right connection, but I was in the right ballpark.

When the true Iran-Contra connection came to light, the Reagan administration line was that aid to the Nicaraguan guerillas was all the work of one U.S. Marines Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

It was a complicated scheme, involving North's funneling $10,000 from the Sultan of Brunei to a Swiss bank account (to the wrong account as it happened), and enlisting the aid of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega against the Nicaraguan government. (Overthrowing Noriega would become a priority of the George H.W. Bush administration.)

Since President Reagan had no idea what was going on, he was obliged to appoint former Senator John Tower (whom we discussed a couple weeks ago) to lead a commission tasked with investigating the Iran-Contra affair. The Tower Commission presented its findings to the president in March, 1987.

But that didn't bring an end to the matter. Attorney General Ed Meese named New York attorney Lawrence Walsh special counsel to determine whether to charge anyone with any crimes. Congress also held hearings into the Iran-Contra affair; Lt. Col. Ollie North was a star witness. He defended his having lied to Congress because he believed aiding the Contras through illegal arms sales was a "neat idea."

You never saw future NRA head honcho Ollie North on TV except in full military uniform, badges and all.

On March 16, 1988, a grand jury handed down a 23-count indictment against top administration officials, including future NRA top gun Ollie North. By the time any of the court trials got underway, Ronald Reagan was out of office. He was also exhibiting signs of senile dementia, although those closest to him were doing their best to conceal the problem and to pass it off as his usual aw-shucks folksy demeanor.

Walsh had concluded that Reagan had not himself broken the law, so popular speculation immediately after his presidency centered on whether he would be called upon to testify at the trials of his subordinates. Of more pressing concern to the first of these was paneling a jury that could be impartial in weighing the fate of future NRA don Ollie North.

But a jury was finally seated. In May, 1989, North was found guilty of three out of 16 federal charges: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and ordering the destruction of documents.

Appellate courts would ultimately set aside North's conviction, as well as those of Reagan's National Security Adviser Adm. James Poindexter and nine others. Five others — including former State Department official Elliott Abrams and former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger — were preëmptively pardoned by lame duck President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

There was no investigation of Walsh's investigation, of course. Bush's successor would have to endure a totally unrelated interminable investigation which was supposed to be about some Arkansas land deal in which Bill and Hillary Clinton had lost money. But it ended up being about extramarital affairs and —

I'm positive we passed that tree before!

Ten, Twenty, Thirty

The old calendar on the wall tells me that it's Snickerback Saturday yet again, and I haven't got a theme I'm raring to fulminate about. So, for no reason in particular, I'm hauling out cartoons I drew ten, twenty, and thirty Aprils ago.

Starting with the oldest:

In April of 1986, the House passed a bipartisan bill supported by the Reagan administration and pushed by the National Rifle Association (but opposed by law enforcement officers) to repeal many parts of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Senate had already passed a similar bill ending federal control on the sale and transport of rifles and shotguns and creating the "gun show loophole." The McClure-Volkmer Act further protects dealers from federal prosecution unless authorities could prove "willful" violation of remaining gun laws, and prohibits any state or federal government from keeping "any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or disposition."

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By this point in April, 1996, the presidential primaries had settled on the major parties' nominees. President Clinton had no significant opposition for the Democratic nomination; that the Republicans would nominate Kansas Senator Bob Dole did not come as a surprise. The Republican nominee-apparent did, however, present a challenge in one part of the world:

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With this cartoon from April, 2006 we tie together sex and an oblique tangent off the first cartoon's theme of terrorism:

In order to cast DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff as Moe of the Three Stooges, I employed a cartoon cliché for depicting surprise and shock.

The Brian Doyle scandal was one of those quickly forgotten peccadilloes of the George W. Bush administration. Amid the ineffectual response to Hurricane Katrina and some careless treatment of an envelope containing white powder, the Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was caught soliciting sex from minors on the internet. Doyle, 55, was found guilty of seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and sentenced to five years in Florida state prison for inappropriate e-mails he sent to an under-cover officer posing as a 14-year-old girl.

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While researching the background of the 1986 cartoon above, I happened to run across a letter to the editor in the April 21, 1986 issue of Time magazine from a 20-year-old Delavan lad who would someday become governor. I draw no conclusion from this and have no snide remarks to make; I simply share it for the sake of trivia:

Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth

For our trip in the wayback machine last weekend, I discussed some of the highs and lows of memorial cartoons. Since the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster is coming up this week, I thought I'd share the two cartoons I drew for that occasion.

I didn't see the explosion live; I had a second shift job in 1986, and I overslept the launch time. (Some of you may recall that the launch had been postponed from an earlier date, which factored into the ill-considered decision to launch on January 28 in spite of the freezing temperatures overnight.) I had my TV programmed to turn on at a certain time every weekday, forcing me to get out of bed and go into the next room to watch it or turn it off. All channels were on news coverage when the TV came on, as the news anchors were still trying to come to grips with what schoolchildren around the country had just witnessed.

This first was my immediate reaction to the disaster.

This cartoon was drawn entirely in charcoal, except for the material in the text box (which I had to redo because I inadvertently omitted the name of one of the astronauts; thankfully, an editor caught my mistake before it went to press).

A week later, the student newspaper I drew for at the time wanted a drawing for its front page, and I came up with an illustration whose wishful thinking was misinterpreted by some as a sort of denial that the disaster had really happened -- like those people who have insisted all these years that we never landed on the moon.

That misinterpretation was partly because when the cartoon appeared in print, you could see the outline of the space shuttle contrary to my intention. I drew the shuttle only using white-out, but some shadow of the white-out showed up anyway.

The point of the cartoon was to push back against the response from some that the space program should be shut down. Given the chance, I'd have liked to have changed the caption to advocate letting "their dreams live on" or "soar" or something other than "not ... die."

17 years later, February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry. I did not draw a memorial cartoon on that occasion, although I did end up having a few seconds on local TV. It was a Saturday morning, and I'd gone to the church where I work to fetch something I'd forgotten there on Friday afternoon. I decided to put an appropriate prayer on the outdoor sign as long as I was there, and was almost finished when a reporter from Milwaukee's channel 6, in Racine because astronaut Laurel Blair Clark had attended the high school two blocks away, stopped to get a comment from me. The reporter mistook me for the church's pastor, but I quickly corrected him; and since he didn't happen upon any other Racine clergy walking the main streets on his way back to Milwaukee, he used the footage of our interview.