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!

Seven and Seven

In belated honor of yesterday having been 7/7/17, Septback Saturday brings you a sampling of stuff I drew in July of 1987, 1997 and 2007.

In July of 1987, Congress was investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. In case that's ancient history to you, the Reagan administration was caught having sold arms to Iran, in violation of an embargo against that country since the hostage affair of 1979-81, and using the money from those sales to surreptitiously fund the right-wing militias fighting the government of Nicaragua.

This was America's introduction to Lt. Col. Oliver North, then an aide to the National Security Council, who was the guy who proposed the Iran-Contra link, and destroyed vital documents as the affair became exposed. Adopting an air of indignant moral impeccability, the future Fox News commentator insisted upon wearing his army uniform and medals when testifying before Congress, and pretty much whenever he appeared in public.

I was freelancing cartoons on local topics for the Racine Journal Times in those days. Cartoons involving court cases are usually unwelcome, but this one skirted the issue of prematurely convicting the accused. The particulars of the case hardly matter for the understanding of the cartoon thirty years later; in fact, I have no recollection whatsoever of how the case was adjudicated.

Ten years later, I was drawing for two Milwaukee newspapers. I illustrated the editorials of The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee; here's one on one of the few topics that needs no explanation — although it might be useful to recall that in Bill Clinton's first term, he had put Vice President Al Gore in charge of a commission to review and streamline government regulation of business. You can pretty accurately imagine the Beej editorial on your own.

The other paper I drew for back then was a now-defunct biweekly, In Step, serving Wisconsin's LGBTQ community. Again, I doubt that this cartoon from July, 1997 requires any explanation.

Twenty years later, we're still waiting for Mickey Mouse to suffer an almighty smite.

Now, had I drawn this cartoon for the Journal Times, there would no doubt have been reader complaints that I was attacking religion. (Had I drawn it for the Business Journal, there would have been editor complaints that this wasn't what his editorial was about.) But at In Step, I was preaching to the choir — if you'll pardon the expression.

Finally, I'll circle back to another Fox News personality with this cartoon from July of 2007 featuring one Mr. Bill O'Reilly. We derisively called it Faux News back then — the precursor of Trumplestiltskin's "Fake News" epithet for all the other channels, newspapers and magazines.

Which brings up a topic having very little to do with this cartoon, but which has been bothering me lately. For all the media outrage at the .gif Mr. Trump tweeted showing him beating up a guy whose face is covered by a CNN logo, American media have been largely and curiously silent about the hamfisted efforts of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to force Qatar to shut down the Al Jazeera news network.

While not all complaints against Al Jazeera are baseless (concerning an allegation that an Egyptian president was an Israeli agent, for example), freedom of the press has got to be respected. It's one thing to call the integrity of Fox's Bill O'Reilly on the one hand, or CBS's Dan Rather on the other; it's quite another for any government to insist that someone else's government shut down the entire network.

Q Toon: The Price of Admission

Well, it's about time I drew a cartoon about Hillary Rodham Clinton again.

One of the commentaries I read this week compared Hillary Clinton's self-inflicted problems to Joe Biden's reputation as the Great Gaffesby. But while Biden's loose talk comes across as candor, Clinton's somehow does not. One gets the impression that, for example, the remark about not knowing where Bernie Sanders was during her 1993-94 fight for health care reform came out of her campaign War Room and was carefully tested with a focus group before she said it on stage.

On the other hand, her "We didn't lose a single person in Libya" remark this week, a gift-wrapped present to the Republican witch hunters, would have been nixed by any semi-sentient human being in the Clinton campaign organization. And Siri, Alexa, or even Magic 8-Ball could have told her to avoid praising the Reagan's "effective, low-key advocacy" on HIV/AIDS.

On that topic, there was another cartoon I could have included in last Saturday's post remembering Nancy Reagan, drawn right after the one of Nancy answering the phone while Ronnie played with his Star Wars. Nancy Reagan wasn't in this February, 1987 cartoon, but her anti-drugs slogan was central:

But getting back to Hillary Clinton and the Joe Biden comparison: what if Hillary Clinton's gaffes this month are part of a carefully scripted plan to counter the perception of her that she's always carefully scripted?

(Clinton cameo appearance on Broad City last night)

Remembering Nancy

At the risk of having Settleback Saturday fall into a rut, I'm hauling a few of my own old cartoons out of the archives yet again -- this time remembering former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

I have seldom drawn cartoons about First Ladies of the United States, except in the cases of Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton. (You may recall one of Nancy Reagan's appearances in a Supreme Court cartoon I posted just a couple Saturdays ago.) Mrs. Reagan came to the White House determined to redecorate; she was front and center in the anti-drug "Just Say No" campaign; and was a force for others in the administration to reckon with to a degree not seen since Eleanor Roosevelt or Edith Wilson.

Edith Wilson might be the more relevant example. We now know that President Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer's Disease as early as 1984. Nancy Reagan may not have been the one taking his calls ... at least not that we know of.

This is a fragment of a never-completed cartoon on an Alice in Wonderland theme. Nancy Reagan was widely considered to be the force behind the firing of President Reagan's longtime friend Donald Regan as White House Chief of Staff in 1987. She felt that he was mishandling the Iran/Contra scandal, and he chafed at her astrology-based demands regarding her husband's schedule. Regan allegedly got the boot after having abruptly hung up on the First Lady.

Regan complained publicly about Nancy and her astrologer, Joan Quigley, in his 1988 memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington: "Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise."

Except for the one at the top of this post, I've chosen cartoons from the last two years of the Reagan administration. I'll wrap up with this cartoon of the Reagans taking their curtain call with several administration members from the previous eight years. It's not a particularly unique take on the end of the Reagan administration, I'll admit. Had I not drawn this cartoon while away from home and reference sources at an out-of-state family funeral, the cartoon would have worked better if the set had looked more like the Oval Office.