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, leading to merciless mocking of Lincoln as a coward in journals both Democratic and Republican. 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.

The Importance of Being Frank

Graphical History Tour remembers former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), who passed away Tuesday night at age 86.

in Q SaltLake, March, 1999

Barney Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, succeeding Rev. Robert Drinan, who had left office in order to comply with Pope John Paul II's call for priests to withdraw from government positions. Q SaltLake asked me to draw the above caricature of Rep. Frank for their cover story on his upcoming speech at a dinner of the Utah Stonewall Democrats, an LGBTQ organization.

Frank earned a reputation as an outspoken, quick- and sharp-witted liberal, but it must be noted that he was very pragmatic, even on LGBTQ+ issues. In the 1990's, he counseled marriage equality advocates that the public were not ready to accept same-sex marriage. In his last public interview, however, he argued that marriage equality is safe because Republicans today would be afraid of the backlash were our marriages to be taken away.

Perhaps the interviewer thought it impolite to bring up the fate of the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act during Republican rule.

Frank wasn't the first openly gay Congressman; Gerry Studds (D-MD) had been outed at the center of a scandal over Congressmen having affairs with congressional pages. (Studds was censured in 1983 for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old page ten years earlier; he retired from Congress in 1997.) Frank was, however, the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily, in 1987.

in Ranger, University of Wisconsin at Parkside, Sept. 21, 1989 

The first cartoon I drew of Barney Frank was, unfortunately, when it appeared that his political career was about to be cut short because of a sex scandal of his own. He had befriended Steve Gobie, a prostitute, hiring him as an aide, housekeeper, and driver in 1985. He evicted Gobie in 1987 after their landlord told Frank that Gobie continued operating as a male escort, even bringing clients to their shared home.

This became public in 1989 when Gobie decided to sell his story to the highest bidder, but gave it away to the Washington Times. Frank called for a House Ethics Committee investigation, claiming to have had no knowledge of Gobie's extracurricular activities at their home. Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID) led the push to censure Frank; but in the end, he was merely reprimanded for misrepresenting Gobie's criminal probation record, and for using his congressional office to fix 33 parking tickets Gobie had racked up.

Craig, by then a senator, would have his own gay sex scandal in 2007.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 30, 1995

During a January 20, 1995 radio interview discussing a possible book deal, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) said, “I like peace and quiet and I don’t need to listen to Barney Fag, [pause] Barney Frank, haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book.” 

The slur was reported by several radio networks, whereupon Armey blamed the media for reporting on what he claimed was an audio glitch, not a slip of the tongue or intentional insult.

Rep. Frank refused to accept Armey's excuses, saying, “There are a lot of possible ways to mispronounce my name but that one, I think, is the least common, ... I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

After a separate incident of Armey making a poor joke about Frank's homosexuality, a reporter asked Frank if he wanted an apology from the Texan. "I’m trying to think of what I would be less interested in than an apology from Dick Armey," he replied. "Maybe the lyrics to the national anthem of Bhutan."

for Q Syndicate, Aug., 1998

Frank's office requested the original of this cartoon. I have no idea whether he still has it.

When Republicans in Congress were holding hearings in preparation to file impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton over his sex scandal, Barney Frank seemed to be the only Democrat willing to speak up in Clinton's defense.

for Q Syndicate, Nov., 1998

Wisconsin's Second District elected Tammy Baldwin to Washington in 1998, the first out lesbian representative in Congress, so I drew Barney Frank offering her some practical advice.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2009

I tried looking up why I included Barney Frank in this cartoon about the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but it dates from two months before I started this blog. (and I couldn't find it among oocities.com's cached pages of my previous Geocities blog). 

Did Frank call Scalia a homophobe? I guess I wouldn't have put it past him, and I can't think of another reason why I would have drawn him in the foreground.

It is, however, my best example of drawing his famously rumpled couture.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2011

This cartoon caught some ridicule from a web page (now long dormant) dedicated to ridiculing editorial cartoons, in part for daring to run afoul of the litigious Dr. Seuss Estate. The topic was the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed in successive Congresses to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ private sector employees.

It faced stubborn resistance from Republicans and other conservatives. In 2007, Frank proposed deleting transgender rights from the bill, in what proved to be a futile ploy to attract support from moderate Republicans which succeeded only in deeply dividing the LGBTQ+ community. 

for Q Syndicate, Oct., 2007

Frank's reasoning was that transgender rights could be added back in someday if ENDA ever became law; transgender activists and their allies are profoundly disappointed by what to this day they regard as outright betrayal.

Congress never has passed ENDA in any form. In an interview with Washington Blade's Lou Chibarro, Jr., after he entered hospice care this month, Frank noted that the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a ruling Frank was confident the Court would never overturn — and if it did, Congress would step in and pass ENDA into law.

He must never have met Mike Johnson.

for Q Syndicate, Dec., 2011

No, this is not my eulogy cartoon for the Congressman.

The 2010 census resulted in Massachusetts losing a seat in Congress. In the redistricting plan produced by the state legislature, the Democratic stronghold of New Bedford was removed from Frank's district. While Brookline, Newton and Wellesley remained in the district, Frank announced shortly after Governor Deval Patrick signed the redistricting plan into law that he would not run for a 17th term.

My reference, of course, is to the reported last words of Oscar Wilde, another gay icon with a not unblemished history. (In trying to verify the quotation for this post, I've found several variations on its theme, so take it with a grain of smelling salts.)

That was the last cartoon I have drawn of Barney Frank — at least so far. I am likely obliged to draw an actual eulogy cartoon for him for release next week. If not, he's got a book coming out in September.

Given his record, the book is not going to be pablum.

January ’Sixes

This week's Graphical History Tour opens on a somber note, as we come to January, 1986, and one of those moments where anybody alive them remembers where they were and what they were doing.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 6, 1986

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded at "throttle up," just over a minute after launch. All aboard were killed, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, chosen to be the first civilian passenger to fly into space. 

In five years, space shuttle flights had almost become routine, but because of McAuliffe's presence on the crew, millions of schoolchildren across the country were watching the liftoff. It was carried live on all the TV networks. 

We all knew the liftoff was not supposed to look like this. Everyone looked on in stunned silence, hoping against all reason to see the shuttle emerge from the fireball.

But no escape measures available to the crew; ejection seats and full pressure suits used in the first four space shuttle test flights had been removed before operational flights began in 1981. It's highly improbable that they would have been helpful in the event of an explosion, anyway.

A Presidential Commission attributed the explosion to a faulty O-ring made of material vulnerable to changes in temperature (there had been freezing temperatures in Florida overnight). Shuttle flights were suspended until September 29, 1988, after the implementation of new safety measures and stricter design standards.

1996

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 25, 1996

We’re now in an even-numbered year, so here’s fair warning that upcoming Graphical History Tours are going to include some presidential election cartoons. Fair warning also that it’s January, and someone is getting ready to harangue a joint session of Congress live on all the TV networks.

President Bill Clinton was all set to run for reelection in January of 1996. While there was a crowded Republican field heading into the year, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole was the odds-on favorite. 

Multi-millionaire Steve Forbes, Jr., with a fortune at his disposal and a signature issue of replacing the current income tax system with a simple “flat tax” for everybody, had emerged as Dole’s closest rival.

2006 

for Q Syndicate, January, 2006

I have to tell you, when I was thumbing through my cartoons from January of 2006 to decide which one to post today, I had absolutely no recollection of what television show this cartoon was about.

The series might have been an attempt to update “Touched by an Angel” (1994-2003), or to make a faith-based “Harvey”; obviously, it never caught on. 

It was apparently one of the uncounted eminently forgettable January replacement series that come and go like Frosty the Snowman. Facebook Memories just reminded me of another such failed series, “¡Bob!”, a vehicle for Rob Schneider and Cheech Marin. I’m wondering if either of them remember it. I’ll bet you don’t.

2016

for Q Syndicate, January, 2016

Here's a cartoon about a spate of "religious liberty" laws, pushed by Republicans to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons — special rights for straights.

What I love about this cartoon is how easy winter scenes are to draw. Especially when the object is to set the cartoon in the middle of the most desolate nowhere imaginable. I may have spent more time thinking up the cartoon than drawing it, even considering all that lettering of the dialogue.

Well, here's where the Graphical History Tour ends today. Safe travels, drive carefully, remember to steer into a skid, and always remember to carry a blanket and maybe an extra jacket in the car.

From Lebanon to Halloween in Order Categorical

Given the newest war in the Holy Land, it is only appropriate to start our Graphical History Tour of my October cartoons with this reminder of the dangers of getting involved in the region.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Oct. 27, 1983

U.S. Marines were in Beirut in 1983 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war. Those dates should give you a good idea of just how successful those "peacekeeping" efforts were.

On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber exploded a truck at the Marines' barracks near Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers. Another suicide bomber blew himself up at the barracks of the French paratroopers, killing another 58. This coordinated attack, for which Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, was the second deadly attack on Western interests; a suicide bomber had killed 63 at the American embassy in April.

A joint American-French retaliatory strike against Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), believed to be training Hezbollah militants, was proposed; but it never came about because of doubts within the Reagan administration that Iran was behind the October 23 bombings. Instead, most of the U.S. peacekeeping force was moved offshore to transport ships. The following February, President Ronald Reagan authorized withdrawal of U.S. troops from the conflict.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 7, 1993

Ten years later, American lives were lost in another civil war, this time in Somalia. Bill Clinton had inherited Operation Restore Hope from the George H.W. Bush administration. U.S. troops were assisting the United Nations operation providing famine relief there when, on October 3, 1993, soldiers loyal to Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed shot down two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters.

Eighteen U.S. soldiers and hundreds Somalis were killed in the crash and ensuing battle. Video of Somali combatants dragging the naked bodies of slain U.S. servicemen through the streets shocked and revolted the nation.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 11, 1993

President Clinton pulled the U.S. forces out of the conflict zone four days later, and from the rest of Somalia the following March. America wanted nothing to do with a distant African nation where all of the warring factions were the bad guys.

The snake imagery in the earlier of these two cartoons echoes two famous cartoons by J.N. "Ding" Darling of a giant German serpent swallowing the world. Darling has not been the only cartoonist to liken war to a giant snake; Pat Oliphant drew at least one cartoon using snake images to represent U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and that country's shape inspired a number of other editorial cartoons.

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Lest today's post get too dark and depressing, let's skip ahead another ten years and sing us Picayune Butler, or something else that's funny.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2003

The U.S. was at war again in October of 2003, but the publications I was drawing for had other priorities. The Business Journal didn't happen to write any editorials about Afghanistan or Iraq that month, and I'd just drawn a cartoon a month earlier for Q Syndicate of religious zealots trying to enlist homophobia in the George W. Bush administration's strategery planning.

My cartoon about the fictional Rock Knuteson was a purely made-up scenario about closeted ball players. We now know of a few bi and gay athletes who were active in professional sports in 2003, but none of them were out to any but their closest friends at the time.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2013

And I couldn't let this post end without a Hallowe'en cartoon.

In 2012, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had vetoed a marriage equality bill passed by the state legislature and had called instead for a putting a constitutional amendment up for popular vote. The legislature failed to override the veto, but didn't pass the amendment measure, either.

Meanwhile, Garden State Equality v. Dow was making its way through the courts, and New Jersey Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson ruled that New Jersey "shall permit" same-sex couples to marry, effective October 21, 2013. The state Supreme Court unanimously denied Christie's appeal to delay implementation of Judge Jacobson's decision, and New Jersey's first same-sex nuptials were performed at the stroke of midnight.

Christie has a mixed record on LGBTQ+ issues, but a considerably better one than most Republicans. As governor, he favored civil unions for same-sex couples prior to legalization of marriage equality; he also signed a bill outlawing conversion therapy for minors. 

Now making a second run for the presidency, he spoke out against his party's bans on gender-affirming care, telling Brian Kilmeade on "Fox and Friends" this past June, "It's more of a parent’s decision than a governor's decision for goodness sakes, Brian. You really think that [Arkansas Governor] Sarah Huckabee Sanders should be making this decision for children in Arkansas?"

You Say You Want a Free Election? Well, You Know

There's still just over a whole week of those ghastly campaign commercials bombarding us on the TV, radio, social media, YouTube, and front yards. So let's take a break from Election 2022...

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 21, 1982

...but first, this commercial from Election 1982.

Scott McCallum was running in Wisconsin for the senate seat held by William Proxmire, and aired a TV ad arguing that he was sympathetic to voters suffering from the Reagan recession and offering his unemployed brother John as proof. 

McCallum's ad didn't work, even though Proxmire didn't campaign on television at all. I suppose Wisconsin voters actually rewarded Proxmire for that.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 28, 1982

Pete Jansson was the Republican running against my district's congressman, Democrat Les Aspin. At a candidate forum hosted by the University of Wisconsin - Parkside, Jansson campaigned against what he called "Aspinomics." I suppose that was an applause line in any GOP crowd, but it fell flat in the mixed audience on a university campus.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 7, 1992

1982 was the Democrats' year, and Les Aspin cruised to a seventh term. By 1992, he was firmly ensconced as the First District's Congressman, Chair of the House Armed Service Committee, and running for his twelfth.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 20, 1992

Senator Robert Kasten (R-WI) came to office in the Republican sweep of 1980 and survived the Democratic wave of 1986, but sailed into strong headwinds in 1992. He painted his Democratic rival, Russ Feingold, as a dangerous radical — which is the standard Republican tactic — but then likened his own positions to those of Wisconsin's Junior Senator, Democrat Herb Kohl, and, incredibly, the Democrats' presidential candidate.

It is impossible to imagine any Republican since then offering themselves up as Almost Like Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat. Since the rise of Newt Gingrich in 1994, any hint of bipartisanship has become anathema in the GOP.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Oct. 29, 1992

Then there was the ad Feingold filmed greeting voters at The Joke Shop in Waukesha. The owner of the store, Jeffrey Campbell appeared in the ad, saying "Yes, it is," in response to Feingold asking "Is this a joke shop?"

Campbell was so upset afterward that Feingold's ad made him appear to support the Democratic candidate that he got himself into a Kasten ad swearing his loyalty to the Republican incumbent. Kasten's ad culminates with its narrator asking, "If we can't trust Russ Feingold's ads, can we trust Russ Feingold on crime, welfare reform or taxes?"

Jump we now to 2002: Drawing for a national LGBTQ+ audience, I only find an excuse to cartoon about local political races when there is a queer angle to one. My one such opportunity in October of 2002 came with the contest in Montana for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Max Baucus.

This time, it was the Democrats running a homophobic television spot.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2002

Challengers have one advantage in these ads in that they can pick and choose any one vote by the incumbent, even on a procedural matter, to accuse the incumbent of being against something that sounds popular or for something that can be given an unpleasant nickname. Republican Mike Taylor didn't have a voting record for Sen. Baucus to comb through, but someone at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up video of Taylor when he owned a cosmetology shop in Denver about ten or so years earlier.

The ad (paid for by the DSCC, not the Baucus campaign) accused Taylor of embezzling funds from the shop. The visual of Taylor massaging a male customer's face insinuated that Taylor might be gay. Whether it was due to the allegation or the insinuation, it was enough to prod a weepy Taylor to withdraw from the race at the 11th hour.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2012

Come 2012, I seized the opportunity to return to Wisconsin politics in my syndicated cartoon when former Governor Tommy Thompson challenged incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin in a televised debate. While he didn't engage in any overt anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric against the only openly lesbian Senator at the time, he did seem to make an unusual number of references to Mrs. Tommy Thompson.

I've found Senator Baldwin's a challenging face to draw, and I tried to make this caricature as simplified as possible. In the end, I don't think this approach worked, and I haven't used it since.

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That brings us up to the present, so that's it for today's installment of congressional campaign cartoons past. We now return you to your regularly scheduled campaign commercials.

Cheap Shots with a Ten-Foot Poll

In last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I shared a few cartoons and illustrations I drew 40 years ago in April of 1982. I had almost included one from April of 1992, but I decided to give that month a post of its own today.

I'll start out with one that drew a couple of complaints.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., April 8, 1992

Religious fundamentalists were upset that the Racine Health Department had begun offering free condoms in response to the AIDS crisis. For years, health advocates had been urgently recommending that men who had sex with men must use condoms every time. Although some in the gay community reacted with the same attitude we've seen in the past two years toward face masks, the absence of any treatment for HIV/AIDS in 1992 made a lot of sense to the rest.

Antigay puritans, however, argued that condoms are less than 100% effective — and that was without guys wearing their condoms down around their nuts instead of up where they're of any use. As far as the Just Keep Saying No crowd were concerned, total abstinence was the only prophylactic that was 100% effective and therefore the only one worth considering.

Just like how abstaining from breathing is 100% effective against transmission of COVID-19.

A frequent denizen of the Journal Times's Letters to the Editor section (he had just had another letter, "Condoms Cause AIDS," in the paper two days earlier) recognized my caricature of the gentleman leading the opposition to the health department program.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 17, 1992

There was another letter, very much like Mr. Brook's, sent in by parents of a friend of a friend. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 13, 1992

When I was a kid, I had occasionally subbed for their son delivering the Sunday morning Milwaukee Journal, with which there always seemed to be one supply problem or another. The worst was when the delivery truck had left 75 extra copies of the classified ad sections instead of 75 copies of the news sections. This was in the days when cell phones were the thing of science fiction, so I had to schlep a third of a mile back to my house to call the circulation department, which never answered their phone at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday.

At any rate, I don't owe the Pfeiffers any favors.

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Nationally, the major story for the month (prior to the Rodney King riots 30 years ago yesterday) was the presidential primary election season grinding to a close.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., April 6, 1992

On the Democratic side, the contest had come down to two former governors: Jerry Brown of California and Bill Clinton of Arkansas. President George Bush had clinched the Republican nomination and polled ahead of either Democrat, even though fascist-wing Pat Buchanan was doggedly refusing to do the Republican thing and fall in line behind him.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 9, 1992

By the time the Wisconsin primary was over — well, I hesitate to say Bill Clinton was the "favorite" for the nomination, because there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm around the former Arkansas governor. He had issues with marital infidelity (an issue that had dashed Gary Hart's presidential ambitions four years earlier) and collegiate marijuana use (still a disqualifying consideration for a sizeable chunk of the voting-age population). He had mighty lame excuses for both.

Furthermore, the central issue of his campaign, aside from personal ambition, was a mild repudiation of the Democratic Party liberal ideals. Its "third way" smörgåsbord of fiscal conservatism and social progressivism was meant to appeal to middle-of-the-road moderates — that ambiguous slice of the American electorate who famously don't really get enthusiastic about politics.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 27, 1992

Then, just as the news media began wondering what they were supposed to report on with the party conventions still a couple months away, along came billionaire H. Ross Perot, dropping loud hints that he might perhaps consider thinking about mulling whether to make himself available for a third-party run for the presidency.

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.

Yet Another Luxembourg-Themed Post?

Having devoted three posts this month to the late U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg James C. Hormel, imagine my surprise when President Joe Biden named Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to that same post this week.

Why, I just happen to have drawn a bunch of cartoons featuring Tom Barrett, mostly for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee back in the early 'aughts. I also wrote a school report on Luxembourg in the sixth grade for which I got somebody in the Grand Duchy to send me a very nice package of informational materials. But I don't know where that school report is any more, so let's take a look at the cartoons, shall we?

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis. Oct. 20, 1992

I thought I might have drawn at least one cartoon featuring Barrett while he was a member of Congress, but I'm only finding two in which he appears, and only as an extra. He had not yet been elected (although he was a shoo-in) in this first cartoon, in which Wisconsin's incumbent Republican Senator horns in on an imagined Democratic campaign event.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, February, 1997

Here, Barrett is standing behind Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Milwaukee Brewers' new stadium.

(Clearly, I had no pictures handy showing what the Brewers' new baseball stadium looked like. I later drew a pencil sketch in the margin of this cartoon so I would know how to properly cartoon the building and Miller Park logo.)

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, June 4, 2004

Once Barrett left Congress and was elected Mayor of Milwaukee in 2004, I naturally had many more opportunities to draw him. These are only a few of them.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, August 13, 2004

A politician can throw cartoonists a curve by changing their look; Barrett wore a more business-like hairdo as Mayor than he had as Congressman...

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, August 27, 2004

...And then he went and shaved off his moustache, which changed his look dramatically. Removal of his most noticeable facial feature meant having to rethink how to represent him in two-dimensional black and white.

Before long, however, I hit upon what would become my go-to caricature of him. Except for the nose. The nose is wrong here.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, July 1, 2005

It's a good thing that it didn't take long to settle on my mayoral caricature, because by the end of the year, the Business Journal had decided that it didn't need an editorial cartoonist any more. Milwaukee's mayoral politics hasn't impacted LGBTQ+ news a whole lot in the meantime, so I haven't drawn Mr. Barrett for Q Syndicate.

But I did put him in a cartoon for the on-line Racine Post when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010.

for Racine Post, July, 2010

The cartoon is based on a campaign commercial from the Republican Party that told voters that Milwaukee was going down the toilet. Of course, the Milwaukee County Executive running for governor on the Republican ticket, or the national Great Recession, had nothing to do with it.

By the way, the original GOP ad didn't portray outgoing Governor Jim Doyle and Mayor Barrett as Nosferatu and the Joker. It just ain't easy to depict the grainy black-and-white images of television/video political attack ads in a cartoon that's in grayscale to begin with, so I had to come up with something else.

Creating the third and fourth panels in color would have been a good choice; I didn't start using color until some months later, though. A missed opportunity, really.

So anyway, if there are any Luxembourger cartoonists looking for tips on how to draw the new ambassador from the United States, here you go. Check out whether Stuart Carlson or Phil Hands have any Qwantable examples out there, and have fun.

Hormel, Hormel, Hormel, Eggs, Bacon and Hormel

Why another post about Ambassador James Catherwood Hormel?

He wasn't the first public figure to ask for an original of one of my cartoons about him, but he is the first one to publish that cartoon in a book, so he holds a special place in my career. The book is his memoir, Fit to Serve, much of which relates what it took for him to get himself appointed by President Bill Clinton as U.S. Ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg — America's first openly gay ambassador to a foreign country (not counting James Buchanan).

Hormel and the Clinton State Department initially expected trouble from vociferous homophobe Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), but were surprised when Helms was satisfied with Hormel's promise that his boyfriend would not live with him in the ambassador's residence. There being no possible legal relationship between Hormel and his boyfriend in 1998, any sort of spousal benefits involved was completely out of the question to begin with.

Q Syndicate, May, 1998

Instead, it was Senators James Inhofe (R-OK) and Tim Hutchinson (R-AR) who put holds on Hormel's nomination, joined after the holds became public by Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH). Their holds came in response to a right-wing smear campaign; someone had dug up video from KOFY-TV's coverage of the 1996 Pride Parade in San Francisco in which Hormel was chatting with the television hosts as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence passed by. 

As Hormel described the incident in Fit to Serve,

"We can't miss these girls!" [reporter] Ginger [Casey] said. From background notes, Ginger read: "They acquired those genuine habits from a convent in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Legend has it that they told the Mother Superior that they needed them because they were putting on The Sound of Music."

I laughed, as did [station owner] Jim [Gabbert].

She followed up, spontaneously: "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

I continued laughing, heartily. That's what I did. Not a single word, just a few laughs. It all seemed like good fun.

The vast right-wing conspiracy, the Family Research Council, and their Republican cohorts painted the episode as proof that Hormel was anti-Catholic, bound to offend the sensibilities of the devoutly Catholic Luxembourgoisie (Luxembourg governmental assurances that Hormel would be welcome notwithstanding).

Q Syndicate, January, 1999

This is the cartoon in Hormel's book, drawn when the Senate returned from its December recess to find that Hormel's appointment was still on the docket. I'm somewhat curious why the book describes the cartoon as having appeared in the Seattle Gay News when Mr. Hormel might have been more likely to have seen it in the San Francisco Bay Area Reporter or Washington D.C. Metro Weekly, both of which ran my cartoons in those days.

It may have been a good thing that Hormel (or whatever staffer contacted me through Q Syndicate) hadn't asked for the original of the cartoon at the top of this post; instead of the usual bristol board, I had drawn it on a less firm type of artists paper. At some point, it got crumpled and torn by a rubber band I was using to hold that year's cartoons together. On the other hand, if I had received the request before the cartoon was damaged, it was on paper that, unlike bristol board, would have rolled up easily into a mail tube.

Q Syndicate, June, 1999

So anyway, James Hormel made it to Luxembourg by virtue of a recess appointment when the Senate adjourned for the summer, and I drew a third cartoon about the new ambassador. The embassy did not request the original of this cartoon.

Ambassador Hormel served out the remaining months of the Clinton administration representing American interests in Luxembourg. 

Q Syndicate, January, 2001

Surprisingly, even after that short tenure, one of the next administration's cabinet appointees, former Senator John Ashcroft, had to defend his opposition to Hormel's appointment on his way to becoming Attorney General.

Q Syndicate, January, 2013 (drawn in December)

By the time President Barack Obama nominated Republican another former Republican Senator, Chuck Hagel, to be Secretary of Defense in his second term, keeping Luxembourg safe for heterosexual privilege was no longer quite the guaranteed safe issue in Washington, D.C. that it was in Nebraska in 1998.

Hagel's 1998 comments weren't enough to derail his nomination in 2013; they presented only a minor hiccup on his way to the Pentagon. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" had been repealed in December of 2010, allowing LGBTQ+ military personnel to serve openly, and was by 2013 a settled issue.

And Hagel did apologize to Mr. Hormel during the course of Hagel's confirmation process, an apology Mr. Hormel accepted.