More Fun than a Barrel of 'Em

Ann Telnaes is getting some flak for an animated cartoon she posted on the Washington Post this week -- the still at left pretty much sums it up- -- before the Post unposted both the cartoon and her explanation of it.

She drew it in response to a campaign video from Ted Cruz (R-1953) in which Cruz reads supposed children's stories to his wife and two daughters. As Cruz reads The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails, his 7-year-old pipes up, "I know that what I'll do, she said, I'll use my own server, and noone will be the wiser!"

Shakespeare it ain't. It isn't even remotely Dr. Seuss. It comes close, however, to being emetic.

Clay Bennett sums up the cartoonists' response to the furore, drawing Cruz saying, "Leave my daughters out of this!" while dragging them into the spotlight.

That being said, there really is no up side to lampooning any politician's school-age daughters. Anyone who has ever had a daughter -- or a younger sister, for that matter -- is going to sympathize with the aggrieved politician, no matter how he or she has used his offspring in what commercial, billboard, tweet, or vine.

Teapublicans have occasionally held up Sasha and Malia Obama for scorn (Elizabeth Lauten comes to mind), and they have been rightfully criticized for it. I declined to pile on then teenaged Jenna Bush after her OWI citations, although I had no such qualms about lampooning the daughters of Dick Cheney. They were both adults at the time, and I think that's a good place to draw the line.

So, yeah, I don't think I'd have drawn Ted Cruz's daughters as performing monkeys. But I'm not going to say that Telnaes was out of line.

After all, I compared a guy unfavorably to a skunk this week.

P.S.: The AAEC responds.

Ripped from the sketchbook!

At the convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists last week, a panel on social media agreed on little other than that it's important to post something every day. Since I don't have a cartoon to post today, here's a pencil drawing from my sketchbook of House Speaker John Boehner.

The AAEC panel on social media strove for diversity. There was Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press advocating that we cartoonists direct traffic from our Facebook page and such to our newspaper's site so that the newspaper knows how many eyeballs our cartoons bring them. Opposite Clay was Ted Rall, telling us to steer those eyeballs to our personal sites because our newspapers are going to screw us sooner or later.

Then there was Stephanie McMillan, detailing how we should each be posting daily messages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, MySpace, Google+, iChat, iChef, ManHunt, Emily's Listserve, and Farmville; blogging on WordPress; and keeping on top of all the on-line comments. Countering Staphanie was -- and I'm not sure I got the name right -- Bruce MacKinnon of the Halifax Herald. Bruce just wants to draw, so his wife takes care of all the technical computer stuff. She participated in the panel via Skype, and was left lingering up on the projection screen after the panel broke up and everyone else was milling around the room. (Eventually, she decided that nobody was going to come up and chat with her, and she hung up. How many convention/reunion attendees' spouses have wished they could do that?)

Weiners in Cartoons

Yesterday, I discussed how a story like Anthony Weiner's boxer tweet spawns many very similar cartoons. It also inspires cartoon ideas that no responsible newspaper will ever print.

I guarantee you will not see this cartoon by Sandy Huffaker in your local newspaper:

American editors are ever so careful these days not to offend. They're not so worried about the blue-haired ladies who might cancel their subscriptions in a huff as they are about advertisers who will cancel their advertising for fear of the wrath of Blue-Haired Americans for Decency Dot Org.
Editors in Europe are less prudish than their American counterparts. Here's a cartoon by Giorgio Forattini. The subject of the cartoon is Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini, who was about to succeed himself as head of a second coalition government:

Editors, advertisers, and cable TV newspersonalities would be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to see that cartoon on the editorial page of an American newspaper. Would you believe that the cartoon ran on the front page of a prominent newspaper?
(front page of La Stampa, Turin, August 17, 1982.)

The Denver Post killed a 2000 cartoon by Mike Keefe depicting the state of Florida dangling from Uncle Sam's groin ("Electile Dysfunction"). The St. Petersburg Times spiked a Clay Bennett cartoon in 1994 showing Bill Clinton wearing an "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt with the arrow pointing down at his crotch -- and the cartoon didn't even show any portrayal of anything penile. These, and other classics, found the light of day in David Wallis' Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression (2007, W. W. Norton & Company). It's a wonderful read, and I thoroughly recommend it.