Oliphant's Veeps

"Promises, Promises" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, April 1968

How many vice presidents do you count in the above cartoon?

I recently mused that since "Oliphant's Presidents" has already been done (you can buy the book at amazon), I could have commemorated Pat Oliphant's passing by collecting his Vice Presidents. Well, his career spanned several of them, so here they are.

"Click" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, October, 1968

Lyndon Johnson picked Hubert Humphrey as his running mate in 1964 to shore up his support with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. To Baby Boomers too young to remember the Minnesotan speaking out on behalf of Black Americans' civil rights in 1948, however, Humphrey came to be seen as errand boy for the man sending that generation to fight and die in a far away forever war in southeast Asia.

Running for president in LBJ's place after Johnson withdrew from the race, Humphrey found it difficult to distance himself from the administration's unpopular war while promising to continue advancing its Great Society ideals.

Of course, Johnson qualifies as a former Vice President in this cartoon, too. I suppose it is possible that Aussie Oliphant penned a cartoon of LBJ sometime before November of 1963; John Kennedy's Vice President could well have said or done something to catch the attention of the Adelaide editorial pages.

"Our Earth Contact, Spiro, Is Pushing for a Landing Here by 1986" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September 1969

Humphrey lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, whose first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, served as the new administration's attack dog, speaking out against the media, liberals, antiwar activists, and the nattering nabobs of negativism.

Oliphant has some fun with one of Agnew's less controversial pronouncements in this cartoon, just two months after the first manned landing on the moon.

There has not, in case anybody is wondering, been a manned mission to Mars as of this writing; but NASA landed a craft on the Red Planet ten years before Mr. Agnew predicted.

Agnew was easily the most caricaturable of the Veeps we're looking at today — at least of the ones who never got promoted to the top job — so five versions of him show up in Oliphant's single-panel cartoon.

Did you remember to count Nixon as a former Veep at the top of this post?

"The Lone Ranger" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, May 1974

Of course you did.

Less than nine months into Richard Nixon's second term, Agnew pled no contest to charges of bribery  and resigned the Vice Presidency, bringing about the first exercise of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Passed and ratified after JFK's assassination, it provided a mechanism to fill a vice presidential vacancy.

Gerald Ford was quickly named and confirmed as Agnew's replacement at a time when the President had some legal problems of his own. Yet, while Agnew cartoons were instantly recognizable, six months into Ford's vice presidency Oliphant still found it necessary to write Ford's name on his chest.

"I'd Like You to Meet Our New Vice-President" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, December 1974

No such problem with Nelson Rockefeller, the former Governor of New York who had run for the presidency in 1960, 1964, and 1968.

He did not make a lasting impression as Ford's second in command, however. Not long ago, contestants on Jeopardy! needed to come up with the name of the vice president who followed Gerald Ford, and none of the three knew who it was.

I'm sure my very intelligent readership had no problem spotting him in the cartoon at the top of today's post.

"Ah Plan a Highly Important Staff Role" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, January 1977

The vice presidency is notoriously a thankless make-work job. John Nance Garner likened it to a bucket of warm spit, or something that rhymed with it. Thomas Marshall joked about two brothers, one of whom went to sea while the other was elected Vice President, and neither was heard from again. Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Selina Meyers in Veep was a character study in constant frustration and humiliation.

Jimmy Carter actually followed through with his promise to give Walter Mondale a substantial policy role in his administration. Mondale, the first vice president to have an office inside the White House, was Carter's adviser and trouble-shooter, the Georgian's conduit to Capitol Hill Democrats.

"There Is No Truth Whatever in the Rumor" by Pat Oliphant, October 10, 1988

There was nothing fair about that purse Oliphant always drew with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush — Oliphant went further than almost any other mainstream editorial cartoonist in exploiting Bush's so-called Wimp Factor.

Having criticized Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics" when Bush was a rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Bush served as a major cheerleader for Reaganomics and the rest of that administration's policies. Behind the scenes, Bush continued the Mondale model of the vice presidency: an experienced advisor who didn't seek credit for administration successes. By the same token, he also avoided the limelight during the Iran-Contra scandal.

The purse, and the Wimp Factor, disappeared once Bush as President dispatched troops to overthrow the government of Panama.

"How Come Is It" by Pat Oliphant, January 9, 1992

Young and handsome J. Danforth Quayle presented cartoonists with a real caricaturing challenge, which Oliphant answered by drawing him as a child. The vice presidency didn't lend Quayle much opportunity to dispel the cartoonists' depiction of him as a callow, inexperienced goofball; attempting to correct a schoolboy's flawless spelling of "potato" didn't help him.

It was a case of peaking too soon; he might have been taken more seriously after a few more years gave him a face fit for presidential central casting. I wouldn't have recognized him in the second pew at Dick Cheney's funeral over three decades later if he hadn't been sitting next to his wife.

"Where Do We Put Mr. Gore" by Pat Oliphant, November 8, 1993

Oliphant leaned into Al Gore's wooden reputation here, a product of the Vice President's extremely careful, measured, parsed, and deliberate speaking style. If Dan Quayle came off as a not-too-bright schoolboy skating by on his looks, Al Gore could have been the guidance counselor patiently explaining the importance of responsible life choices to a school assembly full of Quayles.

"The Energy Show" by Pat Oliphant, May 1, 2001

Dick Cheney was a completely different animal than any previous Vice President. Oliphant consistently portrayed him as the real power behind a frat boy President who got the job on the strength of having been a legacy student who made it to graduation because Dad's name was on a wing of the administration building.

Chief of Staff for President Ford, Congressman from Wyoming, and Defense Secretary under Bush the Elder, Cheney was more recently Chair of the Halliburton Corporation, a multinational oil service conglomerate. Tapped to find Bush the Younger a running mate in 2000, he found one in the mirror.

"I'm Smilin' Joe Biden and I'm Running for President" by Pat Oliphant, January 23, 2013

A commenter at Daily Cartoonist regretted that Pat Oliphant had never drawn Joe Biden. True, Oliphant's eyesight had failed him by the time Biden won the presidency; but he had drawn Biden as Vice President (and as Senator).

Which is where this Graphical History Tour must wrap things up. I know of no Oliphant cartoons of Mike Pence or Kamala Harris, and it's highly unlikely that he ever drew J.D. Vance.

On the other hand, I could have included cartoons he drew of former Vice Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman, and there is probably one of Teddy Roosevelt somewhere along the line. But this post is already long enough.

And I could never be certain that I hadn't missed a cartoon featuring William Rufus Devane King or Charles Curtis.

Q Toon: Will He Be Greeted with Flowers?

Looking over my shoulder as I was sending this cartoon to my syndicate editors over the weekend, my husband asked the immortal question: "Too soon?"

If anything, my publication schedule rendered this cartoon too late. The news cycle keeps on rollin', and all the other editorial cartoonists have moved on to other topics.

Frankly, mine is perhaps the mildest cartoon about the passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney that I've seen. Quite a few of my colleagues chose to chastise him one last time for leading the country into Iraq War II under false pretenses and with unrealistic expectations. 

Those weapons of mass destruction were never found, and we were greeted not with flowers but with IEDs. Then there was the true cost of the war: not the $728 billion spent by the U.S. government on hostilities, but 4,492 U.S. soldiers killed and 32,292 wounded, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Iraqis killed.

Looking back from an LGBTQ+ perspective (as your humble scribbler did this past Saturday), one can muster up a demimodicum of sympathy for a man who has been rated the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history who had to hold his tongue is deference to the homophobic policies of his President that worked to the detriment of his own daughter. George W. Bush campaigned for reelection pushing a constitutional amendment denigrating people like Mary Cheney, in a committed but legally unrecognized relationship with a woman with whom she would raise a family.

Democrats exploited that conflict in 2004, earning the Cheneys' everlasting resentment; but he was after all the loyal Republican from his days as Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff onward. But then, Republicans turned on Dick and Lynne's other daughter after Donald Trump's thwarted coup attempt in January, 2021. Liz Cheney joined Adam Kinzlinger on the House impeachment panel, the only two House Republicans brave enough to stand up for country over party.

Even the Wyoming Republican Party turned against the Cheneys; Liz was trounced in her 2022 reelection bid for not pledging allegiance to Trump, who has complained ever since that she ought to be prosecuted for treason. 

For the first time in his long life, Dick Cheney endorsed a Democrat for President in 2024. Publicly and strongly.

Not that it helped Kamala Harris a whole hell of a lot. But it's the thought that counts.

Is Cheney's unjust war outweighed by turning away from the Dark Side in his twilight years? You, dear reader, get to decide which direction the celestial elevator in today's cartoon is headed.

Heavy responsibility, ain't it?

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.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Hi there, folks!

I will have a regularly scheduled editorial cartoon this week, and it will have something to do with election season, but I'm afraid it won't be about tomorrow's vice presidential candidates' debate. I wish they would schedule these things on Sundays so that I can have a timely cartoon about them, but this year's debates have all been in the middle of the week.

I'll be away at the combined convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and the Association of Canadian Cartoonists in Montréal later this week, so I may not have time before I pack up and leave to draw, scan, and colorize a cartoon about whatever transpires between Messrs. Vance and Walz tomorrow night.

Which would disappoint me if I can't. Vice presidential debates historically make little to no difference in the outcome of an election, but tend to have some of the most memorable moments.

Lloyd Bentsen crushing Dan Quayle: "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." 

Adm. James Stockdale: "Who am I? Why am I here?"

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. ...."
Gwen Ifill (after Edwards finished criticizing Republicans' proposed Definition of Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution): "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."

Sarah Palin: "In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it."

And who can forget the fly on Mike Pence's hair?

August Four the People

You've been waiting all month to find out what cartoons I drew in Augusts past, I can tell. So let's rummage around in the old storage bin and see what we can find, shall we?

Back in May, I posted a cartoon I'd posted of Ronald Reagan preparing to tell jokes at the funeral of U.S.-Soviet détente. When I had selected it for that week's Graphical History Tour, I thought I had drawn it after Reagan's "We begin the bombing in five minutes" joke. Looking the quotation up, however, I found that I must have drawn the cartoon about something else he said.

August, 1984

This was the cartoon I drew shortly after the actual bombing joke.

In case you're not familiar with the story, Reagan was in the habit of making pretend announcements during the sound checks before his television and radio speeches. The sound checks were not confined to the studio, but went out to all the stations that would carry the speech live. Usually, the media overlooked those flippant pseudo-announcements except for the technicians checking for feedback, hiss, and warble.

This time, ears perked up at Reagan's joke: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." In spite of a standing agreement with the media that Reagan's mic check jests would be their little secret, this one leaked out, was reported by Gannett newspapers, and became world news.

The Soviet government (should I have explained that this was when Constantin Chernenko was spending the last few months in his mortal coil being President of the U.S.S.R.?) was officially mum about the incident, but their state media condemned Reagan's joke as "unprecedently hostile," and proof that he wasn't interested in improving U.S.-Russia relations. Some unknown Soviet officer in Vladivostok returned the joke by sending a coded message that "We now embark on military action against the U.S. forces," knowing the message would be intercepted by U.S. intelligence. U.S. and Japanese militaries were briefly on high alert, but afterward, everybody had a good laugh over it.

Just kidding.

I still haven't figured out what incident prompted my earlier cartoon, but it was the better one; and that's why it was the one printed in the first UW-Parkside Ranger of the fall semester rather than this one.

Any cartoon that depicts bullets flying at a president of the United States (or any other real person for that matter) runs the risk of becoming in bad taste if that person does in fact get shot. Which, as you surely know, Ronald Reagan had been three months into his first term. Even though Reagan was known for his roles in B-grade western movies, Americans don't like watching their leaders get shot at.

Could've been why no TV network would broadcast Reagan's film The Killers (1964) while he was president. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., August 22, 1994

In June of 1994, I confidently drew a cartoon assuming that the Republican Party would have a tough time finding a candidate to run against my district's Democratic Congressman, Peter Barca. Barca had won a special election one year earlier to succeed eleven-term Rep. Les Aspin after the latter was appointed Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Defense.

As it turned out, the 1994 election would see a rematch between Kenoshan Barca and Mark Neumann, a real estate developer from Janesville. And Neumann would coast to victory in the Gingrich-led Republican "Contract with America" wave in November, putting an end to the longest stretch of having Democrats in the First Congressional District seat.

Neumann was (and presumably still is) a hard-line right-winger, solidly anti-abortion and against President Bill Clinton's attempt to reform the U.S. health care system. The GOP talking point against the Clinton reforms was that Americans would be denied the right to make their own health care choices — ignoring that their Contract with America also called for denying women the right to make their own reproductive health care choices.

Which was a fine and dandy campaign slogan for Republicans until their Supreme Court justices granted their wish and Republicans had to deal with women upset by government control over their uteri.

Wisconsin's First Congressional District has had two Congressmen, both Republicans, since Mark Neumann's failed run for Russ Feingold's Senate seat in 1998. In the meantime, Peter Barca served as Bill Clinton's Midwest Regional Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, then went back to representing Kenosha in the Madison legislature, and later headed the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

And now, thirty years later, he's running for his old congressional seat against incumbent Republican Bryan Steil. My better half and I talked with him at an open-air party in downtown Racine last month; he liked my Kamala Harris For The People button.

I neglected to mention that I had been drawing cartoons about him for the Journal Times thirty years earlier.

Hearkening back to 2004, here are a couple of people you did not see at the Republican National Convention last month:

for Q Syndicate, August, 2004

Come to think of it, I don't think we saw any former Republican nominees for President or Vice President on the Republican National Convention dais except for the current ones. Although to be fair, if Al Gore, John Kerry, or John Edwards spoke at the DNC this week, I missed it.

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I couldn't think of a good segue to any of the cartoons I drew in August of 2014, so here's some eye candy.

for Q Syndicate, August 2014

"That's So Gay" was the motto of the 2014 Gay Games, held in Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, that August.

By the way, given the kerfuffle over two female Olympians who had aspersions cast upon their gender, you might be interested to know how the Gay Games address transgender and non-binary-identifying athletes.

The Sydney Gay Games in 2002 defined gender by social identity: In the game of netball at those Games, the solution was for women’s, men’s, mixed and transgender competitions, with negotiations of rules and membership according to the gender that participants lived. These measures included removing the burden of proof from athletes to provide documentation, and instead assuming that all are genuine in their gender category selection. This was the most inclusive gender policy developed at that time, and it remains in place today.

The Gay Games were scheduled to be held in Hong Kong in 2022. They were pushed back a year due to COVID-19. New Chinese laws criminalizing "effeminate men," as well as concerns by Taiwanese athletes that they risked arrest, plus pandemic-related travel restrictions, led to a decision to split the 2023 games between Hong Kong and Guadalajara, Mexico. 

If you missed (or miss) the Paris Olympic Games this summer, the Gay Games in Valencia, Spain, are just two years away.

 

This Week's Sneak Peek

Aside from a caricature four years ago, I think this is the first feature length Bernie cartoon I've ever drawn. About time I got around to it, I suppose.

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I was replacing more of those defunct links to the old AAEC site the other night and came across one that, unlike every other one I've been replacing, still showed the cartoon thumbnail. 

(Don't bother clicking there to view; the above is just a screen grab, as is this example of what the rest of the defunct links have looked like.)

Like all the rest, the link led to a 404 Page Not Found message at the new AAEC site. It's just odd that the thumbnail still exists somewhere in the cloud or the ether or the wherevernet. There aren't any of my cartoons older than 2010 at the new AAEC site. 

I didn't have the flash drive with 2007 cartoons handy the other night... I'm kind of tempted to keep the defunct link up as a souvenir, though.

The Cabinet of Dr. Feelgood

In light of Donald Joffrey Trump's failed nomination of presidential physician Adm. Ronny Jackson as Secretary of Veterans' Affairs, Snookerback Saturday takes a look at a few other aborted cabinet nominations of the past.

The Granddaddy of failed cabinet nominations was President Andrew Johnson's attempt to appoint Lorenzo Thomas as Secretary of War in 1868. It was not the first such appointment, but it was the only one that resulted in the impeachment of a U.S. President.

"The Situation," unsigned in Harper's Weekly, March 7, 1868

Republicans in Congress had passed a law to prevent Johnson from firing Edwin Stanton (holding the cannon sponge in the above cartoon), the Secretary of War whom he had inherited from Abraham Lincoln. Johnson fired him anyway — twice — and named Major General Lorenzo Thomas (leaning against Johnson) to replace him. Congress drew up eleven articles of impeachment, three of which charged that Thomas's appointment was unconstitutional, and four more of which accused Johnson and Thomas of conspiring "to hinder and prevent Edwin M. Stanton, then and there, the Secretary for the Department of War...from holding said office."

The Senate ultimately fell one vote shy of the 2/3 majority needed to convict Johnson, but by then, the president had agreed to withdraw Thomas's nomination. Stanton didn't get the job back either;  Gen. John Schofield served as Secretary of War for the remaining months of the Johnson administration.

The Thomas episode revolved about momentous policy issues of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Modern Day failed nominations so far have not risen to the level of impeachable offenses, but we'll see what happens when Trump tries to replace the top echelons of the Justice Department with Michael Cohen, Jared Kushner, and whoever does his hair.

In the meantime, I'm starting with President George H.W. Bush's nomination of Senator John Tower (R-TX) to be Secretary of Defense in 1989. As a Senator, Tower had wielded considerable power and influence as Chair of the Armed Services Committee; after leaving the Senate, he headed the presidential commission investigating the Iran-Contra affair. Some conservatives of the day considered him too moderate, however, and other colleagues found him brusque and overbearing. Once he was named to President Bush's cabinet, he was beset by allegations, leveled at him during a bitter divorce two years earlier, that he was a boozer and womanizer.

For the first time in history, the Senate rejected an incoming president's cabinet nominee, voting 47-53 against their former colleague. Some Senators were only too happy to give Tower his comeuppance. "They're pretty straightforward what they do in Beirut," Tower said later, comparing Washington D.C. to the then war-torn capital of Lebanon. "They hurl a grenade at someone or shoot a machine gun. Up here, it's a little more subtle, but just as ruthless, just as brutal. They kill you in a different way."

Bush's replacement nomination of Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney went off without a hitch, and I'll probably come back to this cartoon again someday. But let's move on to the next administration and its stumble out of the blocks trying to name an Attorney General.

Zoë Baird was Bill Clinton's first nominee to head the Justice Department in 1993, but was compelled to withdraw after it became public that she and her husband had hired undocumented immigrants as nanny and chauffeur; moreover, they had not paid required Social Security taxes on those employees' wages.  It turned out that Clinton's second choice, Kimba Wood, had also hired an undocumented immigrant as a nanny; but unlike Baird, she had paid the woman's Social Security taxes. Wood had done nothing illegal, but the stink of "Nannygate" resulted in Clinton going with his third choice, Janet Reno.

Nor was Clinton quite finished fumbling his Justice Department appointments. He withdrew his appointment of Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General in June of 1993 over Republican complaints that her academic writings supposedly revealed her to be a "quota queen."

Kimba Wood, by the way, has been back in the news lately as the judge presiding over motions arising out of the search warrant of Trump affair-fixer Michael Cohen's home and office.

Returning to the Clinton Administration: After the resignation of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin in December, 1993, Clinton named Admiral Bobby Ray Inman to replace him. Aspin had not been popular within the Pentagon, and took the fall for military fatalities in Somalia.

At first, Inman's appointment basked in bipartisan support; but then he abruptly withdrew his nomination, angrily complaining to the press about New York Times columnist William Safire accusing him of "anti-Israel bias." Inman also claimed that Senators Bob Dole (R-KS) and Trent Lott (R-MS) were planning to "turn up the heat" on his nomination, which both senators denied.

There have been other unsuccessful cabinet nominations since these, but none that I have cartooned about, I'm afraid. As had Baird and Wood, a couple of George W. Bush's nominees had undocumented immigrant troubles; now that we have a president whose hotels, golf courses and other assorted ventures have no doubt seen their share of undocumented workers, I guess that's not such a big deal any more. The Obama administration started off with a trio of failed cabinet nominations: Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson and Judd Gregg all withdrew from consideration for one reason or another.

I don't recall any of those past presidents calling up cable TV morning news crews to throw a tantrum live on the air, however. Unless perhaps Andrew Johnson sent a nasty telegram to Harper's Weekly.

The Second Time Around

For Stonetempleback Saturday today, I'm just going to throw out an example of A Better Idea hitting me after deadline.

In September 1991, months after pulling American troops out of the Iraq War I, President George H.W. Bush's administration was again being bedeviled by Saddam Hussein. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Department of Defense had to come up with another reason for their space-based missile programs and Hussein's refusal to accept defeat quietly was the best they could do.

That's Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff John Sununu flanking President Bush The Elder. Vice President Dan Quayle is the kid making the veiled reference to Communist China, a "most favored nation trading partner."

I can't say I was entirely pleased with that cartoon. Depicting Vice President J. Danforth Quayle as an intellectual lightweight was pretty low-hanging fruit in those days. Somebody actually devoted an entire quarterly publication to it, in fact.

Volume 1, Number 1, page 1.

I got the cartoon done by deadline, and that was the important thing at that moment in time.

Another issue in the news 25 years ago this month was the fear that the U.S. economy wasn't recovering as it had appeared to be: the talk was of a "double dip recession." And thence came a much better cartoon idea than the first.

For that matter, it resulted in a much better caricature of Bush.

By the way, The Quayle Quarterly was put out of business by the 1992 election. They did not move on to become The Al Goreterly.

GOP Conventions Past

Since I've already posted about 1916 this week, for today's installment of Swerveback Saturday, I rummage through the dusty crate of my own cartoons.

The topic this week is cartoons about Republican National Conventions. I didn't draw national issue toons for a newspaper that published during the summer until 1988, so that's where we'll start. My George H.W. Bush caricature didn't quite come together until this second one:

My caricature of Vice President Dan Quayle never really came together at all, so I don't miss him as a national figure.

Skipping an entire generation, all I can find from 1992 to 2000 is this never-published one. It might have worked better in a vertical (portrait) orientation, so that I'd have had room to draw George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's with their arms raised.

As you've seen, these convention cartoons are usually about the candidates; but once in a while, the convention itself comes up for discussion. There was never any contest for the Republican nomination when Dubya ran for reelection in 2004...

...so instead I coupled the GOP keeping its LGBT supporters at arms length with its introduction of a "free protest zone" that year.

The party platform always gets a lot of attention at convention time, even if it becomes wide open to interpretation afterward.

Because...

Q Toons: There's Something About Liz

Longtime Virginia resident Liz Cheney, conservative talking head and elder daughter of Dubya's Vice President, has returned to her childhood home of Wyoming to run for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate race in 2014 (that nomination being the de facto general election, it being Wyoming.)

She's taking on sitting Republican Senator Mike Enzi by running to the right of the solidly conservative Senator -- he garnered a 96% voting rating from the American Conservative Union in 2012. She's doing her best to appeal to the teahadist, theocratic dittoheads who have been agitating to return the U.S. to frontier values, just like in Deadwood and The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Enzi's supporters have tried to undercut Cheney's appeal to theocrats by suggesting that she might support marriage equality, insofar as Cheney's sister, Mary, married her longtime partner, Heather Poe, last year, and the two are the parents of Liz's two nieces, aged 2 and 6. Liz responded by telling the world that she doesn't believe in Mary and Heather's marriage.

“I am strongly pro-life and I am not pro-gay marriage,” Cheney said in a statement released by her campaign. “I believe the issue of marriage must be decided by the states, and by the people in the states, not by judges and not even by legislators, but by the people themselves.”

We are told that the Cheney's are a close-knit family, but they have had such a difficult time accepting Mary's family publicly that she must be used to it by now. When Mary and Heather were expecting their first child, Vice President Dick got testy with reporters asking him about it. My cartoon about that made it into the Los Angeles Times:

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q SyndicateϪJan 31, 2007 EditorialCartoonists.com

Dick Cheney -- and his different-sex wife, Lynne -- had also gotten testy when Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards attempted to goad him into supporting or rejecting Mary in a 2004 televised debate...

Now that Dick Cheney is safely out of the Vice Presidency, he has been more publicly supportive of Mary and her family. But, presumably, he is no longer interested in running for elective office, and doesn't have to pander to that influential Republican constituency that has been devoted to devaluing, demeaning and destroying families such as the Poe-Cheneys for more than a generation.

I'd like to think that the Focus on the Family Tea Party Birther nativist English-only God-Guns-and-GOP folks are not all as nasty, mean and vile as the ones that dominate Fox News, AM radio, TP rallies, and internet comment sections -- that among them are some who are not completely heartless misanthropes.

But perhaps Liz Cheney knows them better than I do.