Q Toon: The Bottom Line

Heading into the final stretch, the midterm election elections keep getting steered into silliness by our Codger In Chief.

Donald T. Rump campaigned in Texas for Almost As Corrupt Ken Paxton by telling voters what an homely slob the guy is. Then he went to Georgia and waxed rhapsodic about how gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson is such a hunky slab of chiseled beefcake.

In Ohio, T-Rump got even more creepy, praising Senator Jon Husted’s firm, shapely buttocks. Later, just in case he was coming across as a wee bit too gay, Trump shared how much he enjoyed gazing at Nicki Minaj’s caboose, too.

Is making callipygiosity into a campaign issue just Trump’s way of distracting everybody from Vivek Ramaswami’s totally cringe endorsement by the kitten-killer widow of Amy Acton’s child molester step-father? Maybe not; but on the other hand, he’s kept his yap shut about any of their derrières.

✍

P.S.: I had wanted to draw at least one cartoon during this campaign about Michigan’s Senate race between Mike Rogers and Abdul el-Sayed as a nod to my Between the Lines readers, but, since T-rump apparently has no opinions regarding Rogers’s posterior, I could never come up with an original LGBTQ+ angle. 

Now I’ve just read that el-Sayed has got an ad up on Grindr, which certainly would have been worth a cartoon. (The ad was actually produced and paid for by the Christopher Street Project, an organization solely dedicated to electing champions for the transgender community.)

Sadly, my next cartoon for Q Syndicate — based in Ann Arbor, by the way — will only come out after the polls have closed.

So Ohio will have to do.

October and Ober Again

In lieu of enjoying fresh autumn air and colorful fall foliage, this week's Graphical History Tour rummages through the dank and dusty vaults of Bergetoon Cellars in search of a half century of October scribblings. 

1976

in Park Beacon, Racine WI, Oct. 1, 1976

This week's tour starts off with a bit of genuine juvenilia. (Is there a singular form of that word?) I drew this cartoon for my high school paper to accompany a brief column by another student about her time as a Navy brat in the Philippines four years earlier.

It sounds absolutely dreadful. After a 25-hour flight with stops in Alaska and Japan, she, her mother, and her siblings arrived in the height of monsoon season. Visibility was nil due to rain and fog, her sister was running a fever, and her step-father wasn't there to take them to Sulric (sic) Naval Base. They eventually got onto a bus for a five-hour ride on roads that were all but impassible.

Something might be missing from Brenda's story after the harrowing account of her family's arrival. They finally made it to Sulric (Subic?); her mother phoned the step-father; he arrived and asked if they were ready to go; and all plane reservations were cancelled for another week. The End.

I checked: Brenda had no Part II in the next issue.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette WI, October, 1986

I think I may have already posted in this blog every cartoon I ever drew in October of 1986, including this one.

My cartoons for the NorthCountry Journal were meant to complement each month's editorial. This one had to do with erosion control efforts for Wisconsin farmland, most of which is in the Mississippi River watershed.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Oct. 3, 1996

People (usually Republicans) used to talk about needing to run government like a business. Well, before Trump started running it like one of his businesses, anyway.

Pabst Brewery was once a premier powerhouse in the Milwaukee beer industry, but was falling on hard times by the late 1990's. The corporate solution was to renege on their commitments to retirees who had devoted a lifetime to the firm.

It took another generation before Pabst became, if not popular, trendy again in Wisconsin, and it didn't last long.

The lesson to be learned is: the folks who have done the actual work are expendable. That is how business is run nowadays, and how Republicans who want government run like a business run government.

2006

Q Syndicate, October, 2006

With yet another school shooting in the news this week, and Republicans campaigning against the LGBTQ community for lack of anything positive to say about their own record, I think it's worth bringing this cartoon back today.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it has proven nearly impossible to get through to those devotees of the second half of the Second Amendment. I thought this was worth a try.

Now, for you ammosexuals out there, I will readily admit that the latest slaughter at Bend, Oregon, was stopped by one of those fabled, if ever-elusive, Good Guys With a Gun. But only if you will also admit that a sixteen-year-old who is too young to drink alcohol responsibly is also too young to have a high-powered rifle of his very own.

2016

for Q Syndicate, October, 2016

Finally, we are just about up to the moment of Donald Berzilius Trump's first election, thanks to the Electoral College, of the presidency of the United States.

His most fervent supporters, then as now, were the religious right, neoconservatives, urban-hating rednecks, alt-right neo-Nazis, and Russia Russia Russia. There were also Log Cabin Republicans and the even more right-wing GOProud gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and Caitlyn Jenner, enthusiastically shilling for Trump in spite of the palpable contempt for them from all the folks in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Conventional wisdom even in the final weeks of the campaign was that Hillary Clinton was going to trounce Trump handily. There was even talk of her winning in perennially Republican Utah and Arizona.

Which I bring up a propos of, oh, nothing ... just the excited talk of flipping House and Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and my own back yard in a couple of weeks from now.

Toon: He Calls It As He Seized It

I was considering drawing a cartoon naming Donald Joffrey Trump as Vladimir Putin's "Apprentice" (get it? get it?). Then I decided I'd rather go with a more up-to-date reference.

Brevity being the soul of wit, I'm sure that if this conversation between Trump and Putin ever occurred, Trump would go on and on about how nobody knew that dumb has a "B" in it and he's so surprised that he hadn't thought of this clever wordplay before now; and then he'd repeat the joke and congratulate himself for being such a stable genius, much better than that Jimmy Kimmel fellow who gets such lousy ratings and ABC ought to lose its broadcast license, just like CNN and the failed New York Times because everybody says Trump should have gotten the Nobel Prize for bringing peace to the Gulf of America but they refuse to report it—

All the while, Putin would have shut off the portion of his brain that translates English to Russian much earlier.

Toon: Schmitt Republicans Say

In case you didn't catch it on C-Span or just about every news organization besides Fox Noisemax yesterday, Senate Republicans hauled former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith before the Judiciary Committee to castigate him for having the temerity to investigate Donald Berzelius Trump for his role in his January 6, 2021 attempted overthrow of the United States government.

Senator Eric Schmitt thought he had Smith in a perjury trap. Flashing a poster board of some on-line messages so quickly nobody could read them, Schmidt pressed Smith to repeat his testimony that he had not gone to Georgia in February, 2024, presumably to coordinate witness testimony there. Schmitt had his "Gotcha! moment" all set up: the text messages proved that Smith was at a Atlanta Hawks basketball game on February 3, 2024.

Schmitt concluded his presentation in highest dudgeon, scolding Smith, "You will go down as a total dirtbag!"

It turns out that Smith was at an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Baltimore that day.

Senator Amy Klobuchar helped clear that up, and suggested that Schmitt owed Smith an apology for calling him a dirtbag on the basis of a mistaken text message.

Instead, Schmitt fumed, "I stand by my statement."

Government v. Press

This week's Graphical History Tour bravely sallies forth against censorship of newsmedia in the United States.

As a political cartoonist who has just been among a few dozen other political cartoonists, Your Humble Scribbler has a vested interest against censorship of editorial cartoons in particular. 

During the First Golden Age of my profession, in the late 18th Century and into the next, newspaper publishers saw the popularity and influence of the Thomas Nasts and Johannes Kepplers drawing for the national weeklies, and hired some of the best editorial cartoonists to grace their newspapers' front pages. And not incidentally, to push the publishers' political agendas.

"No Honest Man Need Fear Cartoons" by Homer Davenport in New York Journal, Apr. 22, 1897

Local politicians did not take kindly to being lampooned on those front pages. Upset by Homer Davenport's cartoons of influential Republican Mark Hanna, New York political boss Senator Thomas Platt, pushed a bill in the state assembly to ban cartoon depictions of real persons without their consent.

Davenport drew the parallel with Platt's predecessor, William Tweed, who had famously complained that although his constituents didn't read the papers, they saw "them damn pictures." Platt's bill failed to pass, but that didn't stop similar bills from cropping up elsewhere.

"The Governor Has His Revenge" by Robert Edgren in San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 25, 1899

A copycat bill by California Republicans failed to pass on its first go-around, but was passed during the next legislative session and signed by newly elected Republican Governor Henry Tifft Gage. As in New York, the partisan Democratic cartoons in Hearst newspapers were a major impetus for the bill; specifically, a cartoon of Gage being led on a leash by railroad magnate C.P. Huntington.

Having been signed into law, California's anti-cartoon bill was laughed — and ignored — into obscurity. Hearst cartoonist Robert Edgren offered an unusual motive for Governor Gage to sign the anti-cartoon bill: that the cartoonists were not drawing him any more.

Frankly, the man was a caricaturist's dream. Too bad he was voted out of office after one term.

by Walter McDougall in North American, Philadelphia, Jan. 30, 1903

Responding to daily cartoons in Philadelphia's North American by Charles Nelan depicting gubernatorial candidate Samuel Pennypacker as the pet parrot of Republican Party boss Senator Matthew Quay, Pennypacker's inaugural address demanded censorship of the "disreputable" North American. Obligingly, State Representative Frederick Pusey introduced a bill outlawing publication of any cartoon 

"portraying, describing, or representing any person, either by distortion, innuendo, or otherwise, in the form or likeness of beast, bird, fish, insect, or other unhuman animal, thereby tending to expose such person to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule."

The North American's other editorial cartoonist, Walt McDougall, responded with a cartoon stretched across the top of the front page depicting Quay, Pusey, and Pennypacker as a series of inanimate objects. (I have folded his cartoon to fit into a square format.) In an accompanying editorial, McDougall exhorted his fellow cartoonists, "Every cartoonist has a Noah's Ark full of worn, broken, and decrepit animals, bugs, and such, but the fresh vegetable field is untouched."

Pusey's bill nevertheless passed the Pennsylvania legislature and Pennypacker signed it into law. It was promptly repealed after Pennypacker was defeated in the next election.

by Frank Spangler in Montgomery [Ala.] Advertiser, Feb. 3, 1915 

As part of a package of election regulation laws, the Alabama legislature entertained a bill sponsored by Samuel D. Weakly prohibiting the caricature of any "prominent" man or politician. "It will make the average newspaper reader smile," the Advertiser editorialized, 

"that a sacred class is to be made of officeholders and office seekers, for they are the bulk of prominent people whom newspapers cartoon. A cartoon is a semi-editorial expression, and a powerful method of reaching public opinion, because ridicule and sarcasm are vividly presented to the eye. Both weapons are enormously effective on the stump, and there is no reason why the press should be deprived of their use. In fact, such a bill is a distinct effort to muzzle the press, and is an infringement of its constitutional powers."

As far as I have been able to determine, Weakly's proposal did not make it into the final bill. The Act (#171, § 11) did require cartoons expressing an opinion on any candidate or election issue to include "upon its face" the name of the newspaper's owner or the chief executive of its corporation.

"The Light that Must Not Fail" by Harry Murphy ca. May 5, 1917

U.S. entry into World War I opened the doors for government censorship of newspapers, and not just for their cartoons.

The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime to publish with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies during wartime; to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States; or to willfully obstruct military recruiting or enlistment.  The Act also gave the Postmaster General authority to impound publications that he determined to be in violation of the Act.

"That Wooden One" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 5, 1917

The U.S. was drawn into Europe's war due in part to the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania by a German U-boat. Nelson Harding, in a single-column cartoon on the Brooklyn Eagle's front page, turned the incident back against advocates for press censorship.

"Is This Somewhere in Germany or Somewhere in America" by Beaumont Fairbank in Brooklyn Sunday Eagle, May 5, 1918

In the same newspaper on the same day, Beaumont Fairbank drew his cartoon in support of an amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) stating, 

"The use of the mails should not be permitted to any newspaper, magazine, periodical, circulars or pamphlets which are printed in whole or in part in the German language." 

Fairbank was by no means alone in advocating governmental censorship of the foreign language press. While that amendment had failed to be included in the final bill, local officials outlawed German-language newspapers in several cities in New Jersey and Long Island.

"Wenn Uns Jetzt Unsere Vorväter Sehen Könnten" by John Lenz in Vorbote, Chicago, Oct. 31, 1917

Protest against this censorship was almost exclusively limited to the foreign language newspapers themselves. The banner behind Congress in John Lenz's cartoon translates to "Freedom of Speech, Press Freedom, Right of Assembly." The rolled parchments beneath George Washington represent the Constitution and First Amendment.

"O Sorry Plight" by Arthur Young in Masses, New York, September, 1917

The Creel Commission also employed the U.S. Post Office to censor publication of material counter to the official line. Art Young's cartoon above appeared in the September issue of  the marxist, antiwar Masses after Burleson's USPS had declared the August issue "unmailable under the Act of June 15, 1917."

"A Convenient Perch" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, May, 1918

If Art Young expected other publications to rally in solidarity with Masses, he would be sadly mistaken. The Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel created a Bureau of Cartoons, which produced a weekly bulletin for cartoonists to direct their attention to matters the Wilson administration wanted them to draw about. By and large, cartoonists and their publishers fell right in line.

Masses ceased publication after its November/December issue.

"It's Nothing Important" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, Dec. 20, 1972

Jumping ahead over half a century, President Richard Nixon tried very hard to force newsmedia to slant the news the way he wanted it reported. His administration enlisted the Federal Communications Commission to pressure television networks, cut funding to public broadcasting, and took newspapers to court. He was stymied, however, without a cooperative Congress or courts.

Instead, his communications team went on to found Fox News.

"Ask Me Anything" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, Nov. 15, 1973

In the meantime, we learned that President Richard Nixon kept an "enemies list" of critics of his administration, including many journalists. Nixon had always had a testy relationship with the media well before being elected president. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, it was revealed that he used the Justice Department, FBI, and Internal Revenue Service to open investigations against individuals on that list — although at least he never barred Jack Anderson, Daniel Schorr, or Mary McGrory from White House press briefings. 

for Bergetoons blog, August, 2018

There has been no assault on the media and the facts to rival the Absolutely Corrupt Donald Trump Regime's campaign to quash any reportage that doesn't fawn upon Dear Misleader. The two terms of his presidency have seen government websites erased, responsible reporters banned first from the Pentagon and now the White House, and weaponization against the media of both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, this time with general compliance on the part of Congress and the Supreme Court.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2025

Unless approved by Trump himself, it's all just fake news.

"They give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away, ... That’s all they do. If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said. But when you go back, take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They're giving me all this bad press, and they're getting a license. When you have a network and they have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that's all they do — that license, they're not allowed to do that!" — Donald Joffrey Trump, September 16, 2025

Q Toon: Or a Steal at $2.44 Each

The cartoonist who's all about the LGBTQ+ issues wants to draw about the federal debt this week? What gives?

Well, folks, since Trump's Treasury Secretary is openly gay, I'm taking that as an opening to draw about fiscal policy once in a while. I did try to draw about transportation issues during the previous administration occasionally, although Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was a little more public about his private life than Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is, so some of those cartoons had nothing to do with policy.

When Donald Commodus Trump named Bessent to his cabinet in 2024, the conventional wisdom was that Bessent would be one of the few adults in the room. Unlike the rest of the cabinet of random MAGA hotheads and docile spineless lickspittles, he was supposedly qualified for his post. In my first cartoon about him, my characters Max and Leo predicted that because of this, he'd be gone in ten months.

It turns out that I, Max, Leo, and conventional wisdom were all wrong.

Scott Bessent has gone from being a George Soros and Democrat backer to full-fledged, pass-me-the-Kool-aid, Trump-ass-kissing drone. And if that's not enough metaphorical imagery for you, it looks like he ain't leaving any time soon. There may be time for him to show up in plenty more cartoons.

When  Trump had the East Wing of the White House demolished, Bessent had the windows on that side of the Treasury Department building covered up so that nobody could get a look at, or photo of, the travesty across the street. When Trump wanted Treasury to add his own signature to U.S. currency, Bessent quickly ordered the engravers to get right on it.

When Trump decided he wanted to have his face on a proposed $250 bill, Treasury officials balked because federal law stipulates that "only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and securities." Bessent, however, told Kaitlan Collins, "I don’t think that there’s anything untoward about having the President of the United States on the 250th anniversary bill." 

Apparently, 31 U.S. Code § 5114, on the books since 1866, hasn't stopped Bessent's Treasury Department from minting a bunch of gold-plated one-dollar coins with Donald Still Alive And Bleating Trump glaring out at the suckers willing to shell out $2.44 to own one.

Because what are you going to do with it? Spend it? It is nominally worth only 41% of what you paid for it (or 65% of the $154 you'd splurge on 100 of them). Assuming that it doesn't become a modern day Confederate Dollar on January 21, 2029.

At least the coin has some gold leaf on the outside — perhaps a bit more than you would be able to strain out of a bottle of Goldschläger. That's more than the folks who fell for Trump Bitcoin will have when the con folds up his game and jets back to Mar-a-Lago in his Qatari Trump Force One.

Obsessive minds might have noticed that the number for how many times 1.54 goes into 40 trillion is strangely repetitive. (Had I not rounded the result off to the nearest whole number, those five digits would have continued on forever.) I suppose I could have used the unit price for a single Trump Commemorative Buck, which would have meant the Treasury needing to sell 16,393,442,622,951 of them.

But that sales figure sounds so much more attainable.

What's in a Name?

 Tariffic!

Q Toon: Trans Exit Hotline

We watch a lot of Ovation TV in our house, to the point where there are some program episodes we can identify within the first five seconds. My better half says he knows which commercials are going to be shown during which commercial break.

A commercial that seems to be replacing the one for buying gold offers a "hotline" to get people out of solar collector contracts, pretty much like those firms offering help getting out of timeshares. I didn't even know dissatisfaction with solar energy was a thing; when I tried googling for news about it, all that came up was a report that quoted only talk radio hosts.

So anyway, that was the inspiration for this week's Q Syndicate cartoon. Donald Commodus Trump made the weird boast in panel #1 during a campaign appearance over the weekend for Lindsey Graham's sister, Darline, in South Carolina. I've quoted him verbatim, except for adding the word transgender from earlier in his diatribe.

You can tell it's the way he talks, because I wouldn't have come up with that "Nobody ever heard about it" sentence myself. It's superfluous and doesn't quite make sense; it's just Trump again boasting his strange belief that his stable genius brain discerns all sorts of things no other human being is capable of ever having conceived before.

Now, I will concede that gender reassignment surgery isn't for everybody, so it is possible that a handful of people who thought it would solve all their problems come to realize that it didn't. It's up to them and their health care professionals to decide whether to pause, halt, or reverse their transition; no responsible physician would consult with the Absolutely Corrupt President of the United States for his Rx.

There is a reason, however, that nobody ever heard about the hospitals kowtowing to Trump's order to perform reverse transgender surgery — which, for the sake of brevity, I will hereinafter call "snart surgery." (Surely nobody has ever heard about it.)

Top snart surgery would be based on traditional breast augmentation/reduction procedures; I imagine that bottom snart surgery isn't absolutely impossible, either. I doubt, however, that it would be 100% effective, and I'm absolutely certain that even if Trump were able to order snart surgery done on you, neither he nor his Republican Congress are ever gonna foot the bill. 

The Dog Days of Cartooning

Or, You Cannot Be Sirius.

1986

in Iconoplastic, Poughkeepsie NY, August 1986

Our Graphical History Tour today delves deep into the Bergetoons vaults for its carefully ripened and aged cartoonistry.

Iconoplastic ("The Magazine for the Self-Interested") was published by a college classmate of mine, Mark Hopkins. The photocopied zine was a way for a bunch of us who had attended St. Olaf together to share our artwork and creative writing with each other. Most of the cartoons I sent to Mark had appeared previously in the UW-Parkside Ranger, but this was one I had drawn expressly for Iconoplastic.

Every one of the five issues of Iconoplastic was dated August, 1986; this cartoon appeared in the second of them. There was supposed to be a sixth and final issue in June of 1987, but if it was ever printed, I never got to see it.

I had begun writing the date in the margin of my cartoons, so I know that I actually drew the above cartoon in August of 1986. I'm sure that it had to do with Ronald Reagan's Missile Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 3, 1996

Why am I including this September cartoon in a collection of my August cartoons? Well, according to my margin notes, I drew it in August. Its topic was the 1996 Republican Party platform, a laundry list of religious right priorities, which the party's nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, told reporters he hadn't read.

The composition of this cartoon is a lot like one I had drawn two months earlier, but with a slightly different cast of Republicans standing behind Dole. Appearing between him and Newt Gingrich is probably the best caricature of Pat Buchanan that I ever produced, which is a pity, since I drew plenty of other cartoons in which he was the main focus rather than an extra in the background.

I had drawn the earlier cartoon for a summer semester issue of the Post that was never published, so I wasn't concerned that some reader might have thought they had seen this cartoon before. 

2006

for Q Syndicate, August 2006

There is nothing wrong with your set.

At some point during the sketching out of this cartoon, I realized that for the dialogue to read properly — for your eyes to read the straight line before the punch line — I either needed the second dialogue balloon to cover Mildred, or to flip the drawing horizontally 180 degrees.

I decided that rather than starting the whole cartoon over, I would just write the dialogue, my signature, and the date in mirror image, then flip the whole cartoon 180 degrees in Photoshop. Being left-handed, I ink my cartoons from right to left anyway, so as to avoid smearing wet ink with the side of my hand.

Here's how the published cartoon looked.

Visually, I think the composition of the cartoon worked better this way, too. The eye sees Luke and Brian first, then Mildred, and finally the two men talking behind Luke and Brian's back.

According to my marginalia, I drew this cartoon in August as a cartoon to be held in reserve, to be released sometime when I didn't send in a cartoon on deadline, so I can't be sure when it was actually published. I think my Better Half and I went on vacation that November, although that would have been an odd time for Mildred to be watering her garden and everyone else to be wearing shorts.

Unless they lived in Florida or southern California.

2016

for Q Syndicate, August 2016

Running for President in 2016, Donald Trump responded to the Pulse Night Club massacre by claiming that his anti-immigrant policies would protect LGBTQ+ Americans.

He didn't mention that the heavily Latino clientele of the Pulse Night Club was just the sort of people who would be targeted for exile to concentration camps in shithole countries by the Corrupt Trump Regime™'s ethnic cleansing program. 

And he apparently had no clue that the T stands for Transgender, people whose persecution would join that of Latinos and Moslems as Corrupt Trump Regime™ priorities.

That, and erecting monuments to himself all over Washington, D.C.

Drawing them discomfited by what I had Trump say in this cartoon, I gave a hefty benefit of the doubt to three of his ardent supporters: Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, and his running mate, Mike Pence. That benefit proved entirely undeserved. The three proved ready, willing, and eager to debase themselves in service of Dear Leader's alternative facts, phantom election fraud, and commitment to not just one, but two Corinthians.

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.

Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.