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.

Q Toon: Michele You Say

I thought I wouldn't be drawing any more cartoons about Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann now that she's retiring from Congress, but I guess I was wrong.

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Gay blogger/Sirius dude Mike Signorile tried to engage Bachmann on the topic of marriage equality at the Value Voters Summit, but she would have none of it. According to Signorile's tweet, she walked away sniffing that gay marriage is "not an issue... in fact, it's boring."

Bachmann later qualified the remark to the right-wing World Net Daily, saying, "What I said is that this won’t be the issue that drives the 2014 election. I told the reporter it’s getting boring having them only press this issue with Republicans while ignoring Democrats."

Bachmann has a history of running away from non-sycophantic reporters, so it's entirely believable that she is still very interested in discriminating against same-sex couples. The Republican party in general, however, has suddenly taken a vow of silence on the issue now that it appears opposition to marriage equality turns off moderate and independent voters.

Not that they're getting off that nest any time soon.

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(Something appears to have gone wrong with the AAEC site today. My apologies for the watermarked version of this week's cartoon, but I have to protect my editors' interests.)

This Week's Sneak Peek

Having spent so much time at the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning this weekend, I just tore a page out of a children's book for this week's cartoon.

And won't those children be ticked off when they find out!

Q Toon: The Christmas Court

It's customary among editorial cartoonists when stealing borrowing other cartoonists' creations to credit the other cartoonists with "apologies to..." or a similar note. We're not usually so assiduous about apologizing to film makers or 19th Century authors -- think of any of the myriad cartoons that use whatever current movie is out to draw some parallel to political or social events (my own from last week, for example). But it would have seemed discriminatory to have left Charles Dickens and Frank Capra out of this week's credits, so in they go.

Besides, I wasn't confident that everyone would recognize Mr. Potter.

Q Toon: Green ENDA and Ham

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) will reintroduce the Employment Non-Discrimination Act into the current Congress, although he concedes that it has virtually no chance of passage in the current Republican-majority House.

I wanted to draw the Capitol dome in the style of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, author of Green Eggs and Ham. His editorial cartoons for PM during World War II were drawn with the same whimsy and fantastic imagery that he used in his children's books. His GOP elephants look like Horton (of Who-hearing fame); his eagles more closely resemble sneetches than any eagle you've ever seen. Improbable machines and strange landscapes are common.

But the one and only drawing I found of the Capitol building was in the background of a November 18, 1941 cartoon, and is squarely representational:
Here I had visions of the dome topped with a lazily drooping attic and Wendy Who holding a torch aloft. In my minds eye, it looked so Seussian. On paper, I'm afraid it just looks like I don't know a thing about perspective. (Sketching and resketching the cartoon, I gradually shoved the figure atop the attic up and out of the cartoon frame.)