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?

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.

Family Matters

My cartoons very seldom make it into the mainstream press, but this one appeared in the Los Angeles Times back in January, 2007. I drew it after then Vice President Dick Cheney bristled at questions about his daughter Mary's family -- they were then expecting their first child -- during an interview on CNN by Wolf Blitzer.

Blitzer asked the vice president about a statement from Focus on the Family about whether having a child outside of a married mother or father is best for the child.
Cheney said Blitzer was "out of line" even asking the question about Mary Cheney and said he fundamentally disagreed with Blitzer's perspective.

It wasn't the first time the Cheney's had treated Mary and her partner, Heather Poe, as if there was something to be embarrassed about. In the 2004 vice presidential debate, Democratic nominee John Edwards cynically tried to prod Dick Cheney into discussing how the Republicans' gay-baiting, homophobic tactics affected the Vice President's own family. Mr. Cheney would have none of it, and his wife, Lynn, came out swinging afterward (although, to be fair, it was moderator Gwen Ifill who brought the subject up in the first place).

(This cartoon alludes to another point in the debate when Dick Cheney denied ever having met Senator Edwards in the U.S. Senate, a claim contradicted by the public record.)

Tune in again tomorrow.