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.

Jagged Little April

Today's Graphical History Tour continues rummaging through the dusty files of cartoons from my salad, appetizer, and cheese course days.

Last week's GHT left off with a cartoon marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so let's start off with this cartoon marking the twentieth.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 20, 1995

My cartoon was an homage to the famous one by David Levine of LBJ showing off his appendicitis scar. I was  commenting that we were still arguing over what the lessons of Vietnam were. Did we need to stop getting involved in domestic disputes overseas? Or was the problem that we failed to commit to overwhelming force?

It was a debate the U.S. was having in the absence of an International Communist Threat. The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald the End of History, whatever that meant; yet our supposed Peace Dividend had already been partly spent in the the former Yugoslavia and in Haiti.

One of my highly respected colleagues cast some shade last week on editorial cartoons that pay homage to classic editorial cartoons. I'm as guilty of that as anyone (I'll note that he and I have both ripped off Bill Mauldin's Weeping Lincoln cartoon). I guess if there is a rule about such things, it is to avoid copying someone else's idea that is already an overexposed meme on the internets.

I say that as someone who once cartooned Bill Clinton as a bunch of dancing screensaver babies.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 13, 1995

Sticking with April of 1995 for a moment but turning to a local issue: Milwaukee Aldermen Dan Schramm and Tom Nardelli objected to the Common Council settling a lawsuit by the family of Konerak Sinthasomphone to the tune of $850,000. Sinthasomphone was the 14-year-old Laotian-American boy returned to Jeffrey Dahmer's clutches by police officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak on May 27, 1991.

Schramm blamed Dahmer's victim for having put himself in danger, and Nardelli cast aspersions on his parents. We'll never know why Konerak didn't keep his distance from the man still on parole for drugging and sexually assaulting Konerak’s older brother; we do know why Gabrish and Balcerzak chose to believe the white serial killer rather than the Asian boy with a hole drilled through his skull or the Black women who called the police for help.

Can't we talk about something more pleasant?

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 8, 2005

Jumping ahead to April of 2005, here's another local issue cartoon. Sort of. 

Before getting into the topic of the cartoon, I just want to point out that I spent a lot of time and effort drawing in black around all that verbiage on the chalkboard. The verbiage isn't white-out, or white ink, or gesso, it's all absence of black ink. Oh, sure, I could have simply filled the space with black in Photoshop and superimposed the repeated sentence in Comic Sans. But we here at Bergetoons honor our commitment to bring you only the highest quality, hand-crafted cartoonistry.

I drew this cartoon before our present government made white supremacy official policy and DEI a dirty word. The editorial page of the Business Journal (at least twenty years ago), like Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton, was quite in favor of promoting diversity on corporate boards, and this character appeared in several of my cartoons accompanying those editorials. 

Here's an earlier cartoon featuring the the fictional board of Gibson, Gibsen, Ibsen and Gibbs:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 13, 2003

No Photoshop cut-and-paste in that cartoon, either.

Moving on to April, 2015:

for Q Syndicate, April, 2015

About all that stuff I said about handcrafted artisanal cartoonistry and being above filling drawings in Photoshop, um, just forget that.

Once I decided that I needed to start sending out cartoons in living color, there was no way I was going to draw two versions of every cartoon: one in color and one in grayscale. Nope, nuh-uh! All the colorizing for one and halftones in the other is done in Photoshop to one black-and-white scan of one drawing.

This cartoon followed an early morning incident in March in which an unidentified man dressed in a construction suit tried to enter the White House grounds through the gate at Pennsylvania Avenue, but was stopped by Uniformed Division officers and taken into custody. Also that April, a man who had jumped the north fence onto the White House lawn in July pleaded guilty to trespassing on restricted grounds.

More seriously, the previous September, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez had made it all the way into the White House through the North Portico doors, where he overpowered a Secret Service officer. He ran through most of the main floor before getting tackled by a counter-assault agent. He was later sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

That’s it for another Graphical History Tour. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position, and remain seated until history comes to a complete stop.

A Stroll Down Malarkey Lane

Today's Graphical History Tour was supposed to be about some century-old stuff, but it can wait. It waited this long, after all, so what's a couple more weeks?

In light of Joe Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 presidential contest, here's a look back at some of the cartoons I've drawn (and not drawn) of his political career.

He came to speak at my college while I was a freshman at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. I didn't happen to sit in on the first-term Senator's lecture, or, as the Manitou Messenger's editorial page cartoonist, to draw a cartoon about it. Since Biden's appearance came after the last Messenger before first-semester finals was published, it wasn't reported in the next issue, which didn't come out until February.

I didn't see him then, but I did get to see him in person in 2020, after the Kenosha rioting, when he came to the church where I work to hold an invitation-only conversation with local church and community leaders. While I did not get to meet him up close, I did deal with his campaign staff and gave his Secret Service detail a thorough tour of the building.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., September 24, 1987

The first cartoon of mine featuring Joe Biden came after his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination foundered on revelations that he had plagiarized the life story of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock as his own in campaign speeches. Biden was justifiably raked over the coals for this rather stupid move.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Oct. 1, 1987

The gaffe, since it was the one thing most people knew about him, dogged his career well after the 1988 campaign was over and done with. He next came into the national spotlight as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. I thought I might have included him in one of my cartoons about that, but it seems I didn't.

for Q Syndicate, October 2008

Other than including him as one of many congresspersons in a cartoon about a Ronald Reagan State of the Union speech, the next time I saw fit to draw Biden was after his vice presidential candidates debate with Sarah Palin in 2008.

By then, I was drawing primarily for LGBTQ+ publications, so my focus was on the candidates' response to a question about marriage equality. Moderator Gwen Ifill asked Biden (at minute 35 here), "Do you support, as they do in Alaska, granting same-sex benefits to couples?"

BIDEN: Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.
The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted — same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.
It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.

Palin, in her rebuttal, reframed the question as an opportunity to voice her and John McCain's opposition to same-sex marriage, although "I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue." The "some of my best friends are..." weasel.

Ifill then asked Biden for his ticket's stance on same-sex marriage, to which Biden demurred, "Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that."

for Q Syndicate, December, 2010

Vice Presidents, and candidates for that office, are expected to echo the position of the guy (or gal) at the top of the ticket. Candidate Obama was officially opposed to same-sex marriage, in spite of having told LGBTQ organizations in Illinois that he was open to marriage equality when he had run for the Senate in 2006.

So, many of us wondered whether Biden was floating a trial balloon or exercising his reputation for verbal gaffetude when, as Vice President in 2010, Joe Biden publicly averred that popular opinion in the United States was "evolving" toward acceptance of same-sex marriage.

At that time, marriage equality was the law in Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia. 41 other states had legislation or constitutional amendments forbidding same-sex couples from marrying.

for Q Syndicate, May, 2012

In 2012, President Obama's position "evolved"; he stated that he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marital rights. The Democratic Party included an endorsement of marriage equality in the party platform for the first time. The Republican platform, of course, was officially opposed to it, calling instead for an opposite-sex marriage exclusivity amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Oct. 2012

There were no bombshell announcements in Biden's 2012 debate appearance with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Congressman Paul Ryan. Republicans groused afterward about the 69-year-old Biden supposedly smirking while the 42-year-old Ryan was speaking.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2020

Biden sat out the 2016 election, campaign season coming as it did just after the death of his son Beau. But he entered the ring again in 2020, the oldest presidential nominee in history up to that point. I suppose that historians will decide that in the midst of an epidemic the likes of which only centenarians had ever seen, and after four years of a chaotic, mercurial presidency, the United States was ready for a steady, experienced leader who promised stability and reason.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2020

The Democratic Party Convention, thanks to COVID-19, proved a disappointment to host city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The city had tried to convince Republicans in Madison to allow bars to stay open past the legal 2:00 a.m. closing time, only to have the candidates and most delegates attending by Zoom rather than in person.

Republicans thought they could show up the Democrats this year by having their 2024 convention in the Brew City. Madison Republicans this time around happily extended Milwaukee bar time to 4:00 a.m. for the week. But with the security zones around the convention center practically forbidden to local residents, and the Republican Party largely made up of people who regard urban areas with fear and loathing, many of the restaurants and bars ended up with their extra staff scheduled to work the wee hours of convention mornings finding nothing to do but polish tables and sweep floors.

October, 2020

Over the years, my caricature of Joe Biden has been as elastic as his hairline. The one thing that came to the fore more and more was his 300-watt smile. How his choppers have remained so day-glo white is beyond me. Does he never drink coffee? Tea? I've heard that some Catholic priests refuse to offer him communion wine.

Maybe it's the ice cream.

for Q Syndicate, 2021

I may have drawn fewer cartoons about Biden as President than I drew about any other president during any given four years. That's largely because I draw for the LGBTQ press, and Biden has a great record on LGBTQ issues, in stark contrast to the leaders in the Republican Party.

The Dad Jokes thing didn't pan out as a running gag, whereas the Republicans' full-bore, sustained persecution of transgender persons has called for a lot of ink and colored pixels over the past four years.

But who knows? I have to come up with a couple cartoons for Q Syndicate to release during weeks when I'm away for the drawing board. If you see any more Dad Jokes here over the next six months, you'll know why.

Remembering Ash Carter

Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense in the last two years of the Obama administration, succumbed yesterday to a heart attack. I only ever drew him in one cartoon, and this is it.

 

The Forty Summers of Twos

Last month, I noted that I had apparently drawn only one cartoon in the whole month of June, 1982 and offered that there was a probable reason for that.

The reason was that I was involved in the start-up of the Kenosha Tribune, which published its inaugural issue on July 1, 1982. Jumping from the well-established Journal Times in Racine to an upstart free weekly paper was a risky one, and one that didn't quite pay off. (I've already posted about the dispute between the publisher and the rest of the staff that doomed the Tribune, so I won't get into that here.)

"Hers & His" in Kenosha Tribune, July 1, 1982

The Kenosha Tribune focused on local issues, but my initial cartoons for the editorial page were devoted to national and international topics. I had put in time helping clean the new office, a block behind Washington Middle School; but I hadn't been equally diligent in catching up with Kenosha politics.

Happily, I did not draw a cartoon to accompany the publisher's issue one, page one article that alleged — without ever using the word "allegedly" or any synonym thereof — malfeasance by a police officer.  

"Start Negotiations" in Kenosha Tribune, July 8, 1982

My second cartoon touches on a couple points I've discussed here recently. As in last week's Q Syndicate cartoon, I used Cyrillic-style lettering to signify that a character (here Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev) is Russian.

I've also warned against using rubber cement as an adhesive. I used rubber cement to paste the text in Brezhnev's thought balloon over my original text there, and it has since discolored significantly.

Compare that with the dog in the Phyllis Schlaffly cartoon. I used a glue stick to add the dog to the cartoon, and there's almost no discoloration at all on the original drawing.

(As for the point of the Brezhnev cartoon, Ronald Reagan had campaigned against the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, negotiations between the Carter administration and the Soviet Union. As President, Reagan basically renamed the negotiations "Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty," keeping one of the t's in "Strategic" so he could call it StART.)

"A Thoroughly Enjoyable Race" in Kenosha Tribune, July 22, 1982

With midterm elections heating up, it wasn't long before I was drawing more local cartoons such as this one about Wisconsin's upcoming gubernatorial primary, and sketching the candidates who came to the Tribune's humble offices to be interviewed.

Interestingly, none of the candidates in this cartoon would be elected Governor in the fall: not Republican nominee Terry Kohler (of the bathroom fixture family), his Republican rival Lowell Jackson (a former and future member of the Governor's cabinet), or Democratic former Governor Marty Schreiber.

Marty Schreiber, for Kenosha Tribune, July/August, 1982, but unpublished

Kohler, the son of a past Governor of Wisconsin, would win the September primary, secured the GOP nomination for Governor, but was trounced in the general election by Democrat Tony Earl, 57% to 42%, the worst showing for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 40 years before or 40 years since. (To be fair, three Democratic gubernatorial candidates made worse showings in those 80 years: William Sullivan in 1942, Daniel Hoan in 1946, and Bill Proxmire in 1952.)

Moving along: Having spent so much of this post on 1982, I don't want to skip over 1992 entirely...

"Boola Boolah," unpublished, July, 1992

Besides, I drew each of those blades of grass individually with quill pen and ink, so it's about time they finally got to be seen by somebody somewhere.

We can discuss whether the Bush administration deserves credit for the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and how much of it, some other time.

"Ah, Wikstrom" in Business Journal, Milwaukee, July 12, 2002

Jumping ahead to 2002, I have absolutely no recollection of the staff editorial this cartoon was drawn to accompany. But it affords me the opportunity to offer yet another take on Donald Joffrey Trump and his stubborn refusal to recognize that he lost the 2020 election.

Yes, he's a grifter and a spoiled brat grown up and grown old without ever once being held accountable for diddley squat. And yes, the Founding Fathers left him a glimmer of hope by creating the Electoral College because they were elitists who didn't entirely trust the Will of the People to elect the best President every time.

But I think that what the Trump presidency shows us is that coming from the World of Business is not such a great qualification for high office after all. Neither Wendell Willkie nor H. Ross Perot got to prove themselves in the Oval Office, but thanks to that damned Electoral College, we were treated to the Trumpian shitshow for four years

In the World of Business, your accounting team can take the same set of numbers and tease stockholders with tales of exponentially growing profits on the one hand, and plead to the IRS that losses swallowed up all your earnings. So naturally, if election officials in Georgia tell you that you're 11,780 votes short, you simply tell them to juggle the books and find you 11,780 more votes.

And if that fails, launch a hostile take-over.

for Q Syndicate, July, 2002

I wasn't colorizing my syndicated cartoons in 2002 (I had done so for the Business Journal's Biz insert cartoons and some InStep covers), but I went ahead and added color to this one before posting it on the GeoCities site I had at the time.

It deserved a little taupe, after all.

It was in 2012 that I started including a color version of every cartoon when sending them to Q Syndicate. I'll sign off today with one of my favorites from that year.

"Where the Boycotts Are," July, 2012

This Week's Sneak Peek

In lieu of the usual swatch out of the coming cartoon, here's a rerun of the cartoon I drew eight years ago this week.

February Festivities

So you have a cartoon due for February 2 and you've got no ideas and there's nothing in the news to inspire you and your bristol board is as white and pristine as the newfallen snow. So you look at the calendar and see, Oh, Goody! February 2 is Presentation of Our Lord! I'm saved!

No, of course it's Ground Hog Day, that wonderful festival when we all suddenly care what the weather is in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for some reason (and how to spell it). I live in Wisconsin, where we're in for six more weeks of winter at the very least whether some overgrown rat sees its shadow or has the sense to stay in its burrow.

What's the ground hog got to do with it, anyway? Those Punxsutawney bastards don't have to drag the critter out of its box to figure out whether it's sunny or overcast.

But it's a holiday, even if it's rather one-dimensional, and you can always drag some inspiration for a hackneyed cartoon from it. Sadly, unlike Christmas, there's only one movie about Notorious GHD, and we've all drawn some version of this cartoon.

So perhaps you shouldn't discount Presentation of Our Lord Day so quickly. In Mexico, it's Candelaria, and time to take the yuletide decorations down. They celebrate forty days of Christmas, which is why having a live evergreen in the house and singing that partridge in a pear tree song have never caught on there.

Fortunately, February is chock full of holidays, unlike, say, August. With Valentines Day on the fourteenth, you have the quadrennial cartoons of presidential aspirants wooing the heart of the Republican elephant or Democratic donkey.

Or, if your governor's name is Tommy Thompson, you can pursue another Valentines Day theme.

Did you know that the Jewish equivalent of Valentines Day is Tu B'Av in August? Save that factoid for those late summer news doldrums!

Returning to February: Presidents' Day will come just in time so that the renewal of Trump's government shut-down can start on a day when the government was going to shut down anyway.

Just so you readers from around the world know, we don't celebrate all the presidents on Presidents' Day. Most Americans wouldn't know James Polk from Calvin Coolidge, and we'd be at each others' throats if someone tried to make the day about any president since JFK.

No, the day is all about Honest Abe Lincoln and Even More Honest George Washington, either of whom supplies our cartoonists with a smörgåsbord of clichés.

Finally, I'm not forgetting the most important February holiday of all: Superbowl Big Game Sunday. (Until I cough up the dough to be named Official Cartoonist of the NFL, I gotta be careful about infringement of that trademark.)

The story behind this cartoon is that when I was drawing for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, editors Gary Miller, Mark Kass, or Steve Jagler would email me the topic (and usually the entire copy) of the coming issue's editorial so that I could draw a cartoon to accompany it. But this particular week, and they emailed me that the editorial board hadn't decided what the editorial should say; for a change, they were giving me carte blanche to draw about whatever I wanted (but taking into consideration that the Beej readership was very different from my audience at the UW-Milwaukee Post).

With the Green Bay Packers heading for The Big Game, however, there was precious little else being covered by Wisconsin news media. Packers cheerleading was the only memorable part of Tommy Thompson's State of the State message, fercryinoutloud.

I don't remember the editorial having been about managed stock funds, either.

Well, that's all for this edition of Sciuridaeback Saturday. It's time to take down the Christmas tree. We can't leave it up until Mardi Gras like we did last year.

Mardi Gras isn't until March.

Q Toon: Selective Service

Members of the Corrupt Trump Administration are enjoying more home-cooked meals these days.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Policy Adviser Stephen Wormtongue Miller were hounded out of Mexican restaurants (¿Qué tan irónico es eso?) over the administration's internment camps for refugee children. The staff at a Virginia restaurant refused service to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the owner explaining that "the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation."

Next, Congressman Maxine Waters (D-CA) urged an audience to harass Trump cabinet members whenever they're seen at restaurants, department stores and gas stations. Called to task for that, she resorted to the same Whatabout tactic usually associated with Trump and his Trump l'oeilists.

I won't condone Rep. Waters's advocacy of shocking, shocking behavior, but at least she wasn't calling for people to commit physical assault, "Second Amendment solutions," or armed insurrection. Apparently that sort of thing is just fine with some people.

We are becoming the United States In Name Only. There are those who think it's okay to proclaim "F*¢k Trump" on live national broadcast television, while others are calling the cops to arrest Black Americans for the most innocuous activities. You boycott Chick Fil-A for being antigay, or Sara Lee for being antigun. Either you get all your news from MSNBC, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Now Next and Colbert, or you get it from Fox, Sinclair, Newsmax, Breitbart, and Russian internet trolls. And promptly repost, retweet, or otherwise regurgitate the juiciest stuff.

That crazy aunt who used to send all those unhinged fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd: emails? She's everyone now.

My husband and I have relatives and friends whom we love dearly, but with whom we just can't discuss anything remotely political any more. It's no problem in the Real World, but becomes trickier on social media. He recently shared a 1947 film that was made to combat the racism, bigotry and divisive rhetoric of the KKK, Jim Crow, and what would later be named McCarthyism; someone then promptly told him it's all the fault of liberal Democrats who refuse to compromise on immigration so they can win this year's midterm elections.

(Trump, McConnell, Ryan and the Tea Party are always willing to talk compromise, you know.)

It is certainly true that a growing number of liberal Democrats see less and less point in compromise. Looking back at eight years of the Barack Obama administration, which started with his naming more members of the opposition party to the cabinet than any administration since World War II, what did his willingness to compromise get us? A health care plan that lacks the comprehensiveness needed for it to fulfill its promise. More arrests of immigrants than any previous administration. A centrist Supreme Court nominee that Republicans refused the courtesy of consideration for nearly a year so that Donald Trump could fill the seat with a doctrinaire conservative instead (and a solid majority who just ruled that hostility to Christians is unconstitutional, but hostility to Muslims is meh.)

Given that Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016, and Democratic Senate candidates totaled 6 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, and Republicans still won the presidency and Senate, some frustration was bound to appear. Republicans felt just as aggrieved over the 2008 and 2012 elections, and they had to resort to making up reasons out of thin air why they should have won. (And, by the way, they praised a baker who refused service to Vice President Joe Biden.)

Have we reached the point at which the center no longer holds? Have we been on this road for too long to turn back? Even people who want to blame Donald Trump for bludgeoning civility to death with his non-stop petulant churlishness can't really believe that civility will miraculously come back to life once he's out of office.

So our side will eat at the Red Hen. Your side can eat at Papa John's.

What Shall We Do with Roosevelt

Heartsick Americans were tortured this week by photos of former President Barack Obama kite surfing with Richard Branson off the British Virgin Islands and having such a wonderful old time, exercising smile muscles that we almost forgot he has. As one of the youngest former presidents this country has ever seen, he may have a very long retirement ahead. What shall he do?

T.E. Powers addressed this issue for another relatively youthful ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt, in a cartoon feature that appeared in the Chicago Examiner on Sunday, February 11, 1917 under this headline:

Syd Hoff tells us that William Randolph Hearst recruited Thomas E. Powers (1870-1939) to draw editorial cartoons for his newspapers during the circulation wars with Joseph Pulitzer, a job which Powers held for nearly 40 years. Powers's obituary describes him as a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt, the subject of this multi-panel spread.

From the obituary:

Mr. Powers first attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt when he pictured the President threatening tall, silk-hatted figures labeled "The Trusts" with the then famous "big stick." His satirical thrusts at "grafting politicians" or others whose right to public office he challenged, however, usually were tempered with broad humor.

I should note that silk-hatted figures representing trusts were a well-established staple of editorial cartoons well before Mr. Powers came along.

Powers was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, his family moving to Kansas City "before I was old enough to appreciate the product on which the 'fame' of that fair city rests," as he told Editor and Publisher in 1906. His cartooning career began at the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Herald before heading to New York. In addition to editorial cartoons, he also created half a dozen comic page strips, and is credited with drawing the first American newspaper color comic.

"The leak" in this next selection refers to the leak then under investigation of President Wilson's Christmastime peace proposal to stock and commodities brokers (see the Gibb cartoon here).

The bottom panel of this next section has Roosevelt sailing up the River of Doubt, or Rio da Dúvida, a tributary of the Amazon renamed after the former president, who led an expedition in the area with the famed Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon in 1913-14. Upon his return, Roosevelt wrote in Through the Brazilian Wilderness of battling rapids and waterfalls to find the previously uncharted river's headwaters.

I have not been able to find what exactly inspired this cartoon — presumably some comment by former President William Howard Taft, judging from the newspaper headline. Roosevelt and Taft were publicly criticizing each other in January over the League to Enforce Peace (cf. one of the Harry Murphy cartoons last week); Taft was a founding member of the League and spoke in support of President Wilson's foreign policy, whereas Roosevelt attacked both.

When the Chicago Examiner published this cartoon, Roosevelt had been out of office for eight years, but not out of the public arena. He had run for President on the Progressive ticket four years after leaving office, and made a run for the Republican nomination another four years after that. Only 58 years old in 1917, he was just three years older than Barack Obama is today.

As it turned out, however, Roosevelt would only live two more years. His death had nothing to do with the assassin's bullet still in his body since 1912, or the debilitating asthma he had overcome as a child. He died in his sleep on January 5, 1919 of a blood clot that got into his lungs.

The Vice President, Thomas Marshall, is quoted as saying "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."