Q Toon: Early Indications

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was a guest on Stephen Colbert's show recently — it seems that there is a different Democratic politician on every night trying to get their fare-thee-wells in before CBS pulls Colbert's plug — and was asked about the possibility of his running for president in 2028.

It's too early for Democrats to declare candidacies for president, and Colbert acknowledged as much in his question, so Buttigieg naturally did not throw his metaphorical hat in the proverbial ring on late-night television. I nevertheless see a lot of his posts on my social media feed, even more than those of Gavin Newsom.

That's the fault of Al Gorithm, I suppose. Al and I have never met, but he seems to think he knows a lot about me.

Anyway, Mr. Buttigieg tells us that his main priority these days is getting Democrats elected to office around the country. That's the sort of thing a former Secretary of Transportation and small-city mayor has to do in order to have elected Democrats return one's calls after one launches a presidential campaign.

There isn’t much Buttigieg can do in the present Gerrymandering War, but he has been lending his star power to various congressional candidates. His strategy for helping get Democrats elected also appears to involve a good amount of showing up on TV. 

He certainly has the skills to hold his own against the Republican mouthpieces on Fox Noise. Perhaps he should give Chuck Schumer some lessons.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed this little respite from the constant Trump Trump Trump of Invasive, Pervasive, Inescapable, Omnitrumpified Trumpitude.

If not, please tune in again tomorrow.

This Week's Sneak Peek

While drawing my cartoon last night, I decided to catch up on some of the late night talk shows that I had missed while My Better Half and I were on vacation earlier this month.

When I called up On Demand list for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on our Spectrum cable TV service, I discovered that the most recent episode was June 9. That was one of the the last Late Shows before Colbert went on a vacation, came back with a mustache, and got canceled by Paramount-CBS as a favor to the Despotic Trump Regime. None of the July and August episodes were available.

I'm not sure what Spectrum is up to; the other episodes available are not the immediately previous ones, as has usually been the case with The Late Show and every other program.

Is this a new Spectrum policy? Artificial Intelligence imagining what episodes I might prefer? Are the rest of his shows available only by subscription to Paramount-Plus? Or is CBS censoring Colbert now that they've cancelled his show?

Have we always been at war with Eastasia?

Q Toon: Attention Get Her

Rosie O'Donnell, whom I haven't cartooned since she had her own talk show, once upon a time said something nasty about Donald Joffrey Trump — and probably true, whatever it was — setting off a celebrity feud with the thin-skinned whiny snowflake.

The rest of the world has forgotten their feud, but petty tyrant Trump nurses a grudge like it's Baby Jesus. So when he somehow convinced a majority of U.S. voters to return him to the office he had not been able to hold onto by force, promising to wreak vengeance upon all his enemies, perceived, imagined, immigrant and transgender, Ms. O'Donnell decided it was time to take her wife and their genderqueer child and hie them to the Emerald Isle.

That was months ago, which didn't stop Trump from taking to his social media app (which I refuse to call by its very misleading preferred noun), foaming at the mouse that he will issue a presidential proclamation stripping O'Donnell of her U.S. citizenship. 

I had completely finished drawing this cartoon and cleaned my pens when I checked my own phone and learned that Little Lord Trump le Roi had added to his list of presidential priorities unrenaming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians. Because as far as he's concerned, they're genetically Redskins and Indians, and they had better not get caught using Commanders and Guardians rest rooms if they want funding for their new stadiums.

Fortunately, Photoshop means I didn't have to try drawing over half a bottle's worth of Whiteout.

The additional distractions Mr. Stable Genius has come up with after my Monday morning cartoon deadline — teasing irrefutable proof of Barack Obama's sedatious impudistry, releasing J. Edgar Hoover's files on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sending cabinet members to tour Alcatraz, gloating over CBS cancelling The Late Show with or without Stephen Colbert — and wait, I need a whole new paragraph for this next one —

promising “We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000%, by eleven hundred, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred, 700, 600,” which means that drug companies will pay customers huge sums of money to take their products, which Trump will achieve by threatening to ban the import and sale of Volkswagens, BMWs, Volvos, and Lamborghinis —

— all that will have to wait for another day. By which time he will have declared covfefe a vegetable, accused Hillary Clinton of masterminding Hurricane Katrina, named son Barron permanent Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and babbled obsessively to the Prime Minister of Iceland about Arnold Palmer's penis.

Toon: Coming to CBS Late Nights!

CBS announced yesterday that Late Night with (and without) Stephen Colbert will be cancelled as of May next year — supposedly for “purely financial” reasons.

Well, yeah. The Tiffany Network can't afford to shell out $16 million every time the petty dictator currently in the White House gets his fragile ego chipped.

CBS's parent company, Paramount Global wants to sell itself out to Skydance Media, which will require FCC approval under Trump's transactional regime. It has already sold itself out to Trump, surrendering to his nuisance lawsuit, a complaint that editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris somehow damaged the Marquis of Mar-a-Lago.

Ah, well. Kowtowing to Republicans offended by left-leaning satire ain't nothing new to CBS.

"Why, That Nut Was Trying to Water My Desert" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, April 9, 1969

Q Toon: Name That Toon

So here's the cartoon I sent to Q Syndicate about Donald Joffrey Trump dismissing Pete Buttigieg as Mad Magazine cover boy "Alfred E. Neuman" during an interview with Politico last week.

In case you were somehow distracted by the Corrupt Trump Administration's trade war with China, its teetering on the verge of actual war with Iran, its determination to provoke a constitutional crisis with Congress, or Republican legislatures decreeing women's uteruses to be government property, here's what you missed. When asked for his opinion of Buttigieg, Trump told Politico that "Alfred E. Neuman cannot become president of the United States," and Mayor Pete responded

"I’ll be honest. I had to Google that. I guess it’s just a generational thing. I didn’t get the reference. It's kind of funny, I guess. But he’s also the president of the United States and I’m surprised he’s not spending more time trying to salvage this China deal."

I don't understand how anyone can make through high school without learning who Alfred E. Neuman is, but, as Stephen Colbert explained to The Kids These Days, "If you're too young to know the reference, magazines were these thick stacks of paper with pictures and words on 'em."

So if Mr. Buttigieg doesn't recognize octogenarian Alfred E. Neuman, perhaps thirty-something Nelson Muntz is more in tune with his generation.

Personally, I found it easier to draw a convincing Muntz-Trump hybrid than a Neuman-Buttigieg one.

Toon: Staking the MeToo High Ground

It's hard to imagine how Bill Clinton thought he could make the talk show rounds chatting up his book, co-authored by James Patterson, without having to discuss in light of the #metoo movement the sex he did not have with that woman.

Or why James Patterson stuck with the tour past Interview #1.

Republicans can safely make the rounds of every show on Fox News secure in the knowledge that they won't have to answer any uncomfortable questions; but Democrats, for all the blather about "liberal media bias," have no such safe space. Seemingly blindsided by pointed questions in a "Today" show interview, Bill Clinton was afforded a chance to revise and extend his remarks on Stephen Colbert's "Late Night" the next day. But it meant having to spend an entire segment of the show repenting for the horndog behavior that got him impeached 20 years ago.

Up until the #metoo movement, Bill Clinton remained the Democrats' second-best Elder Statesman after Jimmy Carter. Al Gore had insisted that Clinton stay at arms length from Gore's 2000 campaign, and lost West Virginia and Florida as a result. Barack Obama sent Clinton to campaign for the Good Ol' Boy vote, and got just enough of them to break the Republican lock on the South twice.

Contrast that with the Republicans' relationship with their most recently disgraced president, Richard Nixon. They defended him in office until the Smoking Gun tapes came out, but unlike the Democrats and Clinton, never gave him a speaking slot at their conventions or sent him out to campaign anywhere. 20 years later, Nixon was studiously rehabilitating himself, cranking out scholarly tomes on foreign policy but still not invited to speak at GOP nominating conventions.

Donald Joffrey Trump is unlikely to be around in 20 years (does even Brian Kilmeade believe the notes from Trump's doctor?), so I don't expect him to be churning out The Art of the Treaty or Everyone Is Saying The President is Missed, That I Can Tell You in 2038. Assuming we have our democracy back, perhaps Republicans will have made a more honest assessment of him by then.

Either that, or his visage will be beaming down on the America Great Again Party Convention, between those of Emperor Putin and our Dear Friend And Ally Kim Jong-Il, as Don Jr. accepts renomination to a fourth term as CEO of the United States.

Better Know a Stooge

Wisconsin legislators got some exposure on the late-night TV shows last night. It was finally Senator Ron Johnson's turn to be David Letterman's "Stooge of the Night," (at 13:12 here) and Congressman Gwen Moore from Milwaukee's Fightin' Fourth was featured in Steven Colbert's "Better Know a District" segment.

Rep. Moore held her own against Colbert's needling -- although I'm pretty sure she could have come up with something impolitic to say about Governor Snotwalker if she had had a mind to.

Never Mind.

The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that "according to people familiar with the show," taping of the Colbert Report was suspended Wednesday and Thursday due to an emergency in his family.

I suppose that if the emergency hiatus had been due to the contraceptive segment, as I had speculated yesterday, the likes of Bill Donahue and the other professionally offended media watchdogs would be crowing about their success in cowing Comedy Central, CBS, Viacom, and the Greater Secularist Conspiracy. Likewise, it would seem out of character for the Daily Show not to mention a contretemps between the Colbert Show and the network brass, and they haven't dropped a hint of it.

So let's hope there is nothing tragic going on chez Colbert, and wish the family our best in coming through this emergency.

P.S.: It's been a while since Editorial Explanations has been baffled by my cartoons, but this week's oeuvre breaks the easily-understood streak. I had rather thought it might do so, since I was so stingy with labels, but at least one reader has ventured an accurate guess.

Whither Steven Colbert?

Like many Comedy Central viewers and the folks who lined up to see last night's Colbert Report, I was surprised to find Wednesday night's episode cancelled. Comedy Central and Viacom are not saying why Stephen Colbert has been indefinitely suspended, but the fact that Tuesday night's episode is not available on the Comedy Central web site indicates to me that it's an issue of something he said or did on that show, rather than some personal or health issue.

The prime suspect would have to be the segment titled "Contraceptive Crusade," satirizing the dispute between the Obama administration on one side and the Catholic Church and Republicans opposed to "Obamacare" on the other.

Colbert described the Catholic church's stand on sex as being strictly for procreation, involving the sperm from a male husband, the egg from a female wife, and a soul from God in a  "divine and ineffably beautiful three-way." In a joke that somehow got past CBS censors, Colbert further explained Catholic teaching that contraception of any kind is anathema, because, "when you use contraception, you are not only sinning, you're cock-blocking the Almighty!"

Continuing, if you didn't get the joke that Rick Santorum's opinion that the administration's contraceptive insurance mandate puts our rights on a slippery "or lubricated" slope, well you haven't googled the ex-Senator in a long time. But you couldn't have possibly missed the phallic imagery of Colbert sliding a condom over a banana, then standing behind it as, at crotch height, he cut it in half with a miniature guillotine.