This Week's Sneak Peek

Happy All Hallow Steve, everybody!

Hmm. If the kiddies are trick or treating where I live from 5:00 to 7:00 tonight, when are we supposed to cook and eat supper?

You Say You Want a Free Election? Well, You Know

There's still just over a whole week of those ghastly campaign commercials bombarding us on the TV, radio, social media, YouTube, and front yards. So let's take a break from Election 2022...

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 21, 1982

...but first, this commercial from Election 1982.

Scott McCallum was running in Wisconsin for the senate seat held by William Proxmire, and aired a TV ad arguing that he was sympathetic to voters suffering from the Reagan recession and offering his unemployed brother John as proof. 

McCallum's ad didn't work, even though Proxmire didn't campaign on television at all. I suppose Wisconsin voters actually rewarded Proxmire for that.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 28, 1982

Pete Jansson was the Republican running against my district's congressman, Democrat Les Aspin. At a candidate forum hosted by the University of Wisconsin - Parkside, Jansson campaigned against what he called "Aspinomics." I suppose that was an applause line in any GOP crowd, but it fell flat in the mixed audience on a university campus.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 7, 1992

1982 was the Democrats' year, and Les Aspin cruised to a seventh term. By 1992, he was firmly ensconced as the First District's Congressman, Chair of the House Armed Service Committee, and running for his twelfth.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 20, 1992

Senator Robert Kasten (R-WI) came to office in the Republican sweep of 1980 and survived the Democratic wave of 1986, but sailed into strong headwinds in 1992. He painted his Democratic rival, Russ Feingold, as a dangerous radical — which is the standard Republican tactic — but then likened his own positions to those of Wisconsin's Junior Senator, Democrat Herb Kohl, and, incredibly, the Democrats' presidential candidate.

It is impossible to imagine any Republican since then offering themselves up as Almost Like Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat. Since the rise of Newt Gingrich in 1994, any hint of bipartisanship has become anathema in the GOP.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Oct. 29, 1992

Then there was the ad Feingold filmed greeting voters at The Joke Shop in Waukesha. The owner of the store, Jeffrey Campbell appeared in the ad, saying "Yes, it is," in response to Feingold asking "Is this a joke shop?"

Campbell was so upset afterward that Feingold's ad made him appear to support the Democratic candidate that he got himself into a Kasten ad swearing his loyalty to the Republican incumbent. Kasten's ad culminates with its narrator asking, "If we can't trust Russ Feingold's ads, can we trust Russ Feingold on crime, welfare reform or taxes?"

Jump we now to 2002: Drawing for a national LGBTQ+ audience, I only find an excuse to cartoon about local political races when there is a queer angle to one. My one such opportunity in October of 2002 came with the contest in Montana for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Max Baucus.

This time, it was the Democrats running a homophobic television spot.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2002

Challengers have one advantage in these ads in that they can pick and choose any one vote by the incumbent, even on a procedural matter, to accuse the incumbent of being against something that sounds popular or for something that can be given an unpleasant nickname. Republican Mike Taylor didn't have a voting record for Sen. Baucus to comb through, but someone at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up video of Taylor when he owned a cosmetology shop in Denver about ten or so years earlier.

The ad (paid for by the DSCC, not the Baucus campaign) accused Taylor of embezzling funds from the shop. The visual of Taylor massaging a male customer's face insinuated that Taylor might be gay. Whether it was due to the allegation or the insinuation, it was enough to prod a weepy Taylor to withdraw from the race at the 11th hour.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2012

Come 2012, I seized the opportunity to return to Wisconsin politics in my syndicated cartoon when former Governor Tommy Thompson challenged incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin in a televised debate. While he didn't engage in any overt anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric against the only openly lesbian Senator at the time, he did seem to make an unusual number of references to Mrs. Tommy Thompson.

I've found Senator Baldwin's a challenging face to draw, and I tried to make this caricature as simplified as possible. In the end, I don't think this approach worked, and I haven't used it since.

✍

That brings us up to the present, so that's it for today's installment of congressional campaign cartoons past. We now return you to your regularly scheduled campaign commercials.

Q Toon: A Hallowe'en Classic

This week's cartoon goes out especially to my readers in Philadelphia Gay News, where the Republican candidate for governor thinks a local hospital is abducting homeless children to practice gender reassignment surgery on them. (I'm not making this up. He is.) 

It was the latest in a series of extreme and false statements by Doug Mastriano, who made the comments during an interview with a right-wing network that features Steve Bannon and a steady stream QAnon conspiracies. ...

During a program this week the host of a program on the “Real America’s Voice” network asked Mastriano a loaded question about his Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race, Josh Shapiro, who is Pennsylvania’s Attorney General. Mastriano then took the opportunity to falsely claim: “He’s standing aside while the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is grabbing homeless kids and kids in foster care, apparently, and experimenting on them with gender transitioning, something that’s irreversible.”

Mr. Mastriano is not alone in fabricating false facts, of course. The Republicans' senatorial candidate in Georgia, football star Herschel Walker has become a laughingstock around the country for claiming that he's an FBI agent-cum-police special consultant who graduated valedictorian from the University of Georgia (no, he didn’t graduate at all) and started a breaded-chicken empire nobody else has ever heard of. Not to mention his denying the stray children and abortions he happens to be responsible for. 

Even his own campaign staffers admit that Walker is a serial liar.

And yet he stands an even or better chance of being Georgia's next senator.

The GQP candidate for governor in Arizona, Kari Lake, clings ferociously to the lie that some nefarious conspiracy stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Retrumplicans in her state tried over and over and over again to find evidence of massive voter fraud, only to come up with a greater Biden win in Arizona than in the original vote count.

If she is elected governor, she promises to add new restrictions on Arizonans' right to vote: only on Election Day, at a polling place, on paper (counted only by hand), and with voter identification on all ballots. That's right: no more secret ballot. And if she still doesn't like how the people vote, she'll simply refuse to certify the results.

And she has a five-point lead in the polls.

Here in Wisconsin, voters have already elected Ron Johnson to two craptastic terms in the U.S. Senate and may very well give him a third, in spite of his pretending that the January 6 insurrectionists were unarmed and peaceful, that mouthwash was as good or better at protecting against COVID-19 as the actual vaccines, and that Dr. Fauci had "overhyped" both COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS.

On January 6, 2021, Johnson sent lists of fraudulent electors to Vice President Mike Pence on the Senate floor in an effort to overturn the wills of Wisconsin — and Michigan — voters. Happily, Pence's staffer told Johnson's errand boy to get lost. Johnson's excuse once the episode came to light was that somebody, he doesn't know who, wanted something, he didn't know what, delivered to Pence that day, so he said, sure, whatever, what does it matter?

The list of these Republicans goes on and so forth, et cetera ad infinitum, with one after another running to be governor, secretary of state, attorney general, senator, congressperson, judge, district attorney, sheriff, school board member, and deputy assistant ombudsman of the water department from coast to coast — many of them firmly convinced that public schools are providing litter boxes for students who believe they are cats.

It's times like these when you wish the phrase "most important election in our lifetime" hadn't been used to describe every election in our lifetime.

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.

 

This Week's Sneak Peek

As befits All Hallow's Eve, this week's cartoon will have a classic holiday theme.

Big Al's Sports Report (Love That Tinkle!)

In honor of the World Series, in which no other country in the world has been invited to play, Sliderback Saturday winds up and pitches some cartoons from the even more exclusive World Series of 1922.

"The Fan" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, Oct. 4, 1922

Not only was the 1922 World Series limited to teams from one country, it was limited to teams from just one city. The series pitted the New York Giants against the New York Yankees, so you might suppose that the rest of the country would have lost all interest in what had become a strictly New York affair.

"Total" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Ledger, Oct. 4, 1922

But that wouldn't sell papers, would it?

"The Ball Weevils" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Oct. 8, 1922

If any interest in the series fell off in the rest of the country, there were still enough fans of the game, or at least gambling on it, to warrant this cautionary cartoon out of Dallas.

Any gamblers who bet on the Yankees were shut out of luck: the New York Baseball Giants swept them four games to none. (There were five games in this subway series; Game 2 ended in a 3-3 tie after ten innings.)

"Hats Off to M'Graw" by Bud Counihan in New York Evening World, Oct. 9, 1922

One newspaper job that disappeared decades ago was that of the sports cartoonist. Major newspapers like the New York Evening World might even have more than one on staff.

Here Bud Counihan salutes the winning coach, John J. McGraw and illustrates highlights of the final game of the series for the benefit of those who might have only read about the games the next day in the paper, if they didn't happen to have access to one of them new-fangled radio thingamabobs.

"Oh, the Melancholy Days" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Oct. ,4 1922

Fortunately for fans then and now, if one's baseball team falls by the wayside short of the World Series, one can always turn to football. It's the start of the gridiron season, and anything is still possible.  

"Impressions of the Pitt-Bucknell Football Game" by Bertin F. Link in Pittsburgh Press, Oct. 29, 1922

Judging by the sports cartoonists of the day, there were more fans of college-level football than of the professional variety. The newly-named National Football League consisted of sixteen teams, only two of which remain with us today: the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and Racine/Chicago (now Arizona) Cardinals.

"A Tragedy of the Football Field" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Oct. 29, 1922

One thing that has changed has been efforts to protect football players from serious injury. You'll notice in these cartoons that the football players' helmets are nothing more than leather caps. They have no mouth guard (although by the 1920's, some players were improvising attempts at creating them); disfiguring facial injuries were commonplace. Concussions were expected and accepted. 

This may seem difficult to believe, but in football, there was more of a priority in protecting the player’s upper body, than in head protection. The invention of football shoulder pads was by L.P. Smock, who was a student a Princeton. His 1877 design were made of wool and leather and were actually stitched onto the player’s jersey. After the turn of the century, we see the development of the ‘harnessed’ shoulder pads that are over the head and attached via the chest area. While an improvement in design, they continued to be made of a combination of canvas and leather. It wasn’t until the 1960’s and 70’s that plastic shoulder pads appeared. By the 1990’s we saw the advent of the bulky padding that our players today wear.

"Speaking of Fullbacks" by Woodson M. Cowan for George Matthew Adams Syndicate, ca. Oct. 13, 1922

The general attitude was that players were tough guys able to withstand a little brain damage. Since the print is quite small, I'll point out the doctor examining University of Iowa fullback Gordon Locke on the right side of Iowa native Wood Cowan's cartoon:

Scientist: "The X-ray shows your skull to be exceedingly thick."

Text: "Scientist discovered that his dome is especially constructed for use as battling ram to hit the line with."

As pointed out elsewhere in the cartoon, Locke was no simple-minded bonehead. He would graduate third in his class at the University of Iowa College of Law, graduating in the top three of his law school class. After coaching football at U of I and Western Reserve University, he was general assistant law director for the city of Cleveland, then general counsel in Washington D.C. for the Committee for Oil Pipe Lines.

Sticking with football for one more cartoon, I'll note here that off the playing field, striking coal miners had reached agreements with mine owners and gone back to work. But then as now, supply chain issues meant that cold weather was moving in before adequate supplies of coal to heat everyone's homes and businesses. What supplies there were fetched premium prices.

"Neighborhood News" by Fontaine Fox for Wheeler Syndicate, Oct. 28, 1922

Then as now, it was surely all Joe Biden's fault.

Q Toon: Count On It

It's hard to tell what the Republican Party stands for any more.

Other than coming to power By Any Means Necessary, that is.

The party that impeached a president over a blow job wasn't in the least bothered by a president who attempted to overthrow the government by force. And they're just fine with a senate candidate who fathered and abandoned a bunch of children with various girlfriends, and paid for at least one abortion, which I used to think was the GOP's biggest no-no.

Paying for things, that is.

Every time there's a mass shooting somewhere, the GOP wails that it's too soon to talk about even the slightest, weakest gun control legislation. Turns out that the time to talk about crime is in the three months before a general election, during commercial breaks when you're trying to watch Jeopardy! or Dancing with the Stars.

There is a long list of things that Republicans are against, of course. They hate transgender children, gays, lesbians, admitting that centuries of oppression against peoples of color has any lasting effect, cities, public schools, protecting any corner of the environment that isn't a golf course, science, health care, other people's religion or lack thereof, and on and on.  

And now they are against counting the votes of people who manage to vote for Democrats in spite of Republicans' decades-long efforts to prevent them from voting in the first place.

Sure, there are still some Republicans who still believe in democracy. But their days are numbered thanks to all the RINO hunters in their ruby-red districts who don't.

Here in Wisconsin, the voting laws and the Elections Commission were created by the Republican legislature and signed into effect by Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2015. Republicans had no complaints when Donald Berzelius Trump won the state the next year, or in the off-year elections of 2017, 2018, and 2019. (Okay, they weren't happy with Democrat Tony Evers winning the governorship, but they used their majority in the legislature to strip the governorship of most of its powers before he could take office.)

When the majority of Wisconsin voters voted for Joe Biden, suddenly Republicans wanted to overrule the voice of the people and declare Trump the winner anyway. Governor Evers's vetoes have been the only thing stopping them from disbanding the bipartisan Elections Commission and replacing it with one that will have a Republican majority as long as Republicans remain in charge of the redistricting process. And being in charge of the redistricting process enables them to remain in charge of the redistricting process forever.

Republican billionaires are outspending Democrats and liberal interest groups in advertising aimed at replacing Governor Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul with conspiracy-mongering election deniers, and in achieving a veto-proof GOP majority in the legislature. (Judging from the disappearance of the TV ads against transgender Democrat Jessica Katzenmeyer running for State Senate, they may believe that their goal has been met; 2022 redistricting made the 15th district more heavily Republican anyway.)

Elsewhere in the country, the arsonists are already in charge of the fire department. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent his Gestapo The Vote squad into the inner cities to arrest felons — almost all of them Black by some strange coincidence — who had served their time and mistakenly thought they had regained the voting rights of ordinary citizens. Whether he'll dump them back into prison or fly them to Martha's Vineyard remains to be seen.

Whether he'll get around to rounding up similar felons in Republican districts also remains to be seen. I'm sure there are plenty of right-wingers on the registered sexual offender list in the Florida panhandle, and some of them tried to vote in 2020, but don't hold your breath waiting for the DeSantis goons showing up at their mobile homes.

In all, 291 Republican candidates for Congress, governorships, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and other constitutional offices around the country continue to cast aspersions against the will of the people in the 2020 elections.

Some may even have been supported by idiot Democrats who thought they'd be easier to beat in the fall. But over half of them are expected to win election to office.

There are far too many win-at-any-cost right-wing stooges who would vote for Elagabalus if he ran as a Republican.